New York at this time was a creative center for drama, song, and dance. Eugene O'Neill was having his plays produced. George Gershwin was writing musicals here. Martha Graham had just opened a school of contemporary dance. Vasile and Pauline Avramenko lived in rented rooms on 8th Avenue in Brooklyn. Avramenko set up his school in Little Ukraine in Manhattan, Greenwich Village to the west of it, and the Lower East Side with a Ukrainian enclave to the east. Able to dispense with live music with the arrival of the phonograph and vinyl records, it became easier for him in the 1930s to offer these lessons. Within a few months he had over 500 pupils attending.