Tomorrow-Land (13 page)

13.

The time has come for Americans of all races and creeds and political beliefs to understand and to respect one another. So let us put an end to the teaching and the preaching of hate and evil and violence.

—President Lyndon B. Johnson, November 27, 1963

 

For four days the entire nation was riveted to their televisions; the only news transmitted over the airwaves was coverage about President Kennedy and his funeral. On Sunday, November 24, just two days after the president's murder, his alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was shot dead by shady Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby while in police custody and in full view of live television news cameras.

Anyone watching that Sunday morning—young or old—witnessed another mysterious assassination unfolding in real time, another unprecedented shock to America's collective psyche, just one in a series of indelible, tragic images over those four days that would haunt the country for decades to come: the grief-stricken First Lady, her delicate features covered in a black veil; the president's seven-year-old daughter, Caroline, kneeling with her mother at her father's casket as it lay in state in the Capitol; and her little brother, John F. Kennedy Jr.—who turned three on the day of the president's funeral—saluting the coffin carrying the father he would barely remember. “It just didn't seem like America this weekend,” one New Yorker complained to the
Times
.

Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson took the Oath of Office aboard Air Force One as it sat on the runway at the Dallas airport just hours after Kennedy's murder. A shell-shocked Jacqueline Kennedy looked on at the untimely and succinct transition of power. She was still wearing her wool Chanel strawberry pink dress, splattered with her husband's blood. “One leg was almost entirely covered with [blood] and her right glove was caked—that immaculate woman—it was caked with blood,” remembered the new First Lady, Lady Bird Johnson, who comforted her predecessor in the back of the airplane. “And that was
somehow one of the most poignant sights . . . exquisitely dressed, and caked in blood.” But when Mrs. Kennedy was asked if she wanted to change into new clothes, she refused. “I want them to see what they've done to Jack,” she said with a fierce determination.

Two days after the funeral, the new president addressed Congress and the nation. Three years earlier, during his inaugural address, Kennedy had told the country, “Let us begin”; now here was Johnson, America's new and unelected president, offering a grieving nation the new refrain: “Let us continue.” Then Johnson declared how “no memorial, oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy's memory than the earliest possible passage of the civil rights bill for which he fought so long. . . . We have talked long enough in this country about equal rights. We have talked for one hundred years or more. It is time now to write the next chapter, and to write it in the books of law.”

If the leaders and members of the civil rights movement were suddenly dumbstruck as they watched Johnson's speech at home that Thanksgiving Eve, suddenly perplexed at the sight of the Texan, they could be forgiven. Every black man or woman who had suffered the savagery of attack dogs, fire hoses, and beatings or endured jail for seeking their constitutional rights had plenty of reasons to distrust the new president. As a congressman and then US senator, Johnson had either failed to support or, when he became the Senate Majority Leader, personally gutted civil rights legislation—as he did in 1957 and 1960. Yet there he was, the one-time protégé of segregationist senator Richard B. Russell of Georgia, architect of the Southern Manifesto (which Johnson never signed), picking up the fallen standard of Kennedy and throwing his thirty-two years of political muscle behind the civil rights movement, just as he had promised two of Kennedy's closet aides, Kenneth O'Donnell and Larry O'Brien, he would aboard Air Force One shortly before he took the Oath of Office.

While America's political equilibrium twisted on its axis, letters requesting that Robert Moses do something dramatic to honor the fallen president who had supported the World's Fair began arriving at Flushing Meadow within days of the funeral. One writer suggested that
Moses erect a John F. Kennedy Pavilion; another man, from Forest Hills, Queens, sent Moses a letter, enclosed with five dollars, suggesting the Master Builder ask all Americans to donate one dollar each to erect a suitable memorial. Moses promptly sent the money back, suggesting that a more appropriate honor would be to name the new National Arts Center then being planned for the banks of the Potomac—designed by Moses associate Edward Durrell Stone—after Kennedy. Moses also supported the renaming of Idlewild Airport in southern Queens to John F. Kennedy International Airport, as some New York City officials had already suggested.

The Master Builder wasted no time in attempting to win the new president's support for his World's Fair. On December 5 he sent a formal invitation to President Johnson requesting the thirty-sixth President of the United States deliver the keynote address on opening day, just as Kennedy had promised to do. It would be months before Moses would receive an answer, unfortunately, leaving his opening day plans in limbo.

Meanwhile, as the World's Fair drew closer, preparations of another kind were under way in New York City. Authorities there had begun a coordinated campaign to “clean up” the Fair's host city in anticipation of the millions of tourists that were expected to flood Gotham over the next two years. After all, the mayor and other officials were hoping that Moses' exhibition would inflate municipal coffers by millions of dollars. They wanted to be certain nothing—or no one—the tourists encountered would offend them. One of the primary targets of the campaign were the denizens of lower Manhattan, particularly the more bohemian elements of its flourishing art scene.

While Greenwich Village and its adjacent district, the West Village, had been an area populated by artists, writers, and bohemians of every kind since the mid-nineteenth century, its burgeoning populations expanded in the postwar years to the tenement buildings east of Broadway. This area of expansion, which roughly stretched from 14th Street (exactly where Moses' Stuyvesant Town towers began) to Houston Street and from Broadway to Avenue D, had once been the domain of generations of immigrant families seeking the American Dream.
Hailing from some of the Continent's poorest locales—including Sicily, Poland, and the Ukraine—these immigrants settled on what was known as Manhattan's East Side, bringing their food, culture, and artisan skills to the New World and, in the process, creating a dynamic neighborhood with a Europeanlike feel.

When their children grew up and married, many fled their former tenement homes and headed further east, for houses in the less crowded districts of Queens and the burgeoning suburbs of Long Island—now readily accessible thanks to the expressways, parkways, and bridges that Moses had been building for decades. In their wake, artists, poets, filmmakers, and assorted scenesters repopulated the former East Side apartments, transforming the neighborhood into a bohemian enclave that would eventually be known as the East Village.

It was only fitting that downtown Manhattan should come under attack by city authorities as Moses entered the final stages of World's Fair preparation. Moses had been trying, in one way or another, to raze various downtown areas or reshape their streets to fit his own master plan. But Greenwich Village was in many ways a fortress that Moses could not penetrate: Time and again he was stopped by the activists and artists, bohemians and intelligentsia, who, led by writer Jane Jacobs, illustrated that there were indeed limits to the Master Builder's supposedly unlimited power. (In 1962 while working on the World's Fair, Moses had one of his staffers investigate Jacobs, in an attempt to dig up anything he could use against her.)

Jacobs repeatedly foiled Moses' plans to slice the historic Washington Square Park in two; she fought him when he declared a large portion of the West Village—including her home on Hudson Street—a slum area; and in 1962, perhaps most painfully to Moses, she led the charge to finally kill his proposed Lower Manhattan Expressway, an elevated ten-lane highway that would have stretched from south Manhattan, slicing through historic neighborhoods like Chinatown, Little Italy, SoHo (then called the Cast-Iron District for its distinct facades), and Greenwich Village. This last crusade earned the attention and support of Bob Dylan. He wrote a song about the downtown streets he loved and
offered it to the activists as a
cri de guerre
. “It had a lot of street names in it that we sang at rallies,” Jacobs later remembered.

By the early 1960s, as surely as Moses was transforming Flushing Meadow into the World's Fair, a wide range of artists were transforming the East Village into an important outpost of the great cultural shift that had begun to take root in America—from Julian Beck and Judith Malina's Living Theatre; to the Peace Eye Store on East 10th Street, owned and operated by poet/activist Ed Sanders; to the cutting-edge underground cinema of filmmakers Jack Smith and Kenneth Anger, which were shown at various downtown venues by Lithuanian-born poet/critic Jonas Mekas, who created the Film-Makers' Cooperative. Alongside these underground artists flourished nationally known talents like comedian Lenny Bruce, part of the new generation of “sick comics,” who never heard of a sacred cow that he didn't want to slay, and who, when he wasn't making the rounds on television, was busy filling Greenwich Village coffeehouses. And just on the other side of Washington Square Park was Dylan's West Village apartment.

If anyone sold the idea of living in downtown Manhattan to millions of disaffected youths who had never even been to New York, it was probably Dylan. The cover of his 1963 breakthrough album,
The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan,
featured an iconic photograph of the songwriter and his then-girlfriend, Suze Rotolo, strolling down a snow-covered Village street near their apartment, lending its beaten-down neighborhood considerable hipster cachet. Like the Beatles' second album,
With the Beatles,
the cover was unusual for its time. It became “one of those cultural markers that influenced the look of album covers precisely because of its casual, down-home spontaneity and sensibility,” recalled Rotolo decades later.

Then at the end of 1963, almost as if to bestow cultural validity on the vibrant and multidimensional art scene that was happening downtown, poet Allen Ginsberg—the celebrated author of “Howl” and “Kaddish” and Beat Generation writer who had helped create a media storm in the staid, conservative 1950s—returned to New York after several years of incessant travel. He eventually settled in an East Fifth Street apartment
with his lover, Peter Orlovsky. It may not have been obvious right at the time, but the downtown art scene was about to explode.

The changes to New York in the early sixties were noticed by another prodigal son of Gotham. Bronx-born A. M. Rosenthal, the newly installed Metropolitan Editor of the
New York Times
, had been a Pulitzer Prize–winning foreign correspondent for the paper, filing stories from Eastern Europe, India, and Japan, among other foreign locales, before resettling in New York in the summer of 1963. In an attempt to modernize the Paper of Record's coverage of his hometown, Rosenthal and his deputy, Arthur Gelb, would go on frequent walks in the neighborhoods that usually didn't benefit from coverage in the
Times
.

During one such stroll through Manhattan, Rosenthal noticed that some men were not hiding their homosexuality in public. Rosenthal thought the paper should do a story about this new sexual boldness. Wanting their reporters to cover New York City with “the curiosity of a foreign correspondent in an unfamiliar city,” Rosenthal and Gelb selected Robert C. Doty, the
Times
' former Paris bureau chief, and gave him a month to report the piece.

The result was an incendiary front-page
Times
story on December 17, 1963—
Growth of Overt Homosexuality in City Provokes Wide Concern
—which claimed in its opening line that “the problem of homosexuality in New York” was a top concern of both the police and the State Liquor Authority. Earlier in the year, the police had raided known gay hangouts such as Fawn in the West Village and the Heights Supper Club in Brooklyn, and revoked their liquor licenses in an attempt to curb “the city's most sensitive open secret—the presence of what is probably the greatest homosexual population in the world and its increasing openness.” This “open secret,” as the
Times
explained, concerned not only the police but psychiatrists and religious leaders. “Homosexuality is another one of the many problems confronting law enforcement in this city,” Police Commissioner Michael J. Murphy told the
Times
, while stressing that the “underlying factors of homosexuality are not criminal but rather medical and sociological in nature.”

In the article, experts estimated that at least a hundred thousand homosexual “deviants” or “sexual inverts” lived in New York and have “colonized” certain areas of the city, including portions of the Upper West Side and Upper East Side, a large swath of Midtown, and Greenwich Village, which was now “a center for the bohemians of the homosexual world.” More than a thousand men were arrested each year since 1960 for “overt homosexual activity,” the majority of them busted for soliciting sex.

Again and again throughout the article, homosexuality was presented as a New York problem, both in the five boroughs and its outer environs, where a homosexual “can find vacation spots frequented by his kind—notably parts of Fire Island, a section of the beach of Jacob Riis Park, and many others.” The
Times
earnestly examined the then-prevalent viewpoint of psychologists who thought that homosexuality was the product of “parental misdeeds and attitudes” and that such men could be “cured by sophisticated analytical and therapeutic techniques.” What's more, the
Times
warned that it wasn't just men embracing a “deviant” lifestyle throughout New York City—“lesbianism is also on the rise.”