By Dylan Foley
At seven in the morning on Easter Sunday 1967, two cops in a patrol car were cruising through Central Park, near Sheep Meadow when they noticed a crowd of hundreds of young people wearing ornate clothes, including embroidered bell bottoms, velvet tunics and top hats. When the officers drove their car towards the meadow, a large crowd surrounded the car.[1]
Yelling a joyous chant of “Daffodil Power,” the crowd threw a shower of flowers onto the police car. Their car covered in daffodils, the befuddled cops drove off.
Thus began the New York Be-In, the first major hippie event in New York City. Promoted through the legwork of the hippie activist and actor Jim Fouratt, 30,000 handbills designed by the artist Peter Max were spread throughout the Lower East Side and Harlem and with notices broadcast on the lefty radio stations like WBAI, throngs of young people jammed into the meadow with their faces painted with the moon and stars.
Two men stripped off their clothes and climbed a tree. A woman with a two-foot long wooden banana strutted around with her entourage. Food was given out, jelly beans were passed around and marijuana was shared. Unlike the San Francisco Be-In in January that inspired the New York event, there were no bands or speeches, no commercial support. It was organic and thrilling.[2]
At one point, hundreds of people formed a large circle and ran into the center, knocking each other down and rolling around in the grass with laughter.
About 10,000 people showed up to the Central Park Be-In, including some elderly Harlem matrons in their splendid Easter church hats, going to the event after the city’s Easter Bonnet parade ended. It was a placid, chilly Sunday in March. Near the entrance to the Sheep Meadow, Mayor Lindsay’s wife taught her young son how to ride a bicycle.
In a recently surfaced 14-minute video of “Be-In: The Lost Ecktachrome Footage—Easter Sunday,” the hippie contingent of people with painted faces, bell bottoms and ponchos, made up about thirty percent of the people present. There were many squares, including men in suits and Upper East Side matrons in pearls, as well as casually dressed teenagers enjoying the spectacle, watching the hippies dance. At one point, Warhol superstar Edie Sedgwick and Allen Ginsberg are seen hanging out together. The video does show the giant wooden or paper mache banana (people claimed you could get high by smoking banana peels) and the large circle of people running into each other.[3]
Lost Ecktachrome Footage--Easter Sunday
At one point, a reporter for the radical newspaper The East Village Other caught the poet Ed Sanders boasting that he was the “tit-grabbing champion” of the day.[4]
There were some drug mishaps. Some “technicolor” hippie girls gave a handful of popcorn laced with LSD to a musician named Jack Bruce from a British band, who had to perform that night. Hours later, when he saw his tripping musician, Eric Clapton, the frontman of Cream, said, “What have you done to my bassist?”[5]
There was a police presence at the Be-In and the cops made the naked men put their clothes back on, but the police stayed on the periphery. The Be-In ended peacefully at dusk, as the crowds wandered off.
Hippies had started filtering into New York City by 1966, most settling in the Lower East Side, which local merchants and real-estate developers had started calling the East Village, from East Houston to 14th Street, and the Bowery to the East River. Residents of the East Village noticed young middle-class kids, often runaways, congregating and panhandling on St. Marks Place and sleeping in Tompkins Square Park. Some hippies rented cheap apartments around the park.
The roots of the American hippies started with the Beat Generation, the informal literary movement pioneered by Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg in New York in the late 1940’s, early 1950’s. When the Beats traveled to and lived in San Francisco, more Beat writers and poets sprung up there, and such places like City Lights Books became important centers of Beat literature, including selling Ginsberg’s “Howl.” City Lights’ defense in 1956 “Howl” obscenity court case led to a landmark victory in literary free expression.[6]
The Beats were both acknowledged and disparaged in San Francisco. The San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen referred to the “beatniks,” a combination of the Beats and the Russian satellite Sputnik, in an April 1958 column, giving the Beats a hint of communism.
By the mid-1960’s, the Beats in the North Beach area of San Francisco were pushed out by rising rents. Many old Beatniks moved to the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, a Black area of San Francisco with old Victorian houses that were cut into cheap apartments. The dour Beats, formed in the traumas of the Depression, World War II and the threat of nuclear war, started mingling with younger people raised in the more optimistic prosperity of the 1950’s and ‘60’s, who embraced the Beats’ anti-establishment sexual freedom and drug use. The younger counterculture kids cast off the Beats’ preference for black outfits and berets, and started wearing colorful clothes and peasant dresses, and grew their hair long. The Beats slapped the term “hippies” on their young friends, a derogatory term used in Harlem jazz clubs in the 1940’s and ‘50’s, to refer to white jazz lovers.[7]
The new hippie counterculture had already gotten its new drug, LSD. In 1960, Ken Kesey was a young Stanford graduate student, living with his family in Palo Alto, California. Needing cash in 1960, he joined an LSD study at the local VA hospital. The drug blew his mind and helped him write his first novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
In 1964, Kesey threw together a San Francisco-area group of friends, dropouts and runaways to create the Merry Pranksters. They converted a 1939 school bus into a rolling luxury dorm, sound studio and film center, with a refrigerator holding containers of orange juice laced with LSD. Their goal was to go to the World’s Fair in New York City and to celebrate the publication of his less successful second novel, Sometimes a Great Notion. The rotating group travelled from the Bay Area to New York and back. The bus and the cross-country round trip became a public shattering of sexual norms, with a semen covered sleeping bag on a bunk for sex. The Merry Pranksters were the proto-hippies, forming a transition from the Beats to the hippies. Beat icon and speed-addled car thief Neal Cassady, from On the Road fame, became the primary driver for many of the trips.
In New York, Kesey and his crew met with Jack Kerouac, the novelist and King of the Beats. The meeting was not cordial, but the torch had already been passed to Kesey and the new counterculture. The Merry Pranksters tried to meet with Timothy Leary, the LSD guru in Connecticut. At first Leary would not see them because he was on a three-day LSD trip, but he later had a frosty meeting with Kesey.[8]
Starting the first cross-country trip as ex-jocks and preppies, the Pranksters evolved over the course of the next two years and many LSD trips into flamboyantly dressed men and women, wearing top hats and pirate shirts, Edwardian costumes and cod pieces. Under the influence of LSD, they painted stars and moons on their faces. Kesey’s wife and other friends pulled out sewing machines and made fanciful outfits for the Pranksters and their extended entourage.
On the road, Kesey and the Pranksters occasionally picked up underage girl runaways for sex. The counterculture journalist Hunter S. Thompson introduced Kesey to the Hell’s Angels, the outlaw motorcycle gang. At Kesey’s ranch outside of San Francisco, the Pranksters pulled in the Angels, America’s “middle-class nightmare,” into their LSD culture. At a party welcoming the Angels at Kesey’s ranch, two dozen Angels “gang-banged” Neal Cassady’s ex-girlfriend in an out-building.[9] Afterwards, Kesey viewed the assault as rape.
Kesey’s association with the Angels, with their history of violence, murder, sexual abuse and drug dealing, gave them a creepy legitimacy on the fringes of the growing hippie counterculture.[10]
Kesey and the Pranksters, their acid tests and their trouble with the law were documented by the white suit-wearing square journalist Tom Wolfe in a series of articles for the New York Herald Tribune that would later become his 1968 book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Wolfe’s work helped insert Kesey and the Merry Pranksters into the front line of the new counterculture.
By 1966 in the Haight, local hippie stores sprung up, selling hippie regalia, including peasant dresses, granny glasses, bell bottoms and Native American jewelry. In January 1966, Kesey and the Pranksters produced the three-day Trips Concert in San Francisco at Longshoreman’s Hall, headlined by two little-known bands, the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane. More than 20,000 people cycled through concert, many on acid. San Francisco was cemented as the center of the new hippie counterculture and the place of the Grateful Dead and their acid rock as the hippie house band, was cemented.[11]
A writer for the San Francisco Chronicle mused on the Trips Concerts, that “The Flower Children of the Hashbury in their sometimes outrageous street clothes partied right alongside straight people wearing sports jackets and ties and sunglasses. It was an odd mix of people. It was a shocker but a fun trip was had by all.”[12]
The concert producer Bill Graham continued the psychedelic concerts for another six years at the Fillmore, his concert hall in the Fillmore neighborhood, where budding “acidheads” could dance to rock and roll and trip out on wall-sized psychedelic projections.[13]
Local newspapers like the San Francisco Examiner started writing about San Francisco’s hippie culture in late 1965, with the reporter Brian Fallon referring to the young people, “the hippies “hanging in front of the Blue Unicorn Café on Haight Street, as “a new generation of Beatnik.”[14]
In 1967, the big photo magazines Life and Look, and news magazine Time, published their establishment take downs of the new hippie culture.
The mainstream media covered the new hippies with mockery, dread and awe. In a massive article on the hippies in June 1967, an awestruck Time mercilessly mocked hippie customs while having the obligatory picture of a nude blonde hippie girl.[15]
Look even sent a 25-year-old assistant editor named William Hedgepeth to go undercover in the hippie subculture. Hedgepeth grew out his beard and went to San Francisco into the swirl of young hippies.[16] On his first day in the Haight, a hippie girl gave him a tab of acid and he tripped for hours. Hedgepeth stayed in the Haight living with, tripping and sleeping with hippies. He stayed in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood for three weeks.
In an interview decades later, Hedgepeth said that he almost didn’t return to the straight society. The hippie community offered him what he needed—food, drugs and girls.[17]
The magazine world’s “It” girl Joan Didion, was also on the ground in San Francisco for the Saturday Evening Post. Didion, a California native, hung out in hippie crash pads and chatted with LSD dealers talking revolution.[18]
In the end of her classic Haight essay, “Slouching to Bethlehem,” Didion met with a couple and their five-year-old daughter Susan, who was wearing white lipstick. The parents regularly dosed the girl with acid. After its publication, the “Bethlehem” essay was used as a symbol of hippie decadence and American decay.
The counterculture journalist Jesse Kornbluth noted that the hippie phenomenon was the most overreported news item in the late 1960’s. The media exposure created more hippies. School vacations and silly journalism, he said, encouraged more young people to leave home for the hippie centers like San Francisco and New York.[19]
The Lower East Side already had an existing counterculture infrastructure. The Beat poet and musician Ed Sanders had the Peace Eye Bookstore on 383 East 10th Street, in a defunct kosher butcher shop, and Sanders published Fuck You: A Magazine for the Arts. Along with Tuli Kupferberg, an older poet who had survived his own suicide attempt jumping off the Manhattan Bridge in 1945, they started The Fugs, a rock band that sang songs like “Kill for Peace.” Beats like Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky lived in a series of tenement apartments around 2nd Avenue, in the East Village. Ginsberg, the de facto PR man for Kerouac and the Beat Generation, both mentored young artists and pursued underage hippies for sex.
Ed Sanders had his own run-ins with the law. Originally a Beat poet, Sanders had done extensive work as an underground filmmaker, including shooting amphetamine junkies in an abandoned Lower East Side apartment. Sander left out a pile of amphetamine on a table, advertised the free drugs and let the neighborhood junkies go wild, while he filmed the results. Footage included a junky shooting meth into the arm of a 16-year-old girl.[20]Fights broke out between “A-heads” working on art projects.[21]
In 1965, the police or federal agents broke into Sanders’ apartment studio and confiscated copies of Fuck You, other books deemed pornographic and all his reels of film, including 10,000 feet of the unfinished “Amphetamine Head.” The film was never returned or found, ending his career as a filmmaker.[22]
In 1964, the bar owner Stanley Tolkin bought a bar in the Polish National Home and kept the old Polish name, the Dom. The building had a quiet bar and a disco space upstairs at 23 St. Marks.[23]
In April 1966, the Pop Art painter Andy Warhol started hosting gallery shows in the Dom’s upstairs disco space. Warhol named the shows “The Exploding Plastic Inevitable.” The Plastic Inevitable became both society and gritty street events, where socialites could dance with street kids. With Warhol as the band’s manager, the ice-queen singer Nico fronted the Velvet Underground. Future film director John Waters noted that the Underground would pretend to shoot up onstage and Warhol scenesters would be all hopped up on speed. In the balcony, Warhol would project psychedelic patterns on the band, mocking the new hippie culture.[24]
The leader of the Velvet Underground Lou Reed had written his heroin anthems “White Light, White Heat” and “Waiting for the Man” while he was still in college at Syracuse, where he started using heroin in the early 1960’s.
Warhol’s entourage and their very public, hip and excessive use of drugs would help spread the use of speed and heroin in the East Village. One of his entourage, Brigid Polk, would walk around the disco with a full syringe of speed, jabbing random dancers in the butt. Polk, a socialite whose father was the head of Hearst Magazines, was nicknamed Brigid Poke.[25]
The downstairs bar at the Dom became a de facto Black social club. Where the rich hipsters danced to the Velvet Underground with members of the growing members of the counterculture, middle-class bus drivers and secretaries grooved to a Motown juke box.[26]
At the same time that Stanley Tolkin was buying the Dom, the East Village’s first sex commune was growing quickly. A former Air Force officer named John Presmont smoked pot for six weeks straight in the mid-1950s and heard a voice telling him to form the next religion, that “would pull out all the swinging people.” He named his new religion Kerista.[27]
Born to Russian immigrant parents and raised by Orthodox Jewish grandparents on the Lower East Side, Presmont was already a known figure to police. In 1958, he was busted hosting an interracial orgy in his apartment in Harlem.[28] Later, Presmont pimped out his first wife for $20 a pop, eventually destroying the marriage.[29] The same year as the interracial orgy, Presmont was busted by police for large-scale marijuana possession. After Kerista had gained steam in the East Village in 1964, the police again busted 19 members of the group at the East 4th Street apartment on marijuana possession charges.[30]
In 1965, the writer Robert Anton Wilson did a profile on the commune for the short-lived Fact Magazine. At this time, Kerista controlled 10 apartments clustered around East 4thStreet and had 18 adult members and three babies. Presmont (born Jacob Luvich) spoke of the bisexual members of the commune, and how women were responsible for birth control because Kerista men hated condoms.[31]
After spending the 1950’s at the hipster San Remo bar in Greenwich Village, the writer Ronald Sukenick was living in the East Village in the mid-1960s, working as an underpaid adjunct and sleeping with “subterraneans” and ex-prep school girls. He was invited to a strange party, full of “hip black men and creamy white blondes.” A beautiful blonde took him to a back room to have sex with him. Her black boyfriend came in the room and seemed pleased. An unsettled Sukenick, hurried out of the party, having had unwittingly met the natural-born swingers of the Keristans.[32]
The paunchy Presmont, already in his early forties, promoted interracial sex. He had married a teenaged Black woman, who was pregnant with his child. Kerista soon recruited hundreds of members in the bohemian areas in New York, Boston and San Francisco, and even New Jersey. The Keristans were early hippies, with their communal living and free love.
In the Wilson article, Presmont said the group planned to buy an island in the Caribbean, so that hundreds of swingers could have sex with each other for a membership of $120 a year.[33]
Presmont bemoaned the hardships of running a sex cult with more then18 members in the East Village. Dau, a prominent member and Kerista theoretician, had sex outside the commune and half the members came down with gonorrhea.[34] At one point, Dau also brought a weirdo stranger back to the commune. The stranger balled 20 women in a week and left without contributing, said an annoyed Presmont.
The commune would send out the bearded, handsome Dau, known as “the Pied Piper” to the streets of the East Village with his saxophone, to attract new members.[35]
Well-known Beats used Kerista for their own purposes. Already in his forties, Allen Ginsberg had a sexual relationship with a 15-year-old boy in Kerista for several weeks. In one creepy blithe letter to the poet Gary Snyder in 1964, Ginsberg wrote about a Kerista orgy, where a two-year-old girl grabbed his penis, then ran off laughing.[36] Tuli Kupferberg of the rock band The Fugs also visited Kerista for sex. Herbert Huncke, the legendary Beat junky, convinced Linda, an heiress affiliated with Kerista, to finance a heroin shooting gallery. Other Kerista members had to threaten Huncke, so he would leave the group.[37]
At an orgy at a Kerista storefront on Suffolk Street in 1964, Ginsberg had sex with a school girl named Rose Feliu, whom he named Rosebud. Rosebud escaped the mass pot arrest of the Keristans later that year. She showed up at Ginsberg’s door for help and he took her in for the next year. The vivacious Rosebud, with her high cheekbones and shiny dark hair, was useful to Ginsberg because she was able to attract boys and young men back to Ginsberg’s Second Avenue apartment.[38] Rosebud remained friends with Ginsberg for the rest of his life, writing his obituary in 1997.[39]
After the big 1964 Kerista pot bust, Presmont served 10 months in jail, and then moved to Honduras, to realize the dream of a Kerista-run island for swingers. Living off the land and group sex did not appear to mix, so the endeavor was a big disaster. Presmont and his Kerista acolytes returned to New York.[40] Soon after, the sex cult relocated to the San Francisco area.
Sleeping with underage kids on the Lower East Side appears to be a Beat trait. In the late 1950’s, the poet Janine Pommy Vega was a 16-year-old from New Jersey who went to the East Village with her best friend Barbara to escape the suburbs. They were picked up by Ginsberg’s bisexual life partner Peter Orlovsky and the Beat poet Gregory Corso at the Cedar Tavern. Pommy Vega was deflowered by a gentle Orlovsky and Barbara slept with the less-gentle Corso at Ginsberg’s apartment. Pommy Vega continued to date Orlovsky and wound up becoming roommates with the much older Huncke.[41] Vega eventually developed her own heroin habit.
After Huncke was kicked out of Kerista in 1964, Ginsberg set up his old friend with a tenement apartment on East 9th Street. The apartment didn’t last…Huncke let a violent meth freak and firebug named George move in with him. In a matter of weeks, the apartment was trashed and eventually George burned the place out. Huncke was beloved by the Beats for his affable demeanor and access to hard drugs.[42]
Further west on MacDougal and Bleecker Street, there was a series of folk clubs and coffee shops that had popped up in the late 1950’s, early 1960’s. These clubs quickly made the transition to more hippie-inflected psychedelic rock and roll.
Hippie fashions were beginning to filter back East. In what would become the epicenter of the New York hippie movement, boutiques started popping up on St. Mark’s Place. A store called Limbo opened on St. Mark’s in 1965. Marty Friedman rented a shop at 24 St. Mark’s for $85 a month. He started going to warehouses that shipped bales of clothes to Nigeria and Afghanistan. Friedman would fill up his Volkswagon and bring bundles of army surplus back to St. Marks. He also got mountains of jeans from Utah, where the many kids in large Mormon families would outgrow their Levis.[43]
Charles Fitzgerald had a store that sold used furs called Grizzly Furs. Society matrons would dump their old fur coats in charity shops. He’d grab them for $2 and sell them for $20.[44]
A local designer named Kristina Gorby opened a boutique at 7 St. Marks, and sold her own psychedelic mini dresses, which were a big seller.[45]
There was an unwritten return policy at Limbo. According to the journalist Ada Calhoun in her book St. Marks is Dead, the writer Paul Krassner bought a long coat at Limbo while tripping on acid. The coat was a mistake. The store took it back when he said he was high when he bought it.[46]
(Limbo, 1960's)
In the 1950’s, the Lower East Side was a working-poor neighborhood of Ukrainians, Puerto Ricans and blacks. Local residents didn’t like the Beats moving in the early1960’s, looking for cheap apartments, and harassed them on the street. Most of the new hippies who started showing up in 1966 and 1967 were white middle-class high school runaways and college dropouts. On the weekends, many more “plastic” hippies, or part-time hippies, flooded into the neighborhood.
In 1966, Southworth “Southie” Swede opened one of the first head shops in the East Village, on Avenue A, called the Psychedelicatessen Swede, a 21-year-old rich kid from Los Angeles, sold drug paraphernalia, but had an underground traffic in acid, pot and hashish.[47]
Back in San Francisco In January1967, the local hippie merchants in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood sponsored the first “Human Be-In,” a four-hour concert where 25,000 people showed up. The Beat poets Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder gave speeches and read poetry between musical acts. Inspired by his trips to India, Ginsberg, in his early forties, had already gone full hippie, wearing a long embroidered Indian kurta and beads, a beard and long hair swirling around his bald pate.
The Be-In was a peaceful event patrolled by only two policemen on horses. At one point, a lost child was returned to his mother on horseback.
As summer drew near and colleges and high schools let out, as many as 50,000 to 75,000 young hippies started flooding into San Francisco, sparking “The Summer of Love.” Some were the flower children who panhandled, smoked pot and lived on the street or in overcrowded crash houses. Another more radical subset included the Diggers, former members of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, who set up a free kitchen to feed runaways and the poor, as well as a free store. They also confronted police harassing hippies and through their own media outlet, the Communications Company, they posted broadsides advocating for the abolition of private property.
In March 1967, Village Voice writer Richard Goldstein went to San Francisco, to profile the Diggers. He focused on the charismatic native New Yorker Emmet Grogan, who had been an elite private school student, a burglar and a heroin junkie in his youth before heading to San Francisco and joining the mime troupe.[48]
The Diggers prided themselves on being leaderless and keeping their members anonymous. Goldstein named Grogan in the article as the Digger leader. Grogan was furious and threatened to throw acid in Goldstein’s face.[49]
In New York City, in 1966, 2,000 hippies had rented apartments around Tompkins Square Park and some were living in the park. A flood of head shops and hippie clothing stores started opening on St. Marks. Hippies also started hanging out in Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village.[50]
By 1967, many of the Village Voice editors were in their late forties and World War II veterans, so hiring new reporting blood was essential. Don McNeill, a 22-year-old Voicereporter from Washington State had been given the job of covering the hippies. He detailed that the impoverished environment of the East Village, where the hippies were obtaining a foothold, meant there was always furniture on the street from evicted families at the end of each month.
The Evergreen Review, the alternative literary magazine founded in the 1957 by Barney Rossett and the Grove Press, jumped onto the hippie bandwagon. In a commercial move, the journal put the middle-aged Ginsberg on the cover, wearing an Uncle Sam top hat. Another ad had the tagline “Join the Counterculture.”[51]
In late 1966, a recently divorced political activist for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee named Abbie Hoffman moved to New York City from Massachusetts to run the Liberty Store, which sold Southern folk handicrafts to raise money for SNCC. He was initially disgusted by the hippie panhandlers on St. Mark’s Place, but liked the long hair on men and the outrageous fashions. Hoffman thought that because they were raised on TV and optimism, the young flower children were politically ignorant.[52]
The resentment of locals towards the new hippie interlopers was almost immediate. Rising rents were pushing long-time residents out. Black and Puerto Rican residents taunted hippies on the street, mugged them and sold them bad drugs. A Black resident told the Times that he resented that the middle-class hippies could leave whenever they wanted, while he was trapped on the Lower East Side in poverty.[53] A young Latina mother told another Times reporter that her community was in a war for the same resources with the hippies.[54]
On Memorial Day 1967, the tensions between hippies and local residents exploded. Twenty hippies were on a hill in Tompkins Square Park, chanting “Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna.” Local elderly Ukrainian women complained about the noise to the 9th Precinct. The hippies laughed when told to leave the hill and formed a human chain to stop arrests. The cops took out their nightsticks and beat their way through the chain.[55] When more officers responded, they were confronted by 150 more hippies. The police sent in a tactical force of 70 heavily armed cops, who beat more hippies with batons, arresting 40 men.[56] Several of the arrested hippies were severely beaten.[57]
The hippie activist and actor Jim Fouratt had visited San Francisco in the spring of 1967 and picked up some tricks from the San Francisco Diggers, like the rapid printing of news leaflets through their Communications Company. Living on Bond Street, he bought himself a mimeograph machine and set up the Communications Company New York, which published handbills on local political actions and police violence against hippies.[58]
In response to the mass beatings of hippies by the cops at Tompkins Square, Fouratt quickly mimeographed hundreds of leaflets detailing the mass arrest. Activated and angry hippies gathered outside the 9th Precinct in support, then packed the night court near Foley Square when the arrested hippies were arraigned. [59] They sat in the courthouse hallway and ate watermelon.
Most of the hippies were released on bail. For the time being, the Memorial Day Riot was a hippie victory, for the local precinct stopped harassing hippies in the park, especially when they gathered or smoked reefer.
Hoffman was impressed with Fouratt’s Communications Company and started working with the activist. They staged a Sweep-In, picking East 3rd Street, the filthiest block in the East Village. Hundreds of young hippies descended on the street with brooms and cleared a trash-strewn empty lot, some filthy basements and swept up huge piles of garbage. The locals were grateful, but the event was a one-off, “a glorious goof.”[60]
Services were being set up for the East Village hippies, including a bail fund for arrested hippies. A free food project was set up in Tompkins Square Park to feed both hippies and local residents. Hoffman wanted to continue with pranks.
Following Fouratt’s idea, a small group of hippies working for a Lower East Side community group, including Hoffman and Fouratt, were given a tour of the New York Stock Exchange. On cue from an upstairs gallery, they showered real and fake dollar bills onto the floor of the Stock Exchange. The stunned traders paused, cheered and then started scrambling for the money. Hoffman, Fouratt and their crew were quickly hustled out. The newspapers the next day carried a picture of Fouratt and a young woman doing a victory dance in front of the Stock Exchange.
When sightseeing buses clogged the Lower East Side looking for the new hippies, Hoffman and his confederates shut down traffic on St. Marks and staged a dance party. Angry residents threw trash at the hippie protesters.
Other hippies pushed back on the square gawkers. The artist and prankster Joey Skaggs hired a bus and organized a “Bus Tour to Queens.” Skaggs drove a group of hippies out to Queens and interrupted local residents, pestering them with questions on why they were mowing their lawns or going shopping.[61]
With the reporter Don McNeill in tow, hippie activists made a nighttime raid to Staten Island, dug up a tree and planted it in a mountain of dirt in the middle of St. Mark’s while the hippie band Public Image played on a flatbed truck. Hoffman and his crew planted the tree, then the commanding officer of the 9th Precinct, the hippie-friendly Captain Fink plucked the tree out and the event was over.
The massive full-color feature spread by Time in July 1967 on the hippie phenomenon featured Public Image on the psychedelic cover. Hoffman’s own hippie wedding to his girlfriend Anita Kushner was featured in the spread.[62]
In the Time article, there is pushback by the academic Martin Marty, who said that the spiritual hippies were a reaction to the soulless consumerism of the post-war American prosperity.
The long news feature often mocked the hippies for their personal hygiene and the spiking STD rates of the hippie vagabonds.
Yuri Kapralov, a refugee from the horrors of World War II in Russia, lived on East 7thStreet. In his memoir Once There Was a Village, Kapralov wrote that on his block were Slavs and Puerto Ricans, united by grinding poverty. The Puerto Rican gangs fought each other, leaving civilians alone. There were also old Beats and artists, some who had decent jobs.
The Slavic churches and schools kept an iron-clad control of their own people, keeping them in poverty. The Slavic men did hard factory work and the women were housecleaners. Their daughters did not go to college and their sons were blown up in Vietnam.[63]
During the Summer of Love, the East Village was clogged with runaways and young hippies out of school. Hippies slept in Tompkins Square Park and stayed in dubious crash pads, with as many as 10 kids sleeping on the floor. On the weekend, the hippie population would surge with hippie poseurs, or “plastic hippies.” McNeill of the Voice painted a grim portrait of the hippie runaways. There were evictions and homelessness, living friends’ floors and abandoned apartments. Some young people became addicted to injecting methamphetamine.[64] Parents posted handwritten signs, begging for help finding runaway minors. The NYPD estimated that 11,000 runaways were reported missing in New York City in 1967.
Older local residents took on the task of helping the young, often malnourished hippies into their own hands. Merril Mushroom, a 27-year-old ex-teacher and her partner Gabby ran an informal gay LSD collective and had opened a handicrafts store called Paranoia on 10thStreet between 1st and 2nd Avenues. “In one room, we had a free kitchen, where people could come and eat, then we had a Day-Glo carousel room,” said Mushroom. “We had a free clothing giveaway. It was kind of like a community service center and store at the same time.
“We worked with the runaways…‘Call your mother, what’s going on and where can you get help?’ It was kind of like semi-social work.”[65]
Mushroom also did anti-war work. “I worked with draft dodgers,” said Mushroom. “We would coach them on how you could get out of the draft by saying you were gay. You don’t go in wearing feathers. Say you want to see the psychologist. Say you are gay and there would be all these men and all these temptations.”
Kapralov noted that the Summer of Love in the East Village was a media event from the beginning. News camera crew showed up, as did press photographers to record the young flower children in their bell bottoms and micro-minis. With the hippies came bookstores, an emergency shelter and a medical clinic, treating the VD and hepatitis that was rampant among the young hippies.[66]
The anti-hippie violence and the battle for the limited resources of the East Village continued. When Public Image gave a concert at the Tompkins bandshell, Puerto Rican youths threw rocks, chasing the band from the stage. Another concert was disrupted by Latino men banging on garbage can lids. When a hippie woman confronted the noisemakers, she was stripped naked by an angry mob. A police sergeant rescued her from more harm.[67]
With the anti-war activity heating up, Hoffman and Fouratt organized a “flower brigade” to march in the Armed Services Day Parade on May 20th. On the East Side, the Flower Brigade encountered drunk VFW members carrying signs like ‘Draft Martin Luther King” and “Kill a Commie for Jesus.” The violence started when a Black woman holding up a peace placard was beaten up by a crowd of veterans.
Though a police officer tried to dissuade the hippies from joining the parade at East 92ndStreet, the group entered the line of march.
Fouratt, Hoffman and 18 young hippies were dressed in gaily colored clothes and carrying American flags. Hoffman advised people to take off earrings and to cover their genitals if assaulted. A young hippie woman started to cry but still entered the parade. Joe Flaherty, an older reporter from the Village Voice, noted the bravery of the young hippies.
The attacks on the hippies started immediately. The Flower Brigade was quickly and brutally assaulted by middle-aged VFW members, who beat both men and women alike, slamming them into walls. The VFW brutes were egged on by their girdle-wearing wives.[68] Flaherty wrote that the paunchy veterans were beating girls young enough to be their daughters.
This was also the first inkling that Hoffman did not always think of the safety of the people following him.
With the East Village runaway situation becoming more severe, cops started raiding crash pads, looking for underage runaway youths. The New York Times wrote about two men, Galahad and his friend Groovy Hutchinson, ran a crash pad where they claimed to help youths get back to their families.[69]
Groovy and Galahad’s first crash pad was through taking over Ed Sanders’ Peace Eye Bookstore, which was dormant because of Sanders’ success with his rock band The Fugs. Years later, Sanders mused that there were 18 to 20 mattresses on the ground, full of runaway kids. The horrified landlord kicked the crash pad out.[70] Groovy and Galahad moved their crash pad to the small two-bedroom apartment on 622 East 11th St., which would hold about 10 kids. Grateful parents gave Galahad a TV for the crash pad, as well as cash for return of their children.
Local community members directed some rage at Galahad for protecting a small number of runaways. “Graffiti appeared on walls near the East 11th Street crash pad, “Draft Galahad.”[71]
Andy Clifford was a 16-year old runaway from Long Island who went by the nickname Shakespeare. Shakespeare was picked up by Groovy in Tompkins Square Park at 4 am when he arrived in the East Village. He lived in the Groovy and Galahad crash pad on East 11th Street. They would panhandle to secure the $35 for the apartment. Clifford noted that rich supporters of the hippies would give them rent money and furniture to sell.[72]
Shakespeare’s stay in the Village lasted from April to the summer. He had appeared on the Alan Burke Show, a talk show which had an episode on hippies in April. His father eventually came to the East Village at the end of the summer, and with the cops from the 9th Precinct, he had his son arrested. He was sent back to Long Island, where he was locked up as a wayward youth in the Nassau County Jail for two months.[73]
The hippies were not a monolith of flower children. In a book on the hippie phenomenon published in 1967, Time Magazine reporters estimated that there were at least 23 hippie factions in the East Village. Included in this number was a film collective and the band Group Image, which was its own commune. There was also a hippie group that supported the bail fund.
One anarchist group working in the East Village in 1966 was named Black Mask. They changed their name to the intentionally unprintable Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers, taken from a LeRoi Jones poem. [Jones was a Beat poet in the late 1950’s, and became a Black nationalist named Amiri Baraka in the mid-1960’s.] The outfit was headed by a former heroin junkie and rising painter named Ben Morea, who gave up art to become a full-time street fighter. The Motherfuckers attacked hippies and confronted the police.
As the earlier Black Mask, the anarchists shut down the Museum of Modern Art in 1966, hitting the donor class for Wall Street’s support of the war. They published broadsides and leaflets, supporting radical black liberation and promoting sexual freedom. The tone of their written materials were angry and searing. In one demonstration, Black Mask protesters showed up at the New York Stock Exchange with posters that said “Wall Street = War Street.”
Though Morea was a bona fide street fighter, many of the two dozen white men who formed the core of the Motherfuckers came from more privileged backgrounds. Tom Neumann, who went by the nom de guerre Tom Motherfucker, was the stepson of the philosopher Herbert Marcuse and a Swarthmore graduate. He dropped out of grad school in history at Yale to go to the Lower East Side to paint.[74] Neumann was sucked into the radical Motherfuckers.
Journalists parachuted into the East and West Villages to “bear witness” on the hippie phenomenon. Suzanne Laban, a right-wing French intellectual and Cold Warrior, wrote a pearl-clutching book called Hippies: Drugs and Sex. In one section, she wrote about young, unwashed hippie youths prostituting themselves at the fountain in Washington Square. At one point, she compared the more political hippies to terrorists.[75]
The Village Voice also fanned the flames of hippie conflict in the East Village between Abbie Hoffman and his rival, the taller and more charismatic Emmett Grogan, the de facto leader of the San Francisco Diggers.
Hoffman declared himself to be a Digger, embracing the radical San Francisco group. Taking one of their most controversial ideas, he set up a “Free Store,” on East 10th Street, full of donated clothes and furniture. The store opening in September 1967 had lines down the block, full of excited locals. The first hiccup the store hit was when it was discovered that nearby vintage stores were taking the “free” clothes and selling them.
In early October, the attacks on hippies would take a sudden gruesome turn. Linda Kirkpatrick was a daughter from a wealthy Connecticut family, who grew up in a 30-room mansion. After trying LSD for the first time on a family vacation to Bermuda, Fitzpatrick dropped out of prep school. She moved to the Village, lying to her parents that she was living with another girl at the Astor Place hotel, when it was really a man. She stayed at the fleabag hotel for a month, but moved out and became a roving nomad with other young hippies.[76]
In the last month of her life, Fitzpatrick fell in with James “Groovy” Hutchinson, an amiable LSD dealer who’d been profiled in the Times, who helped runaways and sometimes gave acid away for free. On October 7th, the couple was lured to the basement of an East Village tenement on Avenue B by two men, one a Black nationalist. Kirkpatrick was raped repeatedly and she and Hutchinson had their skulls smashed in with a brick.[77]
The city newspapers, the Times, the Post and the Daily News had a field day with the murder, publishing pictures of the blonde debutante turned hippie. The Village Voice did a multipart series on the two black men who killed the young people, including a feature on one murderer’s abused, impoverished childhood in the Lower East Side’s public housing. Both men were convicted of murder and died in prison.
The Times sent J. Anthony Lukas, a former war correspondent, to both Greenwich, Connecticut and the East Village, to untangle the two lives of the murdered Fitzpatrick. In ten weeks, she went from a prep school horseback riding debutant to a hippie girl fearing she was pregnant, believing she was being controlled by a warlock named Pepsi and using speed. He interviewed her grief-stricken, shell-shocked parents who still referred to her on the present tense, and her hippie friends, pegging her to hanging out with Groovy hours before the couple were beaten to death by two men in a squalid boiler room on Avenue B. For his efforts, Lukas won a Pulitzer Prize.[78]
In 1968, Lukas wrote an epic article in Esquire, called the “The Life and Death of a Hippie,” on Groovy Hutchinson. Raised in Rhode Island, Groovy was a functionally illiterate boy sent to trade school. He broke out and joined the circus as a roustabout, traveling the country. He picked up Galahad in New Orleans, and the two young men arrived in the East Village in March 1967, both 21. They started running crash pads for the flood of runaways coming to the East Village.[79]
The Groovy Murders, as they are still known, put a knife into the heart of the Summer of Love. Many of the young hippies scattered, returning to their hometowns and back to school.
For Mushroom, the murders killed the good will in the East Village. “After Groovy was murdered, everything started to go sour,” she said. “You can consider that a demarcation point of the descent of the hippies movement.”[80]
“It wasn’t just the Groovy murder,” she said. “It was the fact that hippiness and all the psychedelic movement had become trendy. When it became trendy, people started making money, capitalizing on it. It made it even worse.”
After dealing with temporarily malnourished hippies that eventually fled the East Village, Mushroom realized no real lessons were learned.
“They were rich white runaway kids,” she said. “Not all rich, but privileged white kids. Even the ones that weren’t rich had white privilege and lived that way. They didn’t understand poverty.”[81]
Susana Ventura was a 17-year-old runaway from Connecticut, who had recently escaped a convent juvenile facility, the Sacred Heart School for Wayward Girls. She was friends with Groovy. “Groovy was super sweet,” she told Ada Calhoun in 2014. “He got this idea of saving kids. I was raped five times in the East Village before I was 18. There were predators. We needed places to stay. Groovy and Galahad started these crash houses.”
For Ventura, the horrific crime confirmed the menace in the street. “When Groovy and Linda were murdered, there was a face on the evil that everyone knew.”[82]
Ventura eventually renamed herself Penny Arcade, and became a famed underground East Village performance artist and playwright, writing the shocking “Bitch! Dyke! Faghag! Whore!” in 1990.
The Free Store’s community goodwill turned sour almost immediately. Bricks were thrown through the window and at one point, a hippie girl was pulled out of the store and molested by local men. Visiting San Francisco Diggers became enraged with Hoffman and told him not to use their name and not to steal their ideas.
ABC News came down to the East Village in the days after the Groovy murder. The square, middle-aged correspondent was surrounded by jeering hippies, including Galahad, the local celebrity known for rescuing runaways. He and Groovy had been profiled by the gullible Times in June. Despite his friend’s gruesome murder a week before, Galahad openly mocked the TV reporter.[83]
The reporter also interviewed the young woman who’d been assaulted near the Free Store. Nearby cops ignored her pleas for help and she wound up at Bellevue, the psychiatric hospital. A local activist told the ABC reporter that two Puerto Rican youths had beaten a white man in the Free Store with a rifle barrel.
What the ABC News report indicated was that the East Village was a tinder box, with long-time black and Latino residents enraged by the year-long flood of white hippies renting apartments and raising rents, and jamming the local parks with pot smoking and the streets with panhandlers. A Puerto Rican man told a reporter on the news that these hippies were turning their back on the American Dream.[84]
In the ABC News report on the hippies on the Lower East Side, there is a long section, where the reporter interviews an underground newspaper editor, the poet Allen Katzman, who said that he and other counterculture writers were telling the hippies that the dangers of urban and inner-city living was not compatible with hippie ideals. The editor was urging hippies to move to rural America, to go “back to the land,” to set up communes.
Some hippies started arming themselves. An exodus from the Lower East Side also started. Some young runaways returned home or went back to school. Others started moving to communes. In an interview with Richard Goldstein from the Village Voice, Galahad pulled out a switchblade from under his poncho, with. The handle was painted in Day-Glo swirls.
Every national publication sent reporters down to the East Village to cover the horror of the Groovy murders and to write “what have we become?” pieces. Newsweek did an epic profile on the East Village scene, opening with a photo of Puerto Rican boys taunting a hippie girl in a mini dress. Newsweek focused on a speed-addicted hippie girl with a shattered leg. They also raised stories that Galahad might have molested stoned hippie girls in his care.[85]
Time’s piece was titled “Speed Kills,” following the dubious police line that the gang rape and murder of Fitzpatrick and Hutchinson started out as a drug-fueled interracial sex orgy.[86]
Meanwhile, another event shook the anti-war and hippie communities. On Saturday, October 21, 1967, 100,000 anti-war protesters descended on Washington DC for the March on Washington. Hippie leaders from New York, including Abbie Hoffman and Ed Sanders, had plans to levitate the massive 3.4 million square-foot Pentagon, the center of the Department of Defense.
“We will dye the Potomac red, burn the cherry trees, panhandle embassies, attack with water pistols, marbles, bubble gum wrappers, bazookas, girls will run naked and piss on the Pentagon walls, sorcorers swamis, witches, voodoo, warlocks, medicine men and speed freaks will hurl their magic at the faded brown walls,” said Abbie Hoffman, according to the Washington Post.
As many as 50,000 marchers veered toward the Pentagon and eventually crashed through the chain-link fence.[87] The U.S. marshals and the 101st Airborne with fixed bayonets were guarding the building.
Ed Sanders and The Fugs were playing their classic “Kill for Peace” on a flatbed truck outside the Pentagon. Members of the Motherfuckers, the East Village anarchist gang, were able to fight through the line of marshals and soldiers and got through the doors of the Pentagon before they were beaten back and arrested.[88]
According to the Grace Paley, the fiction writer and peace activist, the middle-aged marshals waded into the crowd and beat protesters. The very young soldiers were much more polite and deferential and did not assault people.[89]
Seven hundred people were arrested at the Pentagon. Voice reporter Edward Jacobs was with the protesters waiting to be arrested. He was clubbed in the head by an MP, goosed by the MPs and thrown into a police van by his hair. The arrestees were put on buses and driven to a minimum-security work camp in Virginia. According to the Village Voice, hundreds of people had been beaten by the marshals and limped off the buses into their short-term confinement.[90] The youngest detainees was a 14-year-old whose father worked for the Pentagon. He had been beaten by the M.P.s on the shoulder and his legs. Several men were charged with assault, which meant they held their hands up to protect their faces while they were beaten with batons.[91] Arrested demonstrators said their female counterparts received the most savage beatings from the marshals and MPs.
The next morning, the detainees were fed a decent breakfast of cornflakes, cake with icing and coffee. Volunteer lawyers were able to obtain the release of most detainees with a $25 fine and five-day suspended sentences.[92]
Meanwhile, things were taking a nasty turn for Galahad, the celebrity hippie. Ronald “Galahad” Johnson had come to the East Village from New Orleans in March 1967, with his friend Groovy. In the seven months the Missouri native had run a crash pad at 622 E. 11th Street for runaways, his apartment had been raided by the police numerous times, looking for drugs and underage kids. Galahad himself had been arrested for corrupting the morals of a minor.
Two weeks after his friend Groovy was murdered, on October 20th, Galahad was arrested on old charges of selling $7 of pot to an undercover cop in New Orleans.[93] It is very possible to see the fingerprints of the NYPD on this arrest, to take Galahad out of the East Village. In March 1968, Galahad was extradited to New Orleans.[94] After he was tried and convicted, he was sent to the hell of Angola Penitentiary, where he picked cotton for two years and received a round-robin beatings by his fellow prisoners. Galahad returned to Missouri after prison. The trauma of Groovy’s murder and his harsh prison experience overshadowed the last five decades of his life.[95]
The East and West Villages were both flooded by young hippies during the summer of 1967. Clergy at Greenwich Village churches like our Lady of Pompeii, on the west side of 6th Avenue, complained bitterly to the New York Times that their poor box was repeatedly stolen and confessionals were being used for sex and as toilets.
Some hippie interactions with locals could be comical. A hippie entering a West Village gift shop picked up an ornate letter opener and tried to rob the store. Without missing a beat, the owner said, “Would you like that gift wrapped?” The flustered hippie ran out of the store.[96]
Hysteria over the missing runaways reached a fevered pitch when the 16-year-old daughter of the Republican State Chair Charles Schoeneck ran away from Syracuse to the East Village, looking for love and beauty. The NYPD aggressively canvassed the Village, looking for the high-strung, guitar playing girl and the Times wrote four or five pieces about her. The cops searched the Digger Free Store twice. Finally, the girl was delivered home 19 days later, after touring the East Village, Antioch and Oberlin Colleges.[97]
Life Magazine did a November 1967 cover story on runaways in New York and San Francisco, mostly focusing on pretty blonde white girls. In one vignette, a social worker comes from Chicago with her business executive husband to track down their runaway son. She meets his friend and arranges a meeting with the lost boy. They are reunited. A blonde 15-year-old girl is picked up by the police, calls her father in DC and he drives through the night to retrieve her.[98]
With all volunteers and no consistent management, the Free Store descended into anarchy. In his dumbest move, Hoffman appointed Motorcycle Ritchie, an aspiring Hell’s Angel, as manager.
After the Groovy murders, the very uptight New Yorker sent a reporter down and profiled Motorcycle Ritchie and three other workers, including an 18-year-old transient biker with a swastika tattoo on his arm, who had no idea why the symbol was offensive to local Ukrainians.[99]
Motorcycle Ritchie took to threatening locals with violence and eventually abandoned the store to become a full-time Hell’s Angel in California. More windows were broken and the Free Store was evicted for nonpayment of rent. In a final screw you, a departing volunteer destroyed the shelves by pummeling them with heavy chains.
In response to the San Francisco Diggers attacking Hoffman, Hoffman and friends made some changes. On New Year’s Eve 1967, in his East Village tenement apartment and under the influence of marijuana, Hoffman, The Realist publisher Paul Krassner and Hoffman’s wife Anita Kushner formed the Yippies as their new political movement.
Splits immediately developed. Fouratt said the new group should continue deepening community activism and building social change, not doing stunts. Hoffman pushed Fouratt out of the new group by holding a press conference, accusing him of making homosexual passes at Hoffman. Gay panic accusations were hard to defend oneself against just before Stonewall.[100] With the future feminist writer Robin Morgan in tow, Hoffman raided Fouratt’s Bond Street apartment, stealing his mimeograph machine and shutting down the Communications Company.
Hoffman and his new comrade Jerry Rubin started planning for the 1968 Democratic Convention.
The next major event was to be the Yip-In at Grand Central Station in late March 1968 for the Spring Equinox. Tensions between the police and hippies were running high, because of high profile raids on the East Village crash pads. Runaways were being arrested and charged with drug possession.
Three thousand young hippies showed up to the Grand Central event. The vibes were festive, with people forming and reforming conga lines and batting balloons around. The mood took a 180-degree shift when some Motherfuckers climbed the information kiosk, with its landmark clock, spray painting the clock and ripping the hands off. The cops descended into violence.
Don McNeill of the Voice covered the start of the Yip-In, then four cops threw him through a plate glass door, badly cutting his head, so he went to the emergency room. Hoffman had no access to the public address system, so he couldn’t address the crowds for calm and the mayor’s representatives stood by helplessly as the cops beat on hippies.
A young man was thrown through another plate-glass door, severing tendons. A police captain pulled a hippie away from some other cops, then slammed his head into the wall. Gleeful cops formed gauntlets and beat fleeing hippies with their batons. It was a full-fledged cop riot. The cop mayhem was also a foreshadowing of what the Chicago Police, Mayor Richard Daley’s goons, were going to do to peaceful demonstrators in August during the Democratic National Convention.
In March 1968, the West Coast rock and roll promoter Bill Graham, the founder of San Francisco’s Fillmore Theatre and producer of numerous psychedelic concerts, opened the Fillmore East on Second Avenue in an old ballroom.[101] It immediately became one of New York’s premier rock venues, hosting such bands and artists as the Grateful Dead, the Fugs and Jimi Hendrix.
Not long after the trauma of the violence of the Yip-In, McNeill was recuperating at a friend’s house in upstate New York. Under the influence of psychedelics, McNeill walked into a pond fully clothed and drowned. Accounts by his friend and fellow Voice writer Richard Goldstein was that McNeill had had his first homosexual encounter with a close friend, was confused when he wondered off. Goldstein viewed McNeill’s death as a suicide.[102]
The violence against the young and naive hippie runaways in New York City continued in 1968. In July, a 13-year-old aspiring hippie named Deborah Neill had run away from her home in rural Ohio to the East Village. Her first night in New York, she and male friend slept in a mosquito-ridden Tompkins Square Park. Her next night, she slept in apartment with two men with criminal records on Mott Street. They raped and killed her by throwing her down an airshaft. On her neck was an amber necklace she had purchased in the Village the day before. Unlike Linda Fitzpatrick, she was not from a wealthy family. Neill’s body lay unclaimed for two weeks.[103] Her parents did not have a phone to receive word of her murder.[104] Though there was a piece in the Times on her murder, there were no soul-searching pieces on her death in the national publications.
The great Greenwich Village short-story writer Grace Paley’s immortalized the girl’s murder in her story “A Little Girl,” a searing look at the sexual exploitation of and violence against young people in the hippie culture.
Right after Neill’s murder, the Times wrote a piece titled “Runaway Girls in East Village Live on Fear Street.” A 15-year-old runaway from Westchester, was found naked and drugged out with three adult men in a tenement apartment on East 11th Street. The men were arrested. Other runaways told of fear of rape and forced prostitution. A police sergeant on the NYPD missing persons squad said the department received 1,000 reports of missing youths a month, 40 percent female.[105]
The Times wrote a grim piece about the changing nature of hippies in the city. Many of the easygoing flower children left town in the drab winter of 1968, returning Tompkins Square Park to the old Ukrainian women. According to Peter Leggieri, the editor of the East Village Other, a radical counterculture newspaper, the hippies were chased out by police harassment and the feeling that the whole town was going to blow up. Gem Spa, the candy shop and hangout on 2nd Avenue and St. Mark’s, had no more flower children. Every night, there were kids on motorcycles hanging out until the police moved them on. The new hippies were “churlish and unimaginative.” The “panhandling along St. Mark’s Place had become aggressive and nasty.” Leggieri noted the old hippies were looking for a new life, but they are gone. “’All that’s here now are these kids from Queens, he added bitterly, ‘the real dregs of society.’”[106]
Even the drugs of choice were changing from acid to heroin. In St. Mark’s is Dead, Ada Calhoun interviewed a long-time St. Mark’s resident, who had watched same trippy and affable hippie panhandlers high on LSD metamorphasizing into hardened and angry junkies.[107]
The East Village was already on the cusp of exploding. In the summer of ’68, rioting Puerto Rican youths battled the cops on Avenue C, looting a butcher shop and throwing meat out to the gathered crowds. They set piles of garbage on fire. According to the suicidal Russian artist Yuri Kaprolov in his memoir Once There Was a Village, the youths threw metal crates and bottles off rooftops at the cops.
The NYPD responded with their fearsome heavily armed tactical police. When they captured the young ringleaders of the riot, the cops responded with more violence. They would identify the youth leaders, pulling them into tenement hallways and would mercilessly beat them with batons, cracking ribs and smashing testicles, arresting some and sending others to the hospital.[108]
Infuriated local residents, including mothers of the beaten youths, responded by setting up flaming barricades of garbage in the street, blocking the cops. More than 400 local residents rioted.[109]
In the same month as Deborah Neill was murdered, the Living Theatre, the legendary New York avant-garde theater company came back to the city after five-year exile in Europe. After producing such foundational shows as “The Brig” and “The Connection,” the troupe had lost their 14th Street theater to the IRS in 1963. Living Theatre founders Judith Malina and Julian Beck were now in their forties and formed a strong link between the 1950’s intellectuals and artists they had come up with and the hippies.
The Living Theatre had evolved into a full-bore hippie commune with 37 members, four apprentices and eight children, mostly infants. The company practiced polyamory and lived fist to mouth. The company was often too impoverished to pay for hotel rooms.
For their seven-month U.S. tour, going across the country in rickety Volkswagon buses, they were carrying out the premiere of their radical performance art piece “Paradise Now,” where members of the audience were transformed into the cast and cast members stripped down to loin cloths or even used nudity. Some audience members struck by the performance would go onstage and take their clothes off. Encores ended in police beatings and arrests in New Haven and Philadelphia, where police pulled Julian down the stairs by his hair. When asked about the New Haven arrests, Beck wryly said that the performance had been very successful. If there was nudity onstage or outside the theater, there were usually arrests.[110]
The Living Theatre turned their national tour into a press junket, going on CBS, performing the Plague scenes from “Mysteries,” where members die violent deaths. The establishment Saturday Evening Post did a large photo spread on the troupe, and the New York Times Sunday Magazine did a gigantic profile on Malina and Beck. Living Theatre members were photographed in the nude by the fashion photographer Richard Avedon, famous for his epic group photos.
The Living Theatre, helmed by a charismatic middle-aged thespian couple and followed by their 37-member commune of free lovers became a new face of protest, resistance and anarchy in United States. Despite being out of the country for five years, the group pushed their way to the front of the radical left.
While performing in New York City, the Living Theatre encountered the feral and often violent Motherfuckers. Both groups were taken with each other and the Motherfuckers became part of the Living Theatre entourage, following them to Boston and San Francisco.
In The Enormous Despair, Malina’s diary of the seven-month tour, she captures the violent and paranoid society the United States has become in the five years the Living Theatre was in exile in Europe. The country seemed to be on the verge of revolution, with labor strikes and campus unrest.
Judith Malina wrote of the company’s arrest paranoia and the fact that a bugging device was found at her family apartment in Manhattan. Judith muses that there seems to be a CIA operative at each lunch counter.[111]
On the Living Theatre tour, the IRS would periodically freeze the proceeds from theater box offices, to pay off the 1963 back taxes, leaving the Living Theatre destitute on the road. The Doors frontman Jim Morrison had attended “Paradise Now” performances and danced onstage with the Living Theatre in San Francisco. When he found out the Living Theatre troupe was destitute and had no way to return to New York, he gave the group $2,500 so they could drive their VW bus caravan back East.[112]
The violence experienced by the Living Theatre on their tour was real. Performing the end of “Paradise Now” in Brooklyn in October 1968, the stage was packed with 200 cast and audience members. Three men started assaulting a semi-nude Malina. The men started fighting among themselves to see who would rape her. In a terrifying moment, the dozens of people around Malina did not notice the violence being inflicted on her. One of the men yelled “Hold her!” as if Malina wasn’t there. Finally, a friend broke in and pulled her to safety.[113]
Years later, Malina told the Living Theatre biographer John Tytell that her would-be rapists had short hair. She thought they might have been outside agitators.[114]
The next night, after the chaotic and violent Brooklyn performance by the Living Theatre, the Motherfuckers decided that they are going to force rock promoter Bill Graham to give up one day a week at the Fillmore East for free community use.
That night, there was a fundraiser for Columbia student protesters at the Fillmore East. The Motherfuckers made plans to take over the theater. The Living Theatre was present, performing parts of “Paradise Now.” Judith Malina did not perform because of her sexual assault the night before. An onstage confrontation and debate between Julian Beck and Bill Graham erupted, with Beck advocating for one day a week community use of the theater. Graham agreed.[115]
At the end of the evening, a Motherfucker smashed Graham’s face with chains, breaking his nose. The next night, Graham, who had grown up as a gang member in the Bronx, spoke with Voice reporter Lucian Truscott in front of the theater. Graham’s broken nose was shining red. He had no intention to submit to the Motherfuckers demands.[116]
Graham, however, did allow four free community events at the Fillmore East, but he found that his theater was trashed, with stained carpets and broken seats.[117] The police finally asked Graham to stop the community events.
The record company for the rock group MC5, known for its political songs, sponsored a free concert by the band at the Fillmore East the day after Christmas 1968. A riot ensued when MC5 left in limousines. In his memoir of the Motherfuckers, Osha Neumann said that a Fillmore usher had his arm broken and a Puerto Rican kid was stabbed.[118]
In late 1968, the situation for the Motherfuckers went into a tailspin of violence. Two crash pads for the Motherfuckers were burned out, so the Motherfuckers moved in with Neumann and his social worker girlfriend and proceeded to trash the apartment, as well as to spray anarchist graffiti in the hallways. The furious super splashed acid on the face of one of the Motherfuckers, disfiguring him. The super was soon stabbed to death, likely by the Motherfuckers.[119]
At the same time, the Gypsy Jokers, a California motorcycle gang moved into the Village, edging into the local drug trade. The Jokers threatened Morea, that they were going to kill Barry Motherfucker, a famed street fighter, for ratting out some Jokers in a drug deal. Morea had a knife standoff with the gang’s leader. Soon after, the Jokers’ loft was burned out by a rival gang, the Aliens. The Joker leader was tied to a chair and left to burn to death.
The writer Paul Krassner gave the Motherfuckers a check for $3,000 to get out of New York. Taking their guns, a group of Motherfuckers caravanned to New Mexico to hook up with radical Latinos challenging local authorities.
After the violent events of 1967 and 1968, many hippies who had the means to leave the city left New York for rural communes. The hippies that stayed were more of a work-class background, with no way to escape the city.
Meanwhile, in the fall of 1968, both the city and federal government were making selective crackdowns on drugs in the East Village. Federal and city police officers raided Church of the Mysterious Elation, a hippie cult that used drugs like LSD and marijuana as a religious sacrament. Reporters from the Daily News delighted that there were eight naked people sleeping in the house as the bust started. The arrested women were named, and their age and hair color were given. (Two of the nude young women were blondes.) The high priest was “Southey” Swede, the owner of the Psychedelicatessen, which was known for dealing pot and acid.
The raid netted 10 pounds of hash, 11 pounds of marijuana, 4500 LSD tabs and 1500 tablets of speed. The law enforcement officers gave the street value of the drugs an impossibly inflated value of $4 to 6 million The Psychedelicatessen was permanently shut,[120] another nail in the coffin of the hippie odyssey on the Lower East Side
The Times stayed on the hippie beat with relish. Twenty-one months after the euphoric Central Park Be-In kicked off the Summer of Love, the mood in the East Village by Christmas 1968 was decidedly grim. The Times profiled an event with young runaways at the Electric Circus, the nightclub that replaced the Dom, on St. Mark’s. The underage runaways couldn’t figure out if they are having a good time in the East Village. One hippie, a dishonorably discharged soldier, admits that he has sent his girlfriend back to her hometown because of her heroin addiction. He informs an underage girl that she is his new girlfriend.[121]
The hippie anti-war resistance, however, continued in New York. Joey Skaggs, the artist who had set up hippie bus tours to Queens and carried a grotesque, skeletal crucifix through Tompkins Square Park on Easter,had planned a Vietnamese Nativity in Central Park for Christmas in Central Park. The city revoked his permits, but he started building the Nativity anyway. All figures, including the Baby Jesus, were Vietnamese peasants. Three squad cars full of police and two horse cops swooped down on the scene. To distract the cops, Skaggs’ co-conspirators shot a paper mache pig dressed like a cop. “I want to make it clear,” Skaggs told the Times, “It is not a very beautiful Christmas in Vietnam.”
The plan had been to set up the Nativity and to have Yippies dressed like American soldiers burn it down, like burning “hooches” in Vietnam. Instead, the wind blew over the Nativity. Five Yippies were given tickets for littering or constructing the Nativity without a permit.[122]
After their seven-month tour through the United States finished and with a half a dozen new arrests under their belts, the Living Theatre left New York by ship in April 1, 1969, heading back to Europe on the SS Europa, leaving behind the paranoia and unrest in the United States and heading back to political violence and unrest in France and other European countries. As they steamed towards Europe, Judith helped write a shipboard manifesto about violence and the coming revolution in America. Judith’s last diary entry in her book Enormous Despair had the large Living Theatre troupe cramming into Judith’s cabin to celebrate the Passover seder. They ate matzah, to remember the Jewish exodus from slavery in Egypt.[123]
The Groovy Murders ripped the guts out of 1967’s Summer of Love and many hippies left for rural communes. Left behind were the poor Latinos, Slavs and African American. The hippies that remained were working-class kids with no ability to escape the East Village. As heroin took hold as the drug of choice among teenagers, rampant violence gripped the area.
In 1969, the prices of dime bags of heroin on the Lower East Side crashed to $2 and $3. Sometimes, dime bags were priced at $1, to hook new younger users. Dr. Michael Baden, the assistant city coroner, said there was a disturbing spike in the number of city children and teenagers using heroin. He said that as many as 250 teenagers were on course to die of heroin overdoses in that year.[124]
In a grim 1971 profile in the New York Times of the East Village referred to the neighborhood as a land of heroin, violence and cheap wine. The article focused on two teen junkies, who would assault the remaining hippies and would mug high school students as easy targets. Middle-class kids looking to buy tickets at the Fillmore East would also be robbed.[125]
A missionary in the East Village noted that in the hippies, the “spark of love was gone from their eyes.” A local patrolman said that this time was “the final end of city hippie life.”[126]
In his memoir Once There Was a Village, the artist Yuri Kapralov told the story of six local teenagers, who descended into heroin addiction. The three girls became prostitutes to support their habits, quickly falling into physical abuse and addiction. The three boys became armed robbers, and had some success, until two were murdered by rival gangs. One boy escaped the East Village, with emotional scars but alive.[127]
By then, Kapralov had moved to East 11th Street, a block so dangerous that it was called “Lil’ Nam.” Veterans returning from Vietnam said that felt safer in the war. One summer, Kapralov counted 34 burned out cars on his block.[128] At one point, a 12-year-old firebug burned down a local synagogue.
Stabbing, robberies and home invasions were the norm. In despair of the violence, several of Kapralov’s neighbors on the block kill themselves.
Despite the violence to the neighborhood, the East Village is still a magnet for runaways. In 1972 while playing chess in Tompkins Square Park, Kapralov met a violent Russian junkie named Jack, very handsome, with shoulder-length red hair. He was also a child rapist and sex trafficker.
When a sunny 17-year-old hippie waitress named Helen disappears, Kapralov realized Jack was involved. Jack seduced Helen, had three men rape her, then drugged her and sold her to a social club in the Bronx for $200, where she was chained to a mattress and forced to have sex with seven men a day. Helen was then resold to a sadist, who locked her in a soundproof room and fed her speed and LSD. She was slowly going insane and hoped the sadist would kill her soon.[129]
Kapralov attacked Jack with a knife and Kapralov retrieved Helen from the Bronx. In her place, Jack gave up two runaways that were never seen again.[130]
In a psychiatric hospital near the East Village, Kapralov met Helen. She had aged 20 years in the several weeks she was forced into sex work and repeatedly raped.
Kapralov found Jack in the East Village, standing on the street with two new girl runaways from the Midwest. In Russian, Kapralov warned him that he would be killed if he stays in New York. Jack refused to leave. Days later, Jack was killed. Resisting a robbery.
In a strange twist, Kapralov went to Jack’s funeral at a seedy Slavic cemetery in New Jersey, where the old priest said “Ivan was a good boy, until his parents died.” Jack was 20. Kapralov mused on the dead pimp, but despaired that there are 10 more like him, preying on naïve runaways.[131]
[1] McNeill, Moving Through Here, pp. 6-7
2 McNeill, IBID, p.7
[3] Untapped New York, “Be-In: The Lost Ecktachrome Footage—Easter Sunday”
[4] The East Village Other, April 1, 1967
[5] Lou Reed: King of New York
[6] Morgan, Bill, I Celebrate Myself
[7] The Hippies: A History
[8] Greenfield, Robert, Timothy Leary pp. 221-3
[9] Wolfe, Tom, Electric Kool Aid Acid Test
[10] Wolfe, Tom, IBID,
[12] Moretta, IBID, p. 110
[13] Bill Graham Presents
[14] Moretta, John Anthony, The Hippies, A 1960s History, pp.35-36
[15] Time, June 1967
[16] Hedgepeth, William, Look Magazine, August 22, 1967
[17] Hedgepeth interview, “Sixties Survivors”
[18] Didion, Joan, Saturday Evening Post, September 23, 1967, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”
[19] Kornbluth, Notes from the New Underground, p. 199
[20] Sander, Ed, Fug You, p.56
[21] IBID, p.59
[22] Sander, Ed, Fug You
[23] Calhoun, Ada, St. Marks is Dead, pp.133-34
[24] John Waters interviewed by Calhoun in St. Marks is Dead, pp.147-48
[25] Lou Reed bio
[26] New York Times, 196@
[27] Wilson, Robert Anton, Fact Magazine, July/August 1965
[28] Jet Magazine, October 1958, pp.27-28
[29] Kerista.com
[30] New York Times, October 18, 1964
[31] Kerista.com
[32] Sukenick, Ronald, Down and In, 1993
[33] Wilson, Fact Magazine
[34] Wilson, p. 7
[35] Kerista.com
[36] The Letters of Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder, 1964
[37] Kerista.com
[38] I Celebrate Myself
[39] allenginsberg.com
[40] American Poly
[41] Pommy Vega, Janine, Women of the Beat Generation
[42] Bronstein, Steve, allenginsberg.com
[43] Ada Calhoun, New York Magazine, Fall 2018, “The Birthplace of American Vintage”
[44] Calhoun, IBID
[45] Calhoun, Ada, St. Marks is Dead, p.139, Calhoun, New York Magazine, Fall 2018
[46] Calhoun, Ada, St. Marks is Dead, p. 144
[47] New York Daily News, September 29, 1968
[48] Village Voice, March 16, 1967
[49] Goldstein, Richard, A Little Piece of My Heart, p.64
[50] Selling the Lower East Side
[51] Evergreen Review
[52] Abbie Hoffman: American Rebel, p.77
[53] New York Times
[54] New York Times, 1967
[55] New York Herald Tribune, June 1, 1967
[56] Village Voice, June 1967
[57] Village Voice, May 1967
[58] Hoffman bio
[59] Jim Fouratt interview by Dylan Foley, Hoffman bio
[60] Don McNeill, Moving Through Here, p. 14
[61] Calhoun, Ada, St. Marks is Dead, pp. 172-73
[62] Time, June 1967
[63] IBID, p. 7
[64] McNeill, Don, Moving Through Here, pp.27-28
[65] Merril Mushroom interview by Dylan Foley, 2021
[66] Kapralov, p.12
[67] New York Times
[68] Flaherty, Joe, Chez Joey, pp.8-9
[69] New York Times
[70] Sanders, Fug You
[71] Catriona Johnson interview by Dylan Foley, July 2023
[72] Andy Clifford interview, August 2, 2023
[73] IBID
[74] Neumann, Osha, Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers, pp. @@
[75] Laban, Suzanne, Hippies: Drugs and Sex
[76] New York Times, October 16, 1967
[77] Daily News, October 1967
[78] New York Times, October 16, 1967
[79] Lukas, J. Anthony, Esquire, 1968
[80] Mushroom interview, Last Bohemians #6, 2021, p.91
[81] Mushroom interview, Last Bohemians #6, 2021, p.91
[82] Calhoun, Ada, St. Marks is Dead
[83] ABC News, October 1967
[84] ABC News, October 1967
[85] Newsweek, October 1967
[86] Time, “Speed Kills,” October 1967
[87] Washington Post, October 19, 2017
[88] Neumann, Osha, Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers, pp.@
[89] Paley biography
[90] Village Voice, October 26, 1967, p. 18
[91] IBID, p.18
[92] IBID, p.18
[93] New York Times, October 1967
[94] New York Times, March 1968
[95] Interview with Catriona Johnson, August 2023
[96] New York Times
[97] New York Times, November 3, 1967.
[98] Life Magazine, November 7, 1967
[99] New Yorker, Ocotber 10, 1967
[100] Fouratt, Jim, interview with Dylan Foley, 2022
[101] Graham, Bill, Bill Graham Presents
[102] Goldstein, Richard, Another Little Piece of My Heart
[103] New York Times, August 2, 1968
[104] New York Times, August 12, 1968
[105] New York Times, August 12, 1968
[106] New York Times, August 26, 1968
[107] Calhoun, Ada, St. Mark’s is Dead,
[108] Kapralov, Yuri, Once There Was a Village, p.13
[109] New York Times, July 23, 1968
[110] Tytell, The Living Theatre: Art, Exile and Rage
[111] Malina, Judith, The Enormous Despair.
[112] Tytell, John, The Living Theatre: Art, Exile and Outrage
[113] Malina, Judith, The Enormous Despair, October 21, 1968 p 94,
[114] Tytell, IBID
[115] [IBID, October, 22, 1968 p96]
[116] Truscott, Lucian, Village Voice, @@@@
[117] Neumann, Osha, Up Against the Wall, Motherfuckers: A Memoir
[118] IBID
[119] IBID
[120] New York Daily News, September 29, 1968
[121] New York Times, Dec. 26, 1968
[122] New York Times, Dec. 26, 1968
[123] IBID, April 1, 1969,
[124] New York Times, October 23, 1969
[125] New York Times, August 30, 1971
[126] IBID
[127] Kapralov,
[128] Kapralov, p 105
[129] Kapralov, pp.116-17, p.120
[130] Kapralov, p.117
[131] Kapralov, pp.121-22
