UP AGAINST THE WALL, MOTHERFUCKERS
In October 1967, a teenage socialite from Greenwich, Connecticut, named Linda Rae Fitzpatrick was found naked and murdered in a boiler room and known drug den at 169 Avenue B, outside of which hung a sign reading “Free Love.” She had been raped multiple times. Next to her lay the body of her boyfriend, James Leroy “Groovy” Hutchinson, a happy-go-lucky twenty-one-year-old from upstate who was known around the neighborhood as someone who helped runaways find shelter. He had been killed with a brick while trying to defend Fitzpatrick. Two men—Donald Ramsey, a Black Nationalist ex-convict who lived upstairs with his wife in an apartment with a black panther drawing on the front door, and Thomas Dennis—were sentenced to prison for the murders.
The musician Peter Stampfel says that with the Groovy murders, the East Village took a turn: “After that, it was a very fast slide. The scene was attracting fuck-tons of ex-con types and human garbage attracted by drugs and girls. . . . Things started getting bad in ’67 when the flower power bullshit made the whole country aware of sex and drugs and young girls who were sexually active. It was a powerful sleaze magnet.” Stampfel retreated inside: “My old lady and I took fuck-tons of amphetamine and stayed home and played music.” Poet Ron Padgett says that before 1967, everyone walking up and down St. Marks Place was carrying books. After that, they didn’t carry books—“just joints or something.” If the peace-and-love sixties really only lasted from 1964 to 1967, the violent seventies began in 1967.
Soon after the murders, the Avenue B building’s “Free Love” sign was amended to read, “Hate.” That strip of Avenue B from Tenth to Twelfth Streets had been called the “Sacred Via,” a road for hippies in search of intoxication and mind expansion, but from then on it was, in the words of the Fugs’s Ed Sanders, “Via Terroris—waypath of terror and desolation.”
A Pulitzer-winning New York Times story, “The Two Worlds of Linda Fitzpatrick,” told how a girl who rode horses, took family vacations to Bermuda, and lived near a Connecticut country club was drawn to an East Village scene “whose ingredients included crash pads, acid trips, freaking out, psychedelic art, witches and warlocks.”
After the murders, many suburban kids were no longer allowed to visit the Village. Shops like Limbo suffered and the streets grew emptier, increasing the ratio of hooligans to innocents. Crime rose. Nationwide, there was a sense of looming apocalypse. On St. Marks, a survivalist store opened selling gas masks. The Whole Earth Catalog offered strategies for life post-annihilation.
The cops tried to keep order, but often failed. “The Ninth Precinct had a special squad lurking around St. Marks Place looking for drug users,” shopkeeper Kristina Olitski says. “We all knew who the cops were.” They had paunches and wore black socks, whereas the real St. Marks Place dealers were lean and barefoot. Olitski thought it was absurd to police drug use on a street where it was so ubiquitous. “I said to them, ‘What are you going to do, arrest the whole street?’”
Olitski says the social revolutionaries were determined to bring about the end of the world, or at least to provoke serious showdowns. The people who ran the Bridge Theater downstairs from her apartment once asked if they could use her six-year-old son on stage for a show. She said sure. “He went down on stage and did whatever they did,” she says, “then he came back upstairs and went to bed.”
At eleven-thirty that night, the doorbell rang. It was the FBI. “They accused me of promoting anti-Americanism,” says Olitski. “I said I didn’t even know what had happened.” The agents informed her that with her son onstage, the performers had burned the American flag. Her response to the FBI: “Oh my God, they [the theater people] are idiots.”
Olitski says St. Marks Place made her children cynical. She, too, found it depressing as more and more people on the street overdosed. She recalls that more than one kid coming down off acid at the Valencia Hotel believed it was possible to fly off the roof. She started keeping a bulletin board on the wall of her store where worried parents and their runaway children could exchange notes. She tried to refer them to the mental health clinic at no. 70. But death was everywhere, even among the scene’s stars.
“She was tiny,” Olitski says of Janis Joplin. “Nobody thinks of her that way. You think she’s a [size] twelve. She was like a four or six. She had a ten-year-old boy’s body. One day she came by to get something. I was fitting something on her, and she felt like a rock—like stone. I said, ‘You feel hard.’ She said, ‘It’s the drugs.’ A week later she was dead. She went to California and that was it.”
Many of the few children who lived in the neighborhood walked around in bare, filthy feet. The Fenstens, an artist couple, lived with their two little girls at no. 7 from 1965 to 1967 and hung out with Joplin. During that period, their barebones apartment was robbed nine times. When their mother, who had worked as a waitress at the 1964–1965 World’s Fair, complained, the policeman told her he wouldn’t file charges unless she slept with him. Instead, the family fled for the relative civility of Spanish Harlem. “When I look at photographs of me and my sister in the St. Marks apartment,” Susan Fensten recalls, “I think, we’re cute, but so dirt broke it could be Appalachia.”
The Peñas, a Puerto Rican family, lived on the second floor of no. 11. The mother, Carmen, sat in the east window, watching her children play outside and keeping an eye on the fighting cock the family kept on the fire escape for fights they hosted in the basement. “Every morning it would crow at 6 a.m.,” recalls Paul Schneeman, who grew up at no. 29 and still lives there. A girl living across the street at no. 8, who had a crush on Paul’s little brother Emilio, sometimes saw dead roosters in Tompkins Square Park on her way to school. That girl, now New York Times lead film critic Manohla Dargis, had a sister named Trishka who spent so much time with the Peñas and other Hispanic neighbors that she developed an impeccable Puerto Rican accent. “Mami!” the little white girl would chirp. If they stayed up late enough, the girls could hear drunks singing “God Bless America” at McSorley’s last call.
When Dargis started attending the competitive Hunter High School uptown, she realized that not everyone lived the kind of bohemian life she and her neighbors did. “When I was twelve, I went to a birthday party in Forest Hills [an upper-middle-class neighborhood in the borough of Queens] and there was a maid in a uniform.” At a time when, for her, a pack of candy was decadent, this house had “a bowl of M&Ms on the table—a bowl of M&Ms.”
By 1968, the East Village had end-times fever. “It was like the San Francisco Summer of Love had moved east, but not so much love,” says Students for a Democratic Society’s Jeff Jones. In fights with police, bottles were thrown. After one particularly violent scuffle, someone said it looked as if blood were flowing out of the pavement of St. Marks Place.
The street began to attract the homeless, both the truly poor and the poor by choice. “There were sleeping bags lined up end to end,” says Carole Rosenthal. “There were bodies everywhere.” And the neighborhood had a creepy vibe. Rosenthal recalls two well-dressed, middle-aged Italian sisters with dyed-black hair who collected stray cats around St. Marks. “They would lure them into boxes,” says Rosenthal. “It took me a long time to figure out what they were doing. But once I was trying to get rid of kittens and put an ad in the Voice, all these medical students started calling me. I realized the sisters were more than likely selling the cats for vivisection.”
One by one, new rebels replaced the Night People. Young people who had read Norman Mailer’s Village Voice and answered Jean Shepherd’s call to gather at the Wanamaker Building for a “mill” were approaching middle age. The Beatniks’ bohemianism seemed quaint in the face of the new revolution: “Beneath the surface emaciation and phony glitter of St. Marks Place, hate, resentment, and alienation transform themselves into thrusts of liberating energy,” wrote an anarchist in the East Village zine Rat. Ernie Hurwitz of no. 51 met a teenage runaway who was living near Tompkins Square Park, and they fell in love. He decided it was time to leave the East Village for good, a decision he now regrets. “Probably the worst thing I ever said to anyone,” he says, “was, ‘Let me take you out of this neighborhood!’ But she was a queen, so we moved to Queens.” Squatters, drug dealers, and radicals continued their colonization.
One winter night in the late sixties, Kenneth Koch was doing a Poetry Project reading at St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery. A tall, skinny, scuzzy man—someone said he was a poet from Detroit—stood up, held out a handgun, yelled, “Koch!” and fired at him three times. The man was Alan Van Newkirk and the mastermind behind the attack was anarchist Ben Morea. To Morea and his Black Mask group, a Dada-inflected street gang that sought to destroy capitalism, Koch was a symbol of what Morea described as “this totally bourgeois, dandy world.”
Koch staggered back, waiting to be dead. Some people screamed, thinking he’d been murdered. But the bullets were blanks. Black Mask members rained down leaflets from the balcony where Peter Stuyvesant’s slaves once sat. The leaflets showed a photo of the poet LeRoi Jones—who by this point had converted to Islam; moved back to his hometown, Newark; and changed his name to Amiri Baraka—with the caption “Poetry is revolution.”
Once everyone realized what had happened, the reading resumed.
Weren’t people freaked out? Didn’t anyone call the police?
“Nah,” says one frequent Poetry Project attendee. “Back then that kind of thing happened all the time.”
“Reactions after the event were split,” Morea has said, “between people who thought it was the greatest thing they’d ever heard and those that thought we were a bunch of sophomoric assholes.” Black Mask was, in Morea’s words, “all about pushing people to decide, ‘Do I belong with this group of people or this one?’”
Black Mask would evolve into a group called Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers (also known, simply, as “The Motherfuckers”), named after a line in the Baraka poem “Black People!” The group handed out flyers on St. Marks Place—or, as they called it, “St. Marx,” an homage to Emma Goldman’s and Leon Trotsky’s Hail Marx Place.
According to Paul Krassner, “The Lower East Side Motherfuckers were an anarchist group who wore black until they got influenced by the hippies and started wearing beads. But they were black beads.” They fought incessantly with the police. “When a cop politely suggested [a Motherfucker named] Carole could find a more private place to breastfeed than the corner of Second Avenue and St. Marks Place,” Osha Neumann recalls, “she whipped out her tit and squirted him full in the chest with breast milk.”
The Motherfuckers claimed St. Marks Place between Second and Third Avenues as their turf. “It would take half an hour to walk that one block, we’d hand out so many copies of the newsletter,” recalls Jeff Jones. (Jones later decided that he wanted “more organization, strategy, and discipline—and less anarchy.” He went on to become a founder of Weatherman.)
One Motherfucker leaflet about Lower East Side outlaw life, written by Johnny Sundstrom, inspired the 1968 Jefferson Airplane song “We Can Be Together.” Their August 19, 1969, performance of the song on the Dick Cavett show marked one of the first uses of the word “motherfucker” on American television.
Some of the Motherfuckers ran a Free Store on Avenue A that from about 1967 to 1970 was an activist meeting spot. “We did such things as collect clothing, food, and we ran a mimeograph machine, and all of these were services to the runaway street people community,” says Sundstrom. “Tompkins Square Park was home to all kinds of people. There were always drum circles all day long. There was one group of guys that adopted us and who we allowed into our Free Store in the cold weather: the Wine Group for Freedom—black veterans, proud winos. They could have their meetings in our Free Store when it was cold outside. They’d pass wine and talk politics. They were quite politically astute. They were back from Vietnam and not going to buy into the system.”
One morning in late 1967, calling it “culture exchange,” the Motherfuckers and those they’d enlisted via flyers brought trash bags from the streets of the Lower East Side uptown on the subway and dumped them in the fountain at Lincoln Center. Just three years earlier, construction of the Center had leveled the Italian part of Hell’s Kitchen where one of the group’s members had grown up; the trash dump was payback.
Another time, the Motherfuckers released stink bombs at a Dada exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art, believing the artists would have appreciated the gesture. They also cut the fences at the Woodstock Festival in August 1969 so people could enter for free.
The Motherfuckers menaced the owners of East Side Books and other businesses, but they went full force against Bill Graham’s Fillmore East. Graham had made peace with the local Hell’s Angels, led by Sandy Alexander, after they had hit him with a tow chain while trying to fight their way in for free. But now the Motherfuckers showed up demanding a free night at the Fillmore once a week. In his own theater, recalls Joshua White, Graham stared down people chanting, “Music should be free!”
“What are you going to do to me with your berets and your fake military crap and your black leather jackets?” he asked the Motherfuckers. “If you want the music to be free, go liberate the Metropolitan Opera House.”
But the Motherfuckers had a specific reason for targeting the Fillmore: they were indignant that other people—fake people from foreign lands, such as California, New Jersey, or above Fourteenth Street—were profiting from their authentic countercultural lifestyle. There was some truth to that. The East Village’s reputation as the epicenter of hippie depravity brought tour buses full of normal-looking folks who gawked at the freaks.
“You’d see a bus pull up. I’d be out in front of the store in my bare feet, and I had long hair and a beard,” recalls Charles Fitzgerald. “I’d be sweeping the sidewalk and then someone on the bus would point out, ‘There’s one!’ And I’d make a face.”
Turning the tables, in 1968, artist Joey Skaggs arranged a “Hippie Bus Tour to Queens.” Sixty hippies boarded a rented Greyhound bus at St. Marks Place and Second Avenue, by Gem Spa, armed with cameras. On the way to Queens, they stopped at a White Castle for hamburgers and at a Howard Johnson’s for ice cream. On a random street in Queens, they snapped pictures of suburbanites mowing their lawns and reading the Sunday paper, and asked them lifestyle questions like, “Hey, what do you do at night around here?” The reply, from a grandmother on 181st Street: “Not much. We go to sleep early.”
But the Motherfuckers weren’t content with cheeky stunts like Skaggs’s bus tour.
“The Motherfuckers’ ideology,” says Sundstrom, “was that the reason [Graham] was thriving and people came from Long Island to go there [the Fillmore] was because it was in the cultural hub of the so-called hippie population and activity. Bill Graham was making money off the image created by the runaway street people, where ten to twelve people would live in crash pads in tenements and get busted. All those kids were the draw for his audiences to come down and stare at the hippies and be hippies for one night a week. So, we asked for one night a week to put on free concerts for that community. We were met with insane outbursts of resistance. It was a showdown.”
Some Motherfuckers attempted an alliance with a biker gang. “They wanted to take over the Lower East Side,” Sundstrom says of the bikers. “We said, ‘No way. You’ll just sell drugs and scare people. We represent the people already here.’ We made a truce in which we divided up the Lower East Side in terms of territory. One night some of us went into a meeting with them, no guns allowed. We told our people around the meeting area, ‘If we’re not out by 8 p.m., come in and get us.’ There were six of us—three from each side. We were having a great time, until we realized no one in the room had a watch.” Any second, the lookouts outside would get nervous and storm the place with guns. “We ran out into the street waving our arms, saying, ‘Don’t shoot!’”
Paul Krassner went along with an activist named Tom Motherfucker to negotiate a plan to get Bill Graham to hand over the keys to his theater. Graham said, “What do you want to do on those nights?” Tom Motherfucker replied, “Bomb! Shoot! Kill!” Krassner said, “He’s just kidding. They’re just going to raise money for the United Jewish Fund.”
Another time, Ben Morea held a sit-in on the Fillmore stage after a Living Theatre performance.
In the end, Graham decided he was fine with a free night. “Sure, if the bands will play for free, I’ll do it, sure,” he said, according to Joshua White. He quickly regretted it. Graham reported that on that first night, four or five hundred people showed up and wrecked the place: “They messed up the floor and peed on the walls and put their feet on the chairs and brought in their cooking utensils so it became like an overnight shelter for the homeless.”
Sundstrom would stand up with the microphone and call out, “It’s freeee night at the Fillmore! If you have something in your pocket, pass it around!” The group handed out free marijuana, featured bands like the antiestablishment Detroit rock band MC5 (best known today for “Kick Out the Jams”), and did goofy, ranting commercials for the revolution that offended just about everyone.
“I was an atheist, but when the Motherfuckers took the stage, they started criticizing all religions,” Krassner says. “I yelled, ‘There are Buddhist nuns and monks burning themselves! You have to judge people by what they do, not what they believe!’ The Motherfuckers were hard to deal with, because they had so much anger. They were the dark side of the antiwar movement.”
Ben Morea says the free nights ended because the NYPD wrote Graham about all the free dope. But Graham said they ended when the Motherfuckers broke the concession display case, at which point he also started to think seriously about getting out of New York altogether. Graham was secretly pleased when MC5, advertised as the “people’s revolutionary band,” discovered after a Fillmore gig at which they’d burned an American flag on stage that all their equipment had been stolen—“by the other people, I guess,” he quipped.
In 1968, a young actress moved to New York. Having been raised mostly in Texas by overbearing parents, she couldn’t get over the freedom and delights that New York City offered. She walked into a deli in the Village and, pointing to a sign in the window that read “Coffee Rice and Beans,” enthusiastically said, “One pound of coffee rice, please!” The man behind the counter laughed her out of the store.
For her day job, she worked as a receptionist at the famous Kenneth Salon. On June 3, Warhol superstar Viva was at the salon getting her hair done in preparation for a role in Midnight Cowboy and talking on the salon’s phone to director Paul Morrissey. Viva was treating the salon to a running commentary of her conversation. When Morrissey left to use the bathroom, he put Warhol on the phone in his place. “Andy says that bitch Valerie just walked in,” the receptionist recalls Viva announcing.
Radical feminist and friend of Ben Morea Valerie Solanas had been hanging around Warhol’s Factory, although she made people there nervous. “Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women,” Solanas wrote in her SCUM Manifesto, “there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex.”
In the salon, Viva held out the phone receiver. Those assembled heard crack, crack, crack. “Listen,” Viva said to the people around her at the salon, “they’re playing with that bull whip I brought back from South America.”
In fact, Solanas had shot Warhol and art critic Mario Amaya. Warhol lay bleeding on the floor of the Factory until the ambulance came; he reached the hospital clinically dead. Doctors opened his chest and massaged his heart, then performed five and a half hours of surgery. Solanas surrendered herself to a cop near the Factory, saying that she’d shot Warhol because he had been exerting too much control over her life. Warhol survived, but he was never the same. And this wasn’t the only major shooting that year—not by any means.
The same year, Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated. “That was when the country moved from ‘We shall overcome’ to black power,” recalls Nell Gibson, a black parishioner at St. Mark’s Church. As a radical activist, she was not surprised when she picked up her phone and heard the clicks of phone taps, or when the police came to the door asking to search her apartment. According to parishioners, there were often “phone company workers” asking to do “routine maintenance” in and around the Church; sure they were FBI agents, Church workers denied them entry.
That year, Bill Graham saw a young black man punch a young white one in front of his San Francisco club for what seemed like no reason. “Why’d you hit that guy?” Graham asked the attacker. “He killed my brother, man,” the young man said. “He killed Martin Luther King. All you white bastard motherfuckers. You killed Martin Luther, man.”
Law enforcement targeted St. Marks Place. Detectives monitored stores like East Side Books (no. 34), which sold underground comics like the explicit Zap Comix (featuring characters such as Captain Piss-Gums and his Pervert Pirates). A nationwide crackdown on lurid comic books in the fifties had resulted in the relative sanitization of the medium for children. But the sixties saw a surge in next-level perverse comics for adults. The bookstore was raided the same day as at least two other lefty bookstores, including City Lights in San Francisco, for selling Zap Comix no. 4—August 25, 1969.
In Zap no. 4, page after page of cartoon orgies give way to a strip about a father and mother who rape their daughter and son, then celebrate when the son and daughter have sex with each other. One line: “The family that lays together, stays together.” On other pages, a girl persuades a cow to perform oral sex on her by covering her vulva with salt, and beasts with multiple penises ejaculate profusely. It’s about as lurid as anyone could imagine, which was more or less the point.
“I was not even really at work that day,” recalls then–East Side Books employee Terry McCoy. “I hadn’t sold it to the undercover cop. It was a Wednesday and I stopped in to get the Village Voice. This bearded guy pushed the door open aggressively and said, ‘Okay, this place is closed down!’ I thought he was a street guy. I instinctively blocked the entrance. ‘Hey, buddy,’ I said, trying to calm him down and get him outside, ‘what’s the problem?’ He said, ‘You work here?’ I said, ‘Yes,’ and he said, ‘You’re under arrest.’”
McCoy and another employee were taken over to the Ninth Precinct and then to the Tombs. The owner of the store, Jim Rose, showed up in a huff, McCoy recalls, saying to the police, “See here, now!” They threw him in jail, too.
In San Francisco, the lawyer defending City Lights had employed celebrity expert witnesses, so Allen Ginsberg offered to testify on behalf of East Side Books. But the New York lawyer tried another tack and argued that bookstore employees couldn’t be expected to know what was inside every book they sold.
The judge was not persuaded. The Court decided: “It is material utterly unredeemed and unredeemable, save, perhaps, only by the quality of the paper upon which it is printed. . . . It is what Dr. Benjamin Spock characterizes as ‘shock-obscenity,’ representing a brutalizing trend in our society.” In the end, McCoy got off on a technicality and the charges against Jim Rose were dropped, but Peter Dargis (Manohla Dargis’s father) was convicted of promoting obscenity and fined five hundred dollars.
In this late hippie period, a black steel cube sculpture, eight feet long on each side, tilted on one point on which it could rotate like a playground roundabout, appeared on a traffic island in the center of Astor Place. Installed in 1967, Tony Rosenthal’s sculpture Alamo became a meeting place where new waves of young and damaged free spirits could smoke pot and make out. The heavy black cube offered a nicely ominous backdrop as the sixties’ playful creativity was beginning to yield to the seventies’ debauchery and rage.
The young people of the early seventies Village soon made their way into fiction. In James Leo Herlihy’s 1971 novel Season of the Witch, set in part on St. Marks Place, one of the main characters is a teenage draft-dodger who has renamed himself Roy. Roy is mugged but won’t turn in his muggers. He feels more allegiance to them than to the police, and he says to his friend, who calls herself Witch, “Witch, you know what I really hate about this revolution? It makes you think about sides. You always have to think about which one you’re on.”
In Harold Franklin’s 1970 novel Run a Twisted Street, a teenager named Freeman runs away after learning that he was adopted and winds up crashing at 35 St. Marks Place. He’s the anti–Horatio Alger character: lazy, aimless, and unlucky. A charismatic pseudo-cult leader named Gee takes “Freem” under his wing, and while they walk around Tompkins Square Park says things like, “You scream ‘murder,’ get my attention, and you still need to hug your pain to you like a money belt.”
A late sixties change in the drug culture—from pot and acid to cocaine and heroin—changed the street’s vibe. “Everyone thought cocaine was amazing,” says Joshua White. “The tragedy of cocaine was not clear for many years. When you came down off it, you were mean.”
“I saw kids who were sweet acid-heads in 1969 drop out,” writes the professor and historian Marshall Berman, “and come back as angry, snarling junkies panhandling on St. Marks Place in 1971.”
On March 6, 1970, the Weather Underground’s headquarters on West Eleventh Street was destroyed when a bomb went off by accident. On March 22, 1970, another bomb exploded on the dance floor of the Electric Circus, injuring seventeen people. Former owner Jerry Brandt claims he’s not sure whether it was “a stink bomb or a bomb-bomb,” but when asked if the rumor that it was planted by the Black Panthers was true he says, “I doubt it, but you can say that if you want. It’s good press.”*
No matter the nature of the explosion, the Circus was already losing its cachet. Jerry Brandt’s partners redesigned the space, and Joshua White says it “completely lost its spirit. They were very precious. It’s a lovely idea to put AstroTurf on the walls. It’s kind of groovy. But when people spill Coca-Cola on it, which they do, it is disgusting.”
Downstairs, the Dom had become a hangout for the Negro Ensemble Company, which performed around the corner, and for college students from Harlem. The white upstairs crowd and the black downstairs crowd rarely mixed.
On Christmas 1969, a West Point cadet and reporter named Lucian Truscott IV went to a free event at the Circus and wrote it up for the Village Voice. He documents a series of unsuccessful hippie moments, interrupted by, for example, a cry of “Up Against the Wall Motherfucker!” during an activity in which everyone was to tell one another “Merry Christmas.” A geodesic dome was constructed in the space to promote “‘dome consciousness, togetherness, love’ and the like.” Straw was placed in the dome’s center and babies were placed on the straw. The group was to “zap” them with love. But two men took all their clothes off, freaking out some of the parents.
The scene at Dom dance hall at no. 23, July 13, 1967. Photo by Larry C. Morris/New York Times.
“One infant showed up, cradled in the arms of a somewhat frightened looking mother, who sat as directed in the hay where she was immediately surrounded by other ‘infants’ who averaged about seven to 10 years old and came equipped with every undesirable and obnoxious trait of that age,” Truscott wrote. One of the organizers asked that a spotlight be put on the children. Big mistake. “Violation one in dealing with the brats that age: never put them in the center of attention. Hay began to fly, most of it directed at the two naked men, who threw it back, much of it going past the kids and landing on the now irate mother of the infant.”
After Truscott’s story ran, it was clear that the Electric Circus had become a joke. St. Marks Place’s love-zapping days were over.
Stanley Tolkin, meanwhile, had used some of the money he’d made from the Dom to buy an old motorboat. Each night after they closed the bar, Tolkin and Joyce Hartwell would take the boat out into the dark stillness of the East River and drift until dawn. One night in 1968, Tolkin accidentally set a fire while trying to make coffee on board. “He was concerned we would all be killed,” recalls Hartwell. “He put out the fire with his hands. The Coast Guard had to come to get us. When the two boats pulled next to each other, he grabbed a chain with his raw hands.”
His hands were slow to heal, and that wasn’t his only health issue. He also had a weak heart. Not long after the boat fire, the couple was at home when Tolkin suffered a full-blown heart attack. “Where’s your medicine?” Hartwell remembers screaming at him. He died in her arms.
Tolkin’s son tried to keep the Dom going, but without his father, the space couldn’t sustain the warm, open vibe that had drawn both the creative class and students. Hartwell notes that she wasn’t particularly popular with Stanley’s son, as she had been Tolkin’s mistress, and so she stayed away. In the summer of 1974, an announcement was made that the Dom, now all but deserted, would briefly become, of all things, a country-Western bar with sawdust floors called The Cow Palace.
The Electric Circus closed in August 1971. One of the last shows featured Iggy Pop covered in glitter. Johnny Ramone was in the audience with a tape recorder. The Fillmore East closed the same year. Joshua White recalls that the beginning of the end was when “someone died at a Vanilla Fudge concert from inhaling too much Whippets from a whipped cream canister.” Bill Graham’s personal assistant desperately tried to revive the short-haired, twenty-one-year-old man, but he expired in the back of the theater.
That summer, the Truscott reassessed St. Marks Place and found that it had changed “from a hippie haven to Desolation Row.” He encountered a group of four young men sitting in front of no. 26 passing around a switchblade. John, “the dirtiest of the group,” wearing “dirty Levi’s and a vest festooned with bits of leather, seashells, and long curls of human hair,” went over to Gem Spa to accost passersby with “whatever scrap of mindless hustle his fizzled-out brain could muster.” St. Marks Place had ceased to be original and surprising. The clothing store Limbo had moved from no. 24 to no. 4, and wearing the clothes it sold now provoked a sneering “I bet that came from Limbo,” rather than a wide-eyed “Where did you get that?”
“The street had its finest hour during the days of the Balloon Farm and the Five Spot,” wrote Truscott, “before a massive influx of boutiques, antique fur stores, hairdressing shops, and pizza and ice cream beaneries turned the block into a limp Times Square. Back then, the street had a fleeting sense of glamor and importance.” Truscott says that the end of St. Marks Place as a destination was imminent. “Residents of the area, in fact, give St. Mark’s Place a couple of years. Outside estimates say five.”
Meanwhile, tension was growing within the civil rights movement. James Forman was among the black activists shifting the movement away from the pacifism of Martin Luther King, Jr. Forman, who had been threatened with lynching at the age of eight while growing up with his impoverished grandparents in Mississippi, was tired of being told to take the high road. “If we can’t sit at the table of democracy,” he said, “then we’ll knock the fucking legs off.”
That more extreme approach appealed to a lot of St. Marks Place’s heroes, including Amiri Baraka. In an essay about the assassination of Malcolm X, Baraka wrote, “Black people must have absolute political and social control.” He advocated for a sovereign Black Nation with its own laws. “And there is only one people on the planet who can slay the white man,” he wrote. “The people who know him best. His ex-slaves.”
In April 1969, at the National Black Economic Development Conference in Detroit, Forman outlined a manifesto for eliminating racism by means of “an armed confrontation and long years of guerilla warfare inside this country” and by “assuming leadership inside the United States of everything that exists . . . total control of the U.S.” As a start, Forman demanded “$500,000,000 from the Christian white churches and the Jewish synagogues.” One item on the manifesto’s budget was thirty million dollars for “a research skills center, which will provide futuristic research on the problems of Black people.” In May 1969, Forman brought his demands to Riverside Church in Manhattan, where he interrupted services to make the case for reparations. Several parishioners at St. Mark’s Church took Forman’s words to heart.
On the morning of Sunday, October 5, 1969, in the middle of Father Michael Allen’s service, a group of six black and Latino parishioners rose from their seats. For weeks, Allen had suspected that his secretary, Nell Gibson, and his newly appointed assistant minister, David Garcia, just out of divinity school, had been up to something, but until that moment he didn’t know what it was. Now he would find out.
John Clarke, who had grown up in the parish, announced that those who were standing were called the Black and Brown Caucus, and that they had a list of demands, including thirty thousand dollars as “reparations” and the replacement of the American flag at the front of the church with the Black Nationalist flag. Demand number three: “That the whites of this parish cease and desist this WASP service, conceived solely by whites to help themselves over their white middle class hang ups.” Number six: “That the words, ‘Go, serve the lord you are free,’ be immediately deleted from the service, because we are not free.” Number seven suggested replacing that phrase with “Power to the people.”
The Caucus protesters had practiced their presentation and prepared for various reactions. They expected Allen to reject their demands, and they thought it possible that parishioners would also attack them physically, at which point they were prepared to resist. Nell Gibson, who still attends services at St. Mark’s Church, says that her fellow Caucus members had sensed weakness in her because she cared about Allen. They’d made her swear that if it came to an armed conflict, she would be prepared to kill him. Seven months pregnant at the time, she’d taken an oath before them, promising to do whatever it took, even that. “For me it came down to Michael or the future of my unborn child,” she said.
But violence proved unnecessary. Allen waited a beat and then followed the Caucus out of the church. “That was a hard moment,” says Allen. “I had heard men and women whom I loved, and who had loved me, judge me, judge us all. And I wondered what I should do. . . . I followed the blacks and the browns, because to do anything else would have denied everything I had lived and believed for ten precious years of my life.”
In fact, the congregation overall reacted far more positively than the Caucus had anticipated. One white woman came up to Nell Gibson outside the church holding the American flag. “I took it down,” she said. “What do we do next?”
Father Tom Pike says he wasn’t there that Sunday, but that he heard about it from an elderly white lady named Mrs. Morton, the wife of a former warden. “Sunday was wonderful!” she told him. “Michael got up to preach and David stood up and said, ‘I’m not sitting for this!’ and everyone walked out! What a marvelous little play!”
Soon, though, Mrs. Morton and her friends realized that it was no play. In a letter dated October 6, 1969, Allen wrote to ask members of the vestry to step down to make way for Caucus members (the Caucus’s list of demands included four spots on the vestry). “Please consider that the nature of every crisis is to stretch the imagination, the dignity, and the freedom of men to the utmost—and then leave them the better or worse for it,” Allen wrote. “I think we could be better.” He authorized a check for thirty thousand dollars (about two hundred thousand dollars today), payable to the Caucus.
The group’s members worked with the Black Panthers to form a prison law library that became a model for such libraries around the country. The service changed as well. Soon, the liturgy emphasized, in Gibson’s words, “the strong sitting with the weak.”
The Gibsons say it took months of hard conversations to sort through what had happened. The theme of that year’s Lent was finding ways to come back together as a congregation. “We made public confessions,” says Gibson. “I had to tell Michael that I had been prepared to kill him.” Reconciliation began, she says, when Allen baptized the Gibsons’ son, Bertram Maxwell III, a few months later and took on the role of his godfather.
“Little black baby,” Allen said in that ceremony, “we’re going to baptize you now. We’re going to bury you in your grave like the people Israel were buried in the water. . . . We’re going to let you die now so you can begin to live.” Turning now to the congregation, he said, “You could teach him, if you believed it yourself, that at the center of this universe there is justice, there is love, there is dignity.”
“Our three-month-old baby was the only person in the church not crying,” Gibson says.
Allen went even further in his efforts to bring about racial reconciliation. In June 1970, he left St. Mark’s Church, taking a position at New Haven’s Berkeley Divinity School. Before he left, he recommended to the bishop that David Garcia be made the next rector of St. Mark’s Church.
In some ways, Garcia and Allen were similar. A half-Mexican, half-white son of a strict, strategic air command officer, Garcia had grown up struggling with his racial identity and rebelling against those in authority. And yet, in other ways Garcia and Allen were polar opposites. Where Allen was patient and a famously good listener, Garcia was irascible and prone to filibustering. Where Allen wanted to appeal to the better angels of the community’s nature, Garcia wanted to wage war until justice as he saw it was done.
“Mike was a wonderful, radical guy,” says former assistant rector Pike, “but he was also an old white WASP. David’s takeover was personal. It was a mixture of ideology and emotions. It was racial and it was Oedipal.”
Garcia won the day, but the church he inherited was not what it had been. Around the time of the October Sunday revolt, two hundred people regularly attended services. When Garcia took over the pulpit, just a few months later, there were approximately twelve.
In 2013, after a coffee at Grand Central Terminal, Garcia stopped in the hallway. As commuters streamed around him, he said, “You know, Michael could have been bishop. But he’s a tragic figure. A great tragedy. The Episcopal Church said to him, ‘You help those spics, niggers, and lesbians, and we’ll never forgive you.’ But he can die complete, because he did the right thing. He is a great man.”
Garcia’s words were an unexpected eulogy. On September 4, 2013, a week after that conversation, Father Michael Allen died in St. Louis, Missouri, at the age of eighty-five, less than a month after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and just six months after the death of the Rev. Priscilla Allen, his wife of sixty-three years.
During his post–St. Mark’s time as rector of St. Louis’s Christ Church, Allen had turned the cathedral basement into a homeless shelter, fought for abortion rights, and conducted outreach to recruit transgender parishioners. He retired in 1998, but continued to act as a substitute preacher at various churches. In one of his last sermons, he spoke on prophecy in Ezekiel. Later that day, he said that he’d been thinking a lot about St. Mark’s: “What I was trying to do there,” he said, “was make it possible for these prophetic voices to be heard or seen.” He hoped his legacy would be an example of acting through love rather than fear. “All the world religions, the great ones,” he said, “agree that at the heart of that which is transcendent, that which is holy, is compassion. And compassion is the heart of what holiness means.”
On a rainy day in October 1974, a couple came to Father David Garcia to see about getting married. He was a poet and she was an actress. They’d been living together on St. Marks Place for a year, and while lying in bed sick from the flu had decided that they should go ahead and make it legal.
Garcia asked them about their “sexual menu” and enthusiastically handed them examples of the modern-language vows he preferred. One line read, “My body worships your body.”
“We’d just like the Book of Common Prayer,” the man said.
“Are you sure?” Garcia said. “What about these?” He proffered mimeographs of vows promising marriages of friendship, social awareness, and world peace.
“No, thank you,” the woman said.
Garcia hesitated.
“The first time I was married,” the man explained, “I laughed through the ceremony and then cried for five years. This time I want to be scared.”
Bishop Paul Moore, unknown child, poet Anne Waldman, Rector David Garcia, and Stephen Facey in St. Mark’s Church’s yard, summer 1978. Collection of St. Mark’s Church. Reprinted with permission of St. Mark’s Church and Stephen Facey.
Garcia had to hunt for the book. It was the first time he had performed the traditional liturgy, he said. (Unbeknownst to the couple, Father Michael Allen had recruited the young priest right out of divinity school, and rather than apprentice himself to scripture, Garcia had staged a revolution.)
The wedding was beautiful, by all reports, although some said that Father Garcia’s hands shook throughout the ceremony, especially when the text referred to “the dreadful day of judgment, when the secrets of all hearts shall be revealed.” The woman wondered in retrospect if her cute brown suit didn’t make her look rather like an airline stewardess. For the party that followed, they miscounted the number of bottles per case of champagne and ended up with more than one bottle per person, all of which vanished. Calls came in the next morning from gay men waking up next to straight girls.
That couple—Peter Schjeldahl, the art critic who had witnessed the fake shooting of Kenneth Koch, and Brooke Alderson, the actress who had heard the crack-crack-crack through the phone receiver at Kenneth Salon when Andy Warhol was shot—lived together in a four-flight walk-up at no. 53. The three-bedroom co-op apartment, not far from the former site of Nicholas W. Stuyvesant’s Bowery House, cost two hundred dollars a month. They lost touch with friends at the Poetry Project. He worked as an editor at Art in America. She began acting in TV commercials and theater. In two years they would have a daughter—me. Everyone had been so sure the world was going to end in the late sixties that when it didn’t, no one quite knew what to do with themselves. “We woke up in a time that wasn’t supposed to happen,” Schjeldahl says. “The good news was we were still here. Everything else was weird.”
* The man has a memoir to sell: It’s a Short Walk From Brooklyn, If You Run: A Conversation with Jerry Brandt.
