A different summer
Like Los Angeles and Chicago, New York did not have a “Summer of Love” in the sense of the San Francisco label, but in 1967 it had a hippie summer of its own, centred on the East Village. This was a stretch of the Lower East Side east of Greenwich Village, a poor neighbourhood historically home to successive immigrant groups, including Ukrainian, Polish, Jewish and Puerto Rican residents. Cheap rents and nearby artists made it a natural destination for young newcomers in the mid-1960s. The name “East Village” was itself a mark of change, because it was adopted partly to distance the area from the old Lower East Side image.
The arts side of New York’s counterculture, including experimental theatre and the Warhol circle, is covered in a separate article. This one focuses on the street scene.
Tompkins Square Park
Tompkins Square Park was the neighbourhood’s central open space, and in 1967 it became a gathering point for young people who played music, sat on the grass and slept outdoors in warm weather. Residents of long standing used it as well, and this mix produced both friendly contact and friction. The park would remain a place of conflict between authorities and the homeless and young for decades, but in 1967 its role was largely as the district’s town square. Shops and cafes along nearby St. Marks Place sold posters, clothes and records, and the area’s own newspaper, the East Village Other, one of the early titles in the underground press, had begun publishing in 1965.
The Central Park Be-In
On Easter Sunday, 26 March 1967, a large gathering took place in Central Park’s Sheep Meadow, known as the Central Park Be-In. It drew thousands of people, with estimates often put around 10,000 or more, who came to sing, play instruments, fly kites and hand out flowers. It was widely covered by the press and was one of the first major hippie events in the city. The event was modelled on the San Francisco Human Be-In from January, and it showed that the mood was spreading across the country. Easter was a convenient date because many people had a holiday.
The Fugs and local performers
The Fugs, a band formed on the Lower East Side in 1964 by poet and publisher Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg, mixed satire, rock and protest in songs with sexual and political content. Sanders ran a bookstore called the Peace Eye, and the group became a symbol of East Village irreverence. In October 1967 the Fugs took part with Allen Ginsberg and others in a mock exorcism of the Pentagon during the national antiwar march. Other local music clubs and the nearby Village venues drew on the same community. The sound of New York’s scene was often rougher and more political than San Francisco’s, and bands like the Velvet Underground represented a very different attitude from the Haight’s optimism.
Runaways and hardship
By midsummer, reports described large numbers of teenagers, some of them runaways, arriving in the East Village. Like the Haight, the district had few resources to house or feed them. Young people slept in doorways, parks and crowded flats, and a number of them used drugs. Social workers and community volunteers tried to help, and groups including local churches offered meals, but the need exceeded the supply.
The most widely reported tragedy of the summer came in October 1967, when two young people, Linda Fitzpatrick, an 18-year-old from a wealthy Connecticut family, and James Hutchinson, a local man known as “Groovy”, were found dead in a basement on the Lower East Side. Newspapers treated the deaths as proof that the hippie dream was dangerous. The case became a symbol, in the press, of the risks facing young runaways, though the underlying problem was a long-standing one.
Relations with the neighbourhood
Long-term residents had mixed reactions. Some resented the newcomers for raising rents, crowding streets and bringing outside attention. Others welcomed new customers or were interested in the music and art. The summer of 1967 was also a tense period in the city’s poorer districts. Elsewhere in the country the “long hot summer” saw riots, including the Newark riot in July, and in New York there were disturbances in East Harlem. The differences between the hippie neighbourhood and its poorer, mostly Black and Puerto Rican, neighbours were a visible part of the social landscape.
Assessment
New York’s hippie summer was smaller and less organised than San Francisco’s, and it lacked a unifying name or a single set of institutions like the Haight’s. Much of the media attention treated it as a variation on the West Coast story. It left a record in music, underground journalism and local memory, and its difficulties, particularly the vulnerability of young runaways, were similar to those facing other cities at the same time.