1960s: Community
“I’m not arguing that writing is therapy … [but] what interest me in it is that testament can occur in no specious sense, that we’re not writing simply to exercise ourselves but … it’s lovely to give witness to what you have as experience of the world, no matter what the terms of that experience may be.” – Robert Creeley, speaking at St. Mark’s Church, 1967
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| LeRoi Jones and Diane DiPrima, Cedar Tavern 1960 |
In the spring of 1960, Barney Rosset’s Evergreen Review published The New American Poetry: 1945-1960, an anthology overseen by Frank O’Hara’s editor Donald Allen. The anthology brought together forty-four American poets writing in experimental and non-academic veins and grouped into four roughly representative groups; the New York School, the Beat Generation, the San Francisco Renaissance, and the Black Mountain Poets. In the forward to the anthology, Allen made a case for the growing centrality of poetry itself among avant-garde aesthetics, writing: “through their work, many [poets] are closely allied to modern jazz and Abstract Expressionist painting, today recognized through the world to be America’s greatest achievements in contemporary culture. This anthology makes the same claim for the New American Poetry, now becoming the dominant movement in the second phase of our twentieth-century literature and already exerting strong influence abroad.”
The book was published in part as a response to the Donald Hall and Robert Pack anthology New Poets of England and America, and Allen was motivated by a strong desire to bring this poetry up from the underground, which could previously only be found in small magazines and broadsheets, or else heard in cafes and coffee houses by a handful of people already in the know.[1] Allen Ginsberg, who had assisted Donald Allen behind the scenes in the choosing of poets to be published, described its publication as “a great blow for poetic liberty.”
While the anthology was certainly met with enthusiasm, it was also met with a degree of scepticism bordering on hostility, as Allen later noted.
The mainstream press reviewers tended to be like the more traditional-sounding poets and to disapprove of the more experimental, their preferences reflecting the anti-Bean sentiment of the period. This bias was especially marked in some academic and little magazines. Cecil Hemley, an editor with Noonday Press, who had told me in 1956 that under no circumstances could I publish Allen Ginsberg in Evergreen Review, reviewed then anthology for the rather staid literary quarterly Hudson Review. Hemley wrote: “Anyone who has had a serious interest in American poetry from 1945 to 1960 must see that this is a very egocentric version of what has been going on. It represents Mr. Allen’s private view, and that is all, and it shows what happens when a narrow dictatorial taste attempts to assert itself as authoritative’. And on the academic side, a John Simon reviewed the anthology for Audit, a publication of the English Department, State University of New York at Buffalo. He found five or six of the poems ‘authentic and self-contained works of art,’ but went on to say ‘as for a majority of Mr. Allen’s poets they are kids who took up poetry in the way one takes up marijuana, Buddhism, switchblade knives, wife-swapping, or riding in box-cars, neither more or less seriously than other ‘kicks.’ Happily, however, they are no threat to poetry.’
John Simon aside, the response to the anthology across University campuses was significant. Here was an available counterculture still in its developing stages and so accessible. For Ted Berrigan, then still a young poet completing his Master’s Degree and considering with some resignation a future in academia, this first encounter with the Allen anthology as a formative event, and one that would have a profound effect both on Berrigan’s life but on the development of the New York avant-garde.
In the late fifties I was “beating” it through college in Tulsa, Oklahoma … [where] we held our breaths and awaited the Don Allen anthology … and that’s where Frank O’Hara first bumped into me. While romping thru the assorted confessions, obsessions, concessions and blessings of the Allen book I am suddenly given an extremely close reading by O’Hara’s poem WHY I AM NOT A PAINTER. For reasons I don’t know this poem seemed to straighten all kinds of things out for me, as I immediately explained to Ron Padgett.
1960 – President Kennedy becomes President.
De Kooning attacks Warhol at a party on Long Island. “You’re a killer of art, you’re a killer of beauty, you’re even a killer of laughter. I can’t bear your work!”
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| Jane Jacobs, unimpressed. |
1961 – Jane Jacobs publishes “Death and Life of Great American Cities,” advocating for low-rise and mixed-use village-like urban areas.
America’s urban centers were both an early and hard-hit casualty of American hegemony, increasingly considered dangerous and uncontrollable environments best abandoned for the con convenience and security of the burgeoning suburbs. Newly built expressways led the exodus out into Nassau County and beyond, and the comforts of newly built bedroom communities were self-evident for a vast majority of ex-urban dwellers. Years later, when, in the words of Sharon Zukin, “the appreciation of the ‘small’ and ‘old’, instead of the ‘large’ and ‘new’ … appealed to the sixties’ liberal social conscious,” it would become fashionable to denigrate the suburbs as sterile and conformist, but it was that sterility and conformity that made them appealing in the first place. At any rate, these later criticisms were made by a generation of urban pioneers who themselves were raised in the suburbs, and in its snobbery it overlooks the reality of general urban neglect in the years after the war, a reality their parents were facing when they chose to leave the old neighborhoods behind. These parents weren’t abandoning the cities out of some guiding socio-aesthetic philosophy but because for the first time in their lives they could afford to, and because the discomforts of city living were far outweighed by the conveniences of the suburbs for a family with some money and a kid on the way. The Lower East Side had been built to accommodate immigrant families arriving into the country, the suburbs of Long Island and New Jersey were built to accommodate their children.
However, this exodus left behind a vacuum. Former tenement districts, their once seemingly endless supply of European immigrant stock tapped out, were abandoned to those with neither the means nor the wherewithal to leave. The city’s industrial base was leaving the city as well, first for the more economically hospitably non-unionized south and then finally overseas, and the city’s blue-collar base followed suit, abandoning their traditional working-class neighborhoods. As the piers closed down along the Hudson, the Irish and Italian dockworkers living in Greenwich Village hunkered down for the long decline.
For the city itself, this urban flight was both existentially troubling and, potentially, financially ruinous, and so the city’s leaders undertook to reshape New York as an urban suburb at the expense of its traditionally heterogeneous base. For it to survive, the new city had to be modern and efficient, car-friendly and stridently new. The older city, littered with the crumbling tenements and storefronts left behind, was to be razed to the ground as quickly as possible and then rebuilt in a more pleasingly contemporary style. As John Strausbaugh writes:
Inspired by Le Corbusier’s Geometric Radiant City, planners dreamed of knocking down all that mess and erecting a brand-new type of urban center, vertical and orderly, with neatly spaced towers lining multilevel highways, rationally segregated in discrete living, business, and recreational zones … less like traditional cities than hives or nodes strung along bustling arterial roadways, operating with machine-like precision and order.
The task was entrusted to the seemingly omnipotent Parks Commissioner Robert Moses, who had held the position since 1934, and who:
…was intent on replacing slums with public housing. He built spartan, twelve- and fourteen-story structures on the Lower East Side and in Harlem, Morrisania, and Brownsville … and half a dozen other sites that required moving thousands of black and Puerto Rican residents to municipal projects in Brooklyn and the Bronx; fifteen thousand were displaced by Manhattantown alone, which along with Washington Square South prompted large protests … During forty years as the master builder of New York City, Moses exerted an incalculable influence on its residents’ life and work. He admired large structures and the automobile, hated slums, and assumed that all New Yorkers shared his sentiments.
If opposition to Moses’s sweeping urban reconfigurations had only come from the disempowered poor, he might have succeeded in re-shaping New York City to an even greater extent than he eventually did, and as it stands his achievements were undeniably sweeping. However, in his plans to redesign downtown Manhattan, and specifically in his plans to funnel road traffic through Greenwich Village’s Washington Square Park (or, rather, to re-funnel traffic through the park – it had been done before), Moses ran into the unexpected opposition of an emergent resident Bohemian middle-class, those that had the financial means to join the exodus out to the suburbs, but instead chose to remain. Many were themselves outsiders, the first seeds of a more affluent influx, college-educated “homesteaders” who, in Sharon Zukin’s words:
…chose to put roots down in the old city [and] identified with origins rather than new beginnings; their choice signified rejection of the homogeneous mass culture of both the corporate city and suburbia. While this view looks backwards to Henry James’s aristocratic disdain of mass culture, it also looks forward to the Downtown artists of the 1970s and 1980s, who celebrated the city’s grit and grunge. But it speaks with special relevance to the political stalemate of the 1950s: rejecting the dominant Modernist landscape at that time struck a blow against political conformity. Middle-class liberals who had been silenced by McCarthyism found a voice and a place of protest by reclaiming the city’s streets. Claiming to speak for urban authenticity was, in their case, a cry for democracy.
For those within the grassroots opposition, the parallels between American post-war conformity and European pre-war conformity were both obvious and upsetting, but now on an addressable scale. Journalist and Village resident Jane Jacobs was a particularly vocal advocate for the revitalization of traditional working-class neighborhoods such as her own, now that the traditional working-class itself was racing to get out and Jacobs’s likeminded neighbours and Moses’s wrecking crew were racing each other to get in. Jacobs opposed the planned (as she saw it) suburbanization of the city and the radical clean-slate approach favouring luxury high-rise residential towers connected by fast-moving freeways. Instead, she advocated for a re-evaluation of what was already there, for what amounted to a middle-class re-utilization of pre-existing working-class structures and social patterns. Jacobs saw virtue in heterogeneous “mixed-use” environments, areas built for and around the creative and communal impulses of the district’s “workers, writers, musicians and intellectuals.” Where Moses envisioned a hive, Jacobs argued for a “complicated ballet” dependent on the accidental interactions inherent in low-rise residential neighborhoods – precisely the type of uncontrolled environment Moses was set against. On the surface this dance looks imprecise, but therein lies its charm: “The ballet of a good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any one place is always replete with new improvisations.”
For Jacobs, the virtues of the heterogeneous and imprecise neighbourhood lay in its ability to foster individuality, encourage small chance encounters, and nurture countercultural communities operating in opposition to the pressures and temptations of mass conformity just beyond its borders. Like Greenberg and Goodman, Jacobs was advocating for a mid-century community of the counter-elite, and the necessarily limited scale of this community would allow it the intimacy needed to give it its strength and sustainability. Where Greenberg found faith in the arts of the avant-garde, Jacobs found hope in the chaos, and it is here – where bohemian expectations meet outside capitalist demands – that the paradoxes and limitations of urban fringe utopianism become evident. From the beginning, this was a revolution that only existed among the rarefied ends of the educated middle-class, sympathetic to the structures of the working-class but freed from its responsibilities.
If you look about, you will see that only operations that are well established, high-turnover, standardized or heavily subsidized can afford, commonly, to carry the cost of new construction. Chain stores, chain restaurants and banks go into new construction. But neighborhood bars, foreign restaurants and pawnshops go into older buildings. Supermarkets and shoe stores often go into new buildings; good bookstores and antique dealers seldom do. Well-subsidized opera and art museums often go into new buildings. But the unformalized feeders of the arts – studios, galleries, stores for musical instruments and art supplies, backrooms where the low earning power of a seat and a table can absorb uneconomic discussions – these go into old buildings … old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.
Sentimental, arguably, but Jacobs nevertheless established a clear dichotomy here, the city as a homogeneous corporate zone of supermarkets, shoe stores, and officially-sanctioned museums and opera-houses (surely with the then-developing, and Rockefeller-funded, Lincoln Center site in mind) against a more idealized heterogeneous city, a messy but creative mix of neighborhood bars, pawn shops, studios and backrooms, uncannily like her own bohemian Hudson Street neighborhood. Jacobs’s own middle-class prejudices appear in the adjectives she used – a city in which good bookshops and foreign restaurants operate amid the studios and galleries where their patrons, presumably, are free to engage in “uneconomic discussions” that will keep the community going without having to pay the bills. Both Jacobs and Goodman rely on the unfettered indulgence of a free-markets economy without ever foreseeing the eventual (and inevitable) demands that same market economy would eventually impose. This time of egalitarian elitism can only exist by way of some considerable amount of wishful thinking.
Like Goodman, Jacobs was presuming both the arts-and-humanities education and values that were general among their own small coterie, alongside and evidently unearned level of income needed to pursue that education. Both Goodman and Jacobs counted on a sustainability maintained through exclusive membership and a more general national economy healthy enough to support their counter-community but not so robust as to drive them out of the city through the pressures of the market. What they had not counted on, and could not have envisioned, was the extent to which their counter-elite, in fleeing the mainstream for the margins, would bring the values of that mainstream in with them. What eventually hobbled their utopian vision was a wilful blindness to the financial realities their ideal depended on. The models they set out – the occasional poetry and complicated ballet - were workable within the unique conditions of post-war downtown New York, but they had designed their models with the presumption that those conditions would remain. Goodman’s occasional poetry could bring the counter-elite together at the same place and at the same time, and Jacobs’s old buildings could house them once they arrived, but neither had considered how to feed these artists once they got there. This was a delicate balance, reliant on the unique social and financial conditions that existed in one corner of one city in the 1950s, risking dissolution either by a total lack of success or, as would transpire, too much of it.
1962 – Ted Berrigan completes his studies at the University of Tulsa and, inspired by the Donald Allen anthology (and especially by the work of Frank O’Hara), moves to New York to write poetry. He is followed by Ron Padgett.
1962 – Ed Sanders begins publishing (via mimeograph machine) the underground literary magazine “Fuck You; A Journal of the Arts.” He is working for Dorothy Day’s “Catholic Worker” at the time, and using the organization’s mimeograph machine for the journal.
1962 – Andy Warhol’s first solo Pop exhibition is held at the Stable Gallery.
1962 – Franz Kline dies.
1962 – The Five Spot closes.
1963 – Playwright Sam Shepard arrives in New York, age 19, aspiring to be an actor. Shepard was better positioned than most to take advantage of the avant-garde’s newfound interest in an unsettled and unsettling Americana. Like Pollock, he was also canny enough to exploit his own Western roots for an Eastern audience searching for authenticity, offering himself up as the Counterculture’s first urban cowboy. Shepard was among a growing wave of younger artists gravitating towards the East Village in the early 1960s, and though he would quickly become one of the country’s more influential playwrights, he arrived with almost no formal education and only a vague familiarity of the scene he was entering into. He quickly came to regard this as a virtue; “I didn’t have any references for the theater, except for the few plays I’d acted in. But in a way I think that was better for me, because I didn’t have any idea about how to shape an action into what is seen – the so-called originality of the work just comes from ignorance.” Unlike Berrigan or Sanders, who came to the neighborhood aware of the area’s evolving traditions and ambitious to enter into them, Shepard repeatedly and adamantly claimed that he fell into writing almost by accident, taking from influences and attitudes “derived from other forms such as music, painting, sculpture, film … I’ve been influenced by Jackson Pollock, Little Richard, Cajun fiddles and the Southwest.” As Pollock’s Life Magazine profile made clear in 1949, there was a clear commercial value to the myth of the primitive American artist, and Shepard may not have read much but he was no fool.
Arriving in the neighborhood, Shepard gravitated towards the newly-established poetry cafés and storefront theaters. The sheer affordability of those spaces allowed for experimentation divorced from any need for financial profitability, and they essentially served as schools for these new artists. This was a happy exemplification of Jane Jacobs’ notion of “old spaces” supporting “new ideas” and Goodman’s of an occasional art for and of the community.
Anyone could get his or her piece performed, almost any time. If there wasn’t a slot open at one of the café theaters or in the churches, you could at least pool together some actors and have a reading. You could go into full-scale rehearsals with nothing more than an idea or half a page of written text. It was a playwright’s heaven. Experimentation was the lifeblood not only of the playwright but also of actors, directors and even of producers and critics. The concept of “audience” was diametrically opposed to the commercial marketplace. The only impulse was to make living vital theater which spoke to the moment. And the moment, back then in the mid-sixties, was seething with a radical shift of the American psyche.
The cafés and churches encouraged the shift in the avant-garde from literary to visual to more purely performative. There was no clear delineation between poetry space and performance space (or, for that matter, between poetry and performance), or between music and performance. Not only did these disciplines share the same venues, they shared the same performers and audience, the same actors and musicians. East Village art was leaning towards the event of creation as much as the product of creation. Collaborative Art was both collaboration for the sake of art and art for the sake of collaboration.
However, this was no promise that the art would necessarily be any good, or that the collaborations would prove successful. Most often, they didn’t. Lacking precedent, there was no reliable standard by which to measure the art’s aesthetic value. Value compared to what? Over time a more critical perspective would develop, allowing the viewer to assess good work from bad, but within the counterculture of the time, even notions of good art versus bad art were suspicious, carrying with them censorial connotations of high art and low art. “Good” poetry was cheerfully mixed in with “bad” in the literary magazines of Berrigan and Sanders – both of whom had the education to tell one from the other. Good theater and bad theater was staged with equal passion on the stages of LaMama and St. Mark’s Church. As in the case of pre-Rosenberg and pre-Greenberg Abstract Expressionism, a language didn’t exist by which to judge, and the responsibility of validation was thrown back onto the audience itself (itself increasingly oblivious to the more stringent standards of critical evaluation). O’Hara and Koch, by contrast, my not have liked Modernism, but they recognized it when they saw it. In this environment, the price of freedom – at least in the short-term – was the abandonment of an educated and influential outside eye.
For a while the big papers wouldn’t touch [the plays], but then they started to smell something, so they came down and wrote these snide reviews. They weren’t being unfair. A lot of that stuff really was shitty and deserved to get bombed. But there was one guy who was sort of on our side. His name was Michael Smith; he worked for the Village Voice, and he gave a glowing review to these little one-act plays, Cowboys and The Rock Garden. I remember that distinctly, not because of the praise but because it felt like somebody finally understood what we were trying to do. He was actually hooking up with us, seeing the work for what it was.
1963 – President Kennedy assassinated.
1963 – Café Le Metro opens at 149 Second Avenue.
1963 – De Kooning leaves Manhattan for Long Island.
1963 – Café Le Metro opens at 149 Second Avenue. Andy Warhol wrote:
In the fall of ’63 I started going around more and more to poetry readings with Gerard [Malaga]. I would go absolutely everywhere I heard there was something creative happening. We went down to the Monday night poetry readings organized by Paul Blackburn at the Café Le Metro on Second Avenue between 9th and 10th Streets where each poet would read for five or ten minutes. On Wednesday nights there was a solo reading. Poets would just get up and read about their lives from stacks of paper that they had in front of them. I’ve always been fascinated by people who can put things down on paper and I liked to listen for new ways to say old things and old ways to say new things.
The testimonial nature of the poetry, combined with the increasingly theatrical and performative nature of the readings themselves, further blurred the distinction between what was product, what was performance, and what was simply the lives and behaviours of the artists themselves. The lines of demarcation had become remarkably thin.
1964 – Ed Sanders opens The Peace Eye Bookstore at 383 East 10th Street (later moved to 147 Avenue A).
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| Peace Eye Books, Strictly. |
1964 – Slug’s Jazz Spot opens at 242 3rd Street, between Avenues B and C.
1964 (October) – Sam Shepard’s play “The Rock Garden” premieres at Theatre Genesis, St. Mark’s Church, directed by Ralph Cook. It is met by a favourable review in the New York Times, which earns Shepard and the Theatre Genesis Theatre respect and credibility beyond their immediate surroundings.
1965 - The Museum of Modern Art holds its 1965 Op Art exhibit. By the time MoMA held its exhibit of Op Art, the fashion houses had outpaced the museums. As Tom Wolfe writes, "one out of every three women entering the glass doors [of the museum] ... for the opening night hoopla were wearing print dresses that were knock-offs of the paintings that were waiting on the walls inside." In such an accelerated climate of widening aesthetic tastes and values, it was harder than ever for the one-time gatekeepers to know where they stood, or how to keep up.
1965 - The Museum of Modern Art holds its 1965 Op Art exhibit. By the time MoMA held its exhibit of Op Art, the fashion houses had outpaced the museums. As Tom Wolfe writes, "one out of every three women entering the glass doors [of the museum] ... for the opening night hoopla were wearing print dresses that were knock-offs of the paintings that were waiting on the walls inside." In such an accelerated climate of widening aesthetic tastes and values, it was harder than ever for the one-time gatekeepers to know where they stood, or how to keep up.
1966 (February) – Police arrest Robert Friede, who was passed out behind the wheel of his car on East 2nd Street. In the trunk of his car they find the body of his girlfriend Celeste Crenshaw, who had died of an overdose two weeks before. Both Friede and Crenshaw were from wealthy New York families, Friede was the grandson of media magnate Moe Annenberg, and the arrest caused a sensation in the newspapers.
1966 (July) – Frank O’Hara dies, after being struck by a beach taxi on Fire Island, age 40. He had been taken to a hospital after the accident, which happened at night, but was bleeding internally – undiagnosed until the following morning – and died surrounded by Larry Rivers, Kenneth Koch, Joe LeSueur and Willem de Kooning. He was buried in the same cemetery in Springs, Long Island, where Jackson Pollock ended up. Larry Rivers gave a eulogy at the grave, attempting to describe what O'Hara looked like in the hospital, "the marks on his body, the stitches, the tubes coming out of him", until he was shouted down by the other mourners.
1966 – Andy Warhol opens the Electric Circus, featuring the Velvet Underground and the “Exploding Plastic Inevitable” at 23 St. Mark’s Place.
1966 – The Poetry Project is founded at St. Mark’s Church.
1966 – John Gruen’s “The New Bohemia: Art, Music, Drama, Sex, Film, Dance in New York’s East Village” is published by Shorecrest.
1967 (March) – The Velvet Underground releases Lou Reed’s “Heroin,” written in 1964.
1967 (Spring) – Patti Smith arrives in New York. As she describes in her memoir Just Kids:
In the spring of 1967 I assessed my life ... I had dropped out of teacher's college, having not the discipline, the focus, nor the money I needed to continue. I was holding a temporary minimum-wage job in a textbook factory in Philadelphia. My immediate concern was where to go next, and what to do when I got there. I held to the hope that I was an artist, though I knew I would never be able to afford art school and had to make a living. There was nothing to keep me at home, no prospects and no sense of community. My parents had raised us in an atmosphere of religious dialogue, of compassion, of civil rights, but the general feel of rural South Jersey was hardly pro-artists. My few comrades had moved to New York to write poetry and study art and I felt very much alone.
1967 – Summer of Love. “Sgt. Pepper,” “White Rabbit,” “Light My Fire.”
1967 (July) – Newark Riots.
1967 – Piri Thomas’s “Down These Mean Streets” published by Vintage Books (?).
1967 – Ed Sanders features on the cover of Life magazine, heralded as “A Leader of New York’s Other Culture.”
1967 (October) – Two young drifters, Linda Fitzpatrick and James “Groovy” Hutchinson, are found murdered in the basement of a tenement apartment at 169 Ave. B, a crime which almost immediately came to be known as the “Groovy” murders. Their naked bodies are found in the boiler room of the apartment building, just around the corner from Tompkins Square, their heads caved in with bricks. Fitzpatrick had been raped and then both were killed b a pair of slightly older men, Thomas Dennis and Donald Ramsey. The already tense racial and class dynamics of the neighborhood, with its competing narratives of resentment, belonging, and victimization, were made all the more complicated by the fact that Dennis and Ramsey were black, their victims white, and that between them Hutchinson and Fitzpatrick represented either end of the class spectrum of teenage runaway. Both were among the thousands of young people moving into the blocks surrounding Tompkins Square in the summer of 1967, and neither had found much happiness or success in the places they had left.
Hutchinson was already a familiar sight around the neighborhood, half social worker and half panhandling clown from a working-class childhood in Central Falls, Rhode Island. In Central Falls he was regarded as troubled but essentially harmless, a juvenile delinquent with a history of petty theft and stupid stunts, given cursory state-provided psychiatric care, and altogether something of a lost cause. In New York, he became something of an underground celebrity, portrayed as an “urban Huck Finn” by an increasingly curious mainstream press eager to capitalize on an exciting, if bewildering, scene. Together with fellow runaway Ronald “Galahad” Johnson, Groovy set up a crash pad at 622 East 11th Street (a short distance from where he’d be killed) where runaway teenagers could stay. Journalist J. Anthony Lucas described it:
On the door was a hand-lettered sign: GALAHAD’S PAD, PROTECTOR OF ALL THAT IS RIGHTEOUS AND HOLY. For the next three months, it served as the most renowned of the East Village’s crash pads, where the homeless and the friendless could stay as long as they lived. Sometimes Groovy and Galahad would return a runaway child to his frantic parents, and be rewarded with a television set or money (“We’re in the people business,” Groovy once said). But most times there were twenty to thirty assorted hippies staying there and, later, a whole lot of visitors – newsmen, television cameramen, other curiosity seekers and policemen, always policemen.
Ed Sanders, who knew Hutchinson well enough to let him use the back room of Peace Eye Books as an earlier crash pad, remembered him spending “some of his time finding safe crashes for the swarms of kids arriving on the Lower East Side. He was a legend in those streets, even though he’d been there for only a few months. Few knew his real name, but everybody within flashback distance of Tompkins Park had a Groovy anecdote to tell.”
Linda Fitzpatrick was a part of the swarm. She grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut, as privileged as Groovy was poor, a product of private schools and yacht clubs, her house staffed with servants and here weekends punctuated by shopping trips with her step-mother along Fifth Avenue. By all accounts, she had no talent for life among the debutantes. After her death, her schoolmates and teachers described her as being socially awkward and academically slow (and in this respect quite similar to Groovy Hutchinson), unmotivated by any subject other than art, where she failed to show any real promise. Not surprisingly, she was as dissatisfied with high society as high society was with her, and sought to escape it as often as possible in the nascent hippy scene a short commuter train ride away. She managed to live in both worlds, but in the summer of 1967 she ultimately abandoned the comforts of privilege for the liberties of the counterculture, dropping out of Oldfields Boarding School and moving into a series of crash pads and S.R.O. hotels around Washington Square and St. Mark’s Place. As Autumn came, Fitzpatrick was more commonly seen around Tompkins Square, where she fell into Hutchinson’s orbit of disaffected young runaways. Together they raised money however they could, traded in and took whatever drugs they could, and slept where they could (the East 11th Street pad long gone) in a neighborhood increasingly given over to transient kids with no ambitions beyond escaping the homes they had left and without any means of creating a better home elsewhere.
Linda and Groovy were last seen alive on the afternoon of October 7th, passed out in a sleeping bag outside the Psychedelicatessen on Avenue A. Sometime that evening they followed Thomas Dennis into the boiler room of the tenement building on Avenue B, hoping to buy drugs, and were instead killed. While the police of the 9th Precinct made efforts to keep the more gruesome details of the discovery out of the papers, one of the attending detectives allowed that it was the “worst he had ever seen.”
Outside of the neighborhood, the murders signaled to an older generation just how little they knew about their own children’s lives, and confirmed their worst suspicions. The brutal nature of their killings, and the rape of Linda Fitzpatrick before their killings, were seen as an inevitable result of a worsening degeneracy disguised as harmless youthful rebellion. The press jumped on the story. The “Groovy Murders,” as they almost immediately came to be known, were reported as symptomatic of a greater generational crisis developing between young urban dropouts and the families they were leaving behind.
Within the neighborhood, the crime shook many the hippies out of their own wilful oblivion. The counterculture was not going to protect them from a dangerous city they didn’t fully recognize or understand. The brutal nature of their killings, and the rape of Linda Fitzpatrick before their killings, uncovered an ugly response within many counterculturalists who came to regard themselves as under siege not just from the traditional enemy (the mainstream) but by another enemy closer to home, and one they had traditionally aligned themselves with, at least sentimentally. This was the turn from utopia to dystopia. Before 1967 the kids heading east to New York or west to San Francisco were operating under the assumption that dropping out and moving to the cities was a relatively safe alternative to the stultifying mainstream. The East Village wasn’t Newark, the Haight wasn’t Oakland. There had been crime and violence, there were overdoses, but prior to Linda and Groovy they were still regarded as rare enough to be anomalies. As the Daily News wrote: “The killings succeeded, where everything else had failed, in pointing up to the hippies themselves the constant peril in which they live as a result of their gentle ways.”
Ed Sanders himself, Life Magazine’s “Leader of New York’s Other Culture” who by his actions and example did so much to promote the neighborhood as the teenage countercultural playground it sometimes seemed, still recognized the inevitability of its dissolution, and not from its traditional enemies.
There’s a problem with opening your act to the gutter … The problem with the hippies was that there developed a hostility within the culture itself, between those who [had] the equivalent of a trust fund versus those who had to live by their wits. It’s true, for instance, that blacks were somewhat resentful of the hippies by the Summer of Love, 1967, because their perception was that these kids were drawing paisley swirls on the Sam Flax writing pads, burning incense, and taking acid, but those kids could get out of there any time they wanted to … They could go back home. They could call their mom and say, “Get me outta here.” Whereas someone who was raised in a project on Columbia Street and was hanging out on the edge of Tompkins Square Park can’t escape. Those kids don’t have any place to go. They can’t go back to boarding school in Baltimore. They’re trapped … so there developed another kind of lumpen hippie, who really came from an abused childhood … and those kids fermented into a kind of hostile street person. Punk types.
This influx of the “lumpen hippie” signalled the absolute reversal of Paul Goodman’s 1951 utopian idea, which had been proposed as a kind of inverse hegemony of the counter-elite designed to construct new patterns of social and cultural order. That original subculture, envisioned as a sympathetic shelter from the dangers of the mainstream, was gone. What had replaced it became increasingly dangerous itself, dystopian in the face of drug use and neglect. The newest arrivals were neither particularly counter nor particularly elite. They could break down mainstream societal patterns, all right, but once they had abandoned the creative artistic ambitions that gave the original counterculture its reason for being, they had no sustainable alternative patterns or ambitions to replace them with.
1968 (February) – Neal Cassady dies of exposure (or renal failure) in Mexico, aged 41.
1968 – Phil Graham opens The Filmore East at 105 2nd Avenue, a commercial rock venue and East Coast equivalent to his Filmore Auditorium in San Francisco.
1968 (April) – Martin Luther King, Jr. is assassinated in Memphis.
1968 (June 3rd) – Andy Warhol shot by Valarie Solanas in his Factory Studio.
1968 (June 5th) – Robert Kennedy is assassinated in Los Angeles.
1968 (Summer) – Ted Berrigan visits Jack Kerouac for an interview in The Paris Review.
1968 (August) – Riots at the Chicago Democratic Convention, with involvement by Abbie Hoffman and Ed Sanders.
1968 – Tet Offensive in Vietnam.
1968 (November) – Richard Nixon elected President of the United States.
1968 (September) – Kerouac appears on “Firing Line” alongside Ed Sanders and Lewis Yablonsky, disavowing any responsibility for the hippie movement.
1968 – Diane di Prima, one of the neighborhood's original and most active writers, leaves New York for San Francisco, finding herself "part of a crew of fourteen 'grown-ups' with all their accompanying children, pets, rifles, typewriters, and musical instruments, who were migrating from New York."
1968 – Ed Sanders leaves New York for Woodstock. Poet Andre Codrescu, while assessing the state of the St. Mark's poetry scene at the end of the decade, wrote:
1969 (June) – Stonewall Riots erupt in Greenwich Village.
I left New York one month ago because my novel was done and because the ugly tensions on the streets took hallucinatory forms. Bikers without bikes, chain-people and dead hippies at each other's throats ... The Saint Mark's Freak Corner is stuffed with fury. I hope it explodes soon (New York, I mean). Besides, poetically, the city is disintegrating. And it's not for the summer only. Ted Berrigan left for good. He's in Iowa, reading. Tom Clark bought a house in California. Diane di Prima runs a communal thing in S.F. Carole Berge is going to France or maybe Honolulu. Allen Van Newkirk is gone. Sam Abrams is going to Cuba, maybe he's there already.
1969 (June) – Stonewall Riots erupt in Greenwich Village.
1969 (October) – Jack Kerouac dies, of cirrhosis, aged 47. He was living in St. Petersburg, Florida, with his mother and his second (third) wife, Stella Sampras. Before he died, he was sitting in his living-room, watching “The Galloping Gourmet” on TV, and had just finished eating a can of tuna. He haemorrhaged into the toilet, and died in the hospital.
1969 – Patti Smith arrived in New York in 1969, aspiring to be a poet, but was at first only a peripheral figure around the St. Mark’s Poetry Project scene. She networked like crazy, publishing a book of poems, giving occasional readings at St. Mark’s, and getting romantically involved with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, poet Jim Carroll, and eventually playwright Sam Shepard by 1971. With Shepard, she co-wrote and planned to star in the play Cowboy Mouth, in which they basically took on the roles of their own complicated relationship. The play, which consists almost entirely out of a dialogue between the two, was written as they say across from each other at a table in the Chelsea Hotel, pushing a single typewriter back and forth between them. The production itself lasted only two runs before Shepard abandoned both it and Smith and, eventually, New York itself for a restorative sojourn in London. Smith remained in New York, and continued her search for expression and fame – both of which she found as a musician. As William Burroughs, who she had befriended, later noted: “Patti started out as a poet, then turned to painting, and then she suddenly emerges as a real rock star. Which is strange, because I don’t think she could have gone very far either in her poetry or in her writing, just from scratch. But suddenly she’s a rock star. There’s no question of that.” Smith herself addressed this turn towards popular art in characteristically grand terms, comparing herself and her fellow musicians to the “Sons of Liberty … with a mission to preserve, protect, and project the revolutionary spirit of rock and roll … We would call for the in our minds the image of Paul Revere, riding through the American night, petitioning people to wake up, to take up arms. We too would take up arms, the arms of our generation … the guitar and the microphone.” The appetite for this style never ceases to amaze.
1969 (November) – Police arrest Sam Melville as he is leaving his apartment at 67 East 2nd Street. Melville is carrying explosives with the intention of setting them off outside the National Guard Armory on Lexington Avenue. The previous evening he had set off similar explosives in the General Motors Building, the RCA building, and the Chase Manhattan Bank.
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