Of all the cafes that have nurtured the careers of artists and enabled their exchanging of ideas, the Waldorf Cafeteria is one of the most reluctant. It was a gloomy place with no friendly bar man sympathetic to long running tabs of intellectuals, and the staff is said to have resented the artists who came in with their own tea bags to fill up on free hot water and mixing their own tomato soup with the complimentary ketchup. When whether permitted the west village based artists preffered to meet in Washington Square Park, but through rain and cold, The Waldorf Cafeteria became the unofficial office of abstract expressionsim in spite of itself. The abstract expressionists who frequented the Cafeteria called themselves The Club and counted all the greats, Rothko, de Kooning, Gorky, Pollock, and Guston, among its about fifty due-paying members. When in 1949 the Cafeteria raised the price of coffee to a dime, The Club was forced to move to the sculptor Ibram Lassaw’s loft on West 12th Street, where it established itself as an official society.