Limelight: A Greenwich Village Photography Gallery and Coffeehouse in the Fifties : A Memoir

Even without the coffeehouse, Gee's life is like something out of a novel: at age 16 she left home to live in Greenwich Village with a Chinese painter named Yun Gee. The late '30s and early '40s were hardly a time of racial tolerance in the United States, and so their romance was disliked as much for its interracial nature as for the age difference between the two lovers. After the birth of their daughter, Yun Gee developed schizophrenia, leaving Helen to fend for herself and her child. She did this in a variety of ways before finally hitting on the idea of opening a coffeehouse. In Limelight Gee describes the obstacles she faced in starting the place, the people she met while running it, and the eventual problems--both political and personal--that brought Limelight down. This memoir is both Gee's story and the story of the art community in 1950s, both of which are worth telling.

Book Description
In the late 1950s, Limelight was the busiest coffeehouse in New York and the only photography gallery in the country. This is the story of Helen Gee's efforts to open Limelight and her fight to keep it afloat for seven years. The major figures in photography appear in this story--Edward Steichen, Robert Frank, W. Eugene Smith, Berenice Abbott, and others--and so do the big photographic events of the period: the opening of The Family of Man, the publication of The Americans. Gee has her own personal stories as well: raising her Asian American daughter alone, dealing with a landlord with underworld ties and bookies who did business in the hall of her apartment house, and coping with unwelcome advances, quixotic employees, and suicidal photographers.

This is also a portrait of a time when Greenwich Village was a center of creative activity, when actors, writers, painters, and photographers were part of a burgeoning coffeehouse scene. Photography as an art form was coming into its own, and Limelight Gallery made history with some seventy shows. The story of its seven years is amusing and heart-breaking, exciting and surprisingly full of adventure.