An arts scene before a youth scene
New York in 1967 had a counterculture, but it was built differently from San Francisco’s. Where the Haight was a neighbourhood scene that became a national story in one season, New York’s rebellion was largely an arts movement that had been developing since the late 1950s and drew on theatre, painting, film and poetry already established in Greenwich Village and the Lower East Side. By 1967 it overlapped with the hippie scene of the East Village, which is covered separately, but its roots and priorities were different: it was about making new kinds of art as much as about changing how people lived.
Off-Off-Broadway theatre
The term Off-Off-Broadway theatre came into use for small, low-budget productions staged in cafes, churches, lofts and basements, outside the commercial circuit of Broadway and even the established Off-Broadway houses. A few places became landmarks. Caffe Cino, run by Joe Cino in Greenwich Village, gave early stagings to young playwrights, and Cino died in 1967, after which the cafe did not last long. La MaMa, founded by Ellen Stewart in the early 1960s, became one of the most durable experimental venues and went on to host work from around the world. The Judson Memorial Church sheltered both a poets’ theatre and experimental dance.
The Open Theater under Joseph Chaikin worked on ensemble methods rather than conventional scripts, and its associated writers produced pieces responding to the war in Vietnam. Many of these productions ran for a few weeks to small audiences and left few records, which is why the period is easy to underestimate.
In October 1967 the Public Theater in the East Village staged a new musical about long-haired young people, which later moved to Broadway; that story belongs with the Hair musical and its own article. It is a good example of how the underground fed the mainstream within a short time.
The Living Theatre in exile
The Living Theatre was founded in 1947 by Julian Beck and Judith Malina and became known for confrontational, communal productions, including The Brig in 1963. After a dispute with tax authorities the company lost its New York theatre, and in 1964 the group left for Europe, where it toured for years. In 1967 it was therefore working abroad, not in New York. The company returned to the United States in 1968. Its influence on American experimental theatre was strong all the same, because its methods and reputation circulated through the younger companies that stayed.
The Warhol circle
Andy Warhol’s studio, the Factory, was the centre of a mixed group of artists, performers, musicians and hangers-on. In 1966 Warhol had presented multimedia shows with the Velvet Underground, combining films, lights and live music under the name Exploding Plastic Inevitable. The group’s debut album, produced with Warhol’s involvement and featuring the singer Nico, appeared in 1967. Sales were modest at the time, and the record’s later reputation grew with the years.
Warhol’s films were part of the wider underground film movement, which screened in small cinemas and galleries and tested censorship limits. His circle also overlapped with the world of psychedelic light shows, which were becoming a standard feature of rock performances in both New York and California. The Factory was a place of creative energy and also of personal troubles, and the picture of a carefree artistic family is probably too tidy.
The Electric Circus
The Electric Circus opened on St. Marks Place in 1967 in a building that had previously held another nightclub associated with Warhol’s earlier shows. It offered a mix of rock bands, strobe lighting, projected films and performers such as acrobats, and it was marketed to a mixed crowd that included curious tourists as well as East Village regulars. Some members of the local scene regarded it as a polished, commercial version of the more spontaneous events elsewhere, an early sign of how quickly the underground was being packaged.
How it differed from the West Coast
Several differences are worth keeping in mind:
- New York’s scene was spread across the Village, the Lower East Side and Midtown rather than concentrated in one neighbourhood.
- It had more professional artists and fewer visiting teenagers, though the summer of 1967 brought plenty of those to the East Village.
- Its politics ran closer to the antiwar movement and to avant-garde ideas about performance than to the Haight’s mixture of mysticism and communal living.
These contrasts help explain why historians often treat New York’s underground as a parallel story rather than a copy of San Francisco. By the end of the year, commercial interests had begun to notice both, and the next few years saw many experimental ideas move into mainstream theatre, film and music.