Summer 1967 - Tale of Three Americas

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had there been no Vietnam debacle, I wonder how America would have turned out?

You still would have had the race related riots. The economy was good and would have been even better sans Vietnam and you still would have had the baby boom so you would still have had student unrest and probably counterculture but with not nearly the edge.

Without both Vietnam and the white youth movement having less of an edge LBJ gets reelected. Eventally liberal overreach would result in a backlash with republicans gaining power years after they did but without Vietnam and Watergate politics would have been more a lot more civil and a less conspiracy theory minded and a lot more trust of institutions until the 2000's and the advent of internet/social media.

...This belongs in that " boomers' fault " line but I can't find it ~ A non-American's use of the " boomers " phrase relating to U.K. stuff made me wonder ~ Is the phrase " Baby Boomer " used in any other country to refer to their births of that era?

Reactions to the Summer of Love in New York were predictably mixed. An estimated 50,000 young people descended on the city to join the movement, but many New Yorkers, including longstanding residents, police officers, and politicians, had little interest in spending the Summer of Love soaking up the good vibes. In the end, the city’s Summer of Love saw as much conflict and violence as peace and love, and debates about rental prices, real estate values, and the gentrification of the Lower East Side were all part of the conflict.

New York’s Summer of Love got off to a rocky start on Memorial Day Weekend when a group of hippies clashed with local residents and police in Tompkins Square Park. As reported on June 2, 1967, in the New York Times, police swarmed the park “as tensions between hippies and anti-hippies rose against the backdrop of protest music in Tompkins Square Park.” The over 200 officers who rushed to the scene were apparently there to restore to peace after residents and anti-hippie protesters complained that 200 hippies had assembled in the park without a permit and “were playing their bongos too loudly and too constantly.” By the end of the day, dozens of injuries had been incurred by police, protestors, and hippies, over thirty people had been arrested, and one young woman had been stripped naked by a group of anti-hippie protestors on a street corner just outside the park. Unfortunately, such scenes of conflict and violence would continue to unfold throughout New York’s Summer of Love, even as some public leaders sought to maintain the peace.

While the Summer of Love was by no means confined to a single neighborhood, like San Francisco, New York’s rendition had a clear epicenter—the East Village and specifically, St. Mark’s Place between Second and Third avenues. But if the Summer of Love had a center, it likely had more to do with business savvy than destiny.

While some merchants despised the hippies, many others welcomed the influx of affluent youngsters. On St. Mark’s Place, merchants even sought to create a “night mall” by closing the street to traffic from 7:00 pm to midnight. One reporter described the scene as follows: “Raindrops and flowers gently pelted a thousand people who jammed the pavement, stoops and fire escapes of St. Mark’s Place last night for a psychedelic dance party.” But as the article further observed, “below the flow of balloons, daisies, lights and music came grumbles.” Many older Ukrainian, Italian, and Jewish residents felt that local merchants were handing over their neighborhood to the new arrivals, and even some longstanding business owners were upset. Jerry Polk, the manager of the St. Mark’s Baths, complained that he was simply “too old for this stuff.”

If many residents and even some business owners were upset about the influx, it was not without reason. While the Summer of Love certainly brought increased business to the Lower East Side, it also resulted in soaring rents and a strategic rebranding of some parts of the neighborhood. In Selling the Lower East Side, housing historian Christopher Mele observes that from May to June 1967, an estimated 2000 hippies moved into old tenements adjacent to Tompkins Square Park. At the same time, rental prices soared throughout the neighborhood as demand for housing increased and leases were turned over more quickly. In the summer of 1967, properties as far east as Avenues C and D were impacted by the hippies’ mass arrival and accompanying demand for housing.

Unlike San Francisco, where the Summer of Love vibe appeared to linger for years, in New York, the Summer of Love really was just a summer. Following months of clashes and verbal conflicts with local residents, police, and politicians, in October 1967, tragedy struck when a hippie couple was found murdered in a basement boiler room of a tenement building at 169 Avenue B. One victim, Linda Fitzpatrick, was the 18-year-old daughter of an affluent Connecticut couple. Groovy, a well-known local drug dealer who had a reputation for giving his LSD away for free, was also found dead at the scene. The highly publicized murder not only resulted in a massive moral panic amongst suburban parents who were soon contacting the NYPD to track down their missing children but also symbolically marked the end of New York’s Summer of Love.

If New York did not have as well-defined a scene as Summer of Love hot spots such as San Francisco and London, it had a great deal more going for it. One factor was the avant-garde movement that centered on Andy Warhol and his studio, the Factory. Warhol became a vortex around which hustlers, glamorous society girls and artistic subversives like the Velvet Underground all spun. A conceptual genius. Warhol saw the Velvets as the musical expression of his own desire to blur all distinctions between fine art and commercialism, between the coarsest source material and high artistic achievement. Warhol produced The Velvet Underground & Nico, which came out in March 1967 and provided a dark counterpoint to the wide-eyed utopiantsm of the Summer of Love. Even its cover — a Warhol-designed peeloff banana skin with a phallic pink banana underneath — was a swipe at hippie softheadedness: a parody of the recent fad of smoking banana peels to get high.

The Velvets' music, however, was dead earnest — stark portrayals of the junkies, sexual adventurers and slumming socialites who populated the New York demimonde in which the band moved. The Velvets' shows, as part of the performance-art circus Warhol called the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, were roaring sonic assaults aided by band associate Gerard Malanga, who brandished a whip onstage, and the grainy vérité films by Warhol and director Paul Morrissey that were projected onto the group and its audience. "Andy pulled me aside and said. 'Whatever you do, don't let people clean it up. Don't change the lyrics. Keep it exactly as it sounds — raw,'" Lou Reed recalls about Warhol's role in producing those groundbreaking songs. "We'd be recording live, and he would sit there. The engineer would say, 'We want to change . . . ' and Andy would say, 'Oh, no, it's great.' And because he was Andy Warhol, it stayed that way."

The Velvets' John Cale respected Sgt. Pepper as "a theatrical statement," but had no use for Haight-Ashbury. "We were pretty much appalled by what was going on on the West Coast," he says. "The hippie scene was not for us. They were scruffy, dirty people." The feeling was mutual. When the Velvets played the Fillmore in San Francisco, their performance inspired a passionate denunciation in The San Francisco Chronicle by critic Ralph J. Gleason (who would co-found Rolling Stone). The Velvets and their cohorts, Gleason declared, were "all very campy and very Greenwich Village sick."

New York felt like a much smaller town then. Outside the Wall Street and midtown business districts, buildings were human-scale. It was a city that was not exclusively for the rich. The World Trade Center did not. exist. So Ho was an industrial zone that became an artists' haven as manufacturing companies left the city.

Fass' free-form, midnight-to-5 A.M. show, Radio Unnameable, became a must-stop for guests who included Dylan, Abbie Hoffman, Arlo Guthrie and Phil Ochs. Pass brought a playful social consciousness to New York's political scene. He used his show to help organize the city's Easter Sunday Be-In in March 1967, an event in Central Park attended by 10,000 celebrants. Pass would improvise and encourage his listeners to gather at midnight at JFK Airport for an impromptu Fly-In (3,000 people showed up on one of the year's coldest nights).

Bands of Negro youths invaded the midtown area shortly before midnight last night, smashing the windows of three stores and looting two Fifth Avenue haberdasheries. At 2 A.M. today, the police said the midtown area was free of looters.

Police patrol cars chased the youths and arrested 23, after one group had ripped the metal grille from the window of the Blye Shop, on the northeast corner of Fifth Avenue and 46th Street, and taken some menswear.

Homebound theatergoers and tourists gaped as the looters then smashed the windows of Wallachs, another men's store, on the southeast corner, and looted the display.

The outbreak came after a day of comparative calm in the Puerto Rican ghetto of East Harlem where on three previous nights antipolice riots had erupted. In Mount Vernon last night, Negroes went on a window-smashing, looting binge. Mayor Joseph P. Vaccarella declared a state of emergency and imposed a curfew on the Negro district from 10 P.M. to 6 A.M.

East Harlem appeared to have cooled off after four nights of antipolice rioting by teen-age Puerto Rican mobs. But Mayor Lindsay, after three daytime sorties into the neighborhood cautioned: ``Nothing's really over.''

After a day without incident, looting was reported in the early evening, when a crowd of teen-agers and a few adults pried open a metal gate guarding a clothing store at 1540 Park Avenue, near 111th Street, and removed shirts, dresses, pants and socks.

The Mayor was hanged in effigy by a crowd of youths in 109th Street, between Lexington and Third Avenues.