In the Broadway musical Rent, what New York City neighborhood is the main setting?

Alphabet City is the main New York City setting of the Broadway musical Rent.

Rent is set in Alphabet City, a neighborhood on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Jonathan Larson’s musical follows artists and friends dealing with love, poverty, addiction, illness, and the AIDS crisis. The characters live in or around an abandoned building and struggle with rent, creative ambition, and changing city life.

The musical opened off-Broadway in 1996 before moving to Broadway later that year. It won the Tony Award for Best Musical and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1996. Larson died unexpectedly shortly before the off-Broadway opening.

Because Rent is strongly associated with downtown Manhattan’s artistic scene, Greenwich Village is a plausible but less precise answer. The show’s fictional addresses and real neighborhood references reflect the Lower East Side’s transformation during the period depicted.