Tomorrow-Land (40 page)

 

16.

My trusty old copy of
Malcolm X Speaks
(Grove, 1966), acquired years ago from a used bookstore, was my guide to the powerful commentary on American life that is Malcolm X's “The Ballot or the Bullet” speech. Audio files of the speech are readily available online.
Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention
was key to understanding the speech and Malcolm's evolution as a civil rights fighter. I also consulted Martin Luther King Jr.'s autobiography for this chapter and various newspaper accounts that referenced Malcolm X during this period in his life.

 

17.

A. M. Rosenthal's short book,
Thirty-Eight Witnesses: The Kitty Genovese Case
(Melville House, 2008), is a sad testimony to this unforgettable episode in New York City history. I also consulted the original
New York
Times
stories. Arthur Gelb recounts the sordid affair in his
City Room
memoir. A 1964 Talk of the Town piece about Rosenthal's book from
The New Yorker
was also helpful. I found the letters regarding crime in New York City that Moses began receiving shortly after the Genovese murder among his papers at the New York Public Library. One of the best stories I came across on the subject was a piece titled “Kitty, 40 Years Later” by Jim Rasenberger in the late great City Section of the
New York Times
(February 8, 2004).

 

18.

My narrative about Andy Warhol, pop art, and the World's Fair drew from many sources. For starters there is the aforementioned Helen A. Harrison essay from
Remembering the Future
. Key to understanding Warhol and his work
Thirteen Most Wanted Men
is Richard Meyer's chapter on the subject from his brilliant 2002 book,
Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art
(Beacon) as well as “Andy Warhol Remembered” by Mark Lancaster from the
Burlington Magazine
(March 1989), which recounts Lancaster's trip to Flushing Meadow with Warhol. Also invaluable was Calvin Tompkins wonderful profile on Warhol, “Raggedy Andy,” which I found in
The Sixties: The Art, Attitudes, Politics, and Media of Our Most Explosive Decade,
edited by Gerald Howard (Washington Square Press, 1982).

Also helpful—and amusing—were Warhol's own
The Philosophy of Andy Warhol
(Harcourt, 1975) and
Popism:
The Warhol Sixties,
cowritten with Pat Hackett (Harcourt, 1980). The best biography on Warhol that I came across was
Pop: The Genius of Andy Warhol
by Tony Scherman and David Dalton (Harper, 2009). I also consulted
Philip Johnson
by Franz Schulze (Knopf, 1994). Louis Menad's aforementioned “Top of the Pops”
New Yorker
essay on Warhol was also helpful for this chapter. Roy Lichtenstein's homage to Jack Kirby was found in
Marvel Comics: The Untold Story
by Sean Howe (Harper, 2013).

For general background knowledge about the postwar New York art scene and the pop art movement, I turned to
New Art City
by Jed Perl (Knopf, 2005) and
City Poet,
Brad Gooch's biography of poet Frank O'Hara, an important player in the New York art world. Tompkins'
New Yorker
profiles of Robert Rauschenberg (“Moving Out,” February 29, 1964) and Philip Johnson (“Forms Under Light,” May 23, 1977) were also invaluable. Ada Louis Huxtable's
New York Times Magazine
piece on Philip Johnson's work (“He Adds Elegance to Modern Architecture,” May 24, 1964) was both useful and enlightening.

Reading the work of
Times
art critic John Canaday was an experience I will not soon forget; it's no wonder that his rapierlike wit and precise prose irked Robert Moses so much. His pieces, such as “Pop Art Sells On and On—Why?” (
The New York Times,
May 31, 1964), were intrinsic to understanding the pop art revolution. And his pieces about art and the World's Fair, as the text shows, became part of the Fair story.

Other works I consulted on Warhol and pop art were:
Andy Warhol
by Carter Ratcliff (Abbeville Press, 1983);
Andy Warhol: A Retrospective,
edited by Kynaston McShine (Bullfinch Press/Little, Brown, 1991), especially Robert Rosenblum's essay “Warhol As Art History”;
Warhol
by David Bourdon (Harry N. Abrams, 1995); and
Andy Warhol and the Can That Sold the World
by Gary Indiana (Basic Books, 2010). Among the illuminating essays to be found in the late Robert Hughes's collection,
Nothing If Not Critical
(Penguin, 1992), is a wonderful piece on Warhol.

 

19.

My chapter on the New York City crackdown on the downtown bohemian art scene drew from stories in the New York papers, mostly the
Times,
about the Wagner administration's efforts and Operation: Yorkville. Information about how these events actually affected artists like Frank O'Hara and Allen Ginsberg was found in the aforementioned biographies such as
City Poet
,
I Celebrate Myself
, and Ed Sanders's memoir
Fug You
. O'Hara's World's Fair poem can be found in
The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara,
edited by Donald Allen (California University Press, 1995).

It is always a pleasure to reread the work of Allen Ginsberg; I kept my City Lights volumes of his work on my desk while writing this chapter and frequently turned to
Allen Ginsberg:
Collected Poems 1947–1980
(Harper & Row, 1984). I drew on information from
The American Pope: The Life and Times of Francis Cardinal Spellman
by John Cooney (Times Books, 1984) and
The Trials of Lenny Bruce: The Fall and Rise of an American Icon
by Ronald K. L. Collins and David M. Skover (Sourcebooks, 2002). Arthur Gelb's
City Room
has wonderful scenes about Lenny Bruce. Steve Allen was the subject of a November 10, 1962, Talk of the Town piece in which he mentions Bruce; the April 20, 1966, issue of
The New Yorker
ran a Notes and Comment piece upfront that served as an obituary of the famed comedian.

The story of Ralph Ginzburg's and Robert F. Kennedy's roles are recounted in
The Last Innocent Year
. Rick Perlstein's
Nixonland
discusses the Abraham Fortas fiasco. I also consulted the works of my former professor at Queens College, John Tytell. His book
Living Theatre: Art, Exile and Outrage
(Grove, 1995) was very helpful in understanding the downtown scene in the early 1960s.

The information about filmmaker, poet, and archivist Jonas Mekas was gleaned from all the above-mentioned books about the downtown art scene plus several Talk of the Town pieces in
The New Yorker
from 1962 to 1965, as well as a lengthy profile from the January 6, 1973, issue by Calvin Tomkins.

 

20.

As I have noted, the stall-in saga of Brooklyn CORE and the World's Fair is a forgotten chapter in the history of the civil rights movement. The story played out in the New York papers, beginning
with the
Journal-American
's original story, and quickly became national news. Besides the
Times
' authoritative coverage, I found numerous articles in the Arnold Goldwag/Brooklyn CORE Collection at the Brooklyn Historical Society, plus flyers, pamphlets, and telegrams from Arnold Goldwag to the Kennedys and others. Much thanks to the helpful staff there for their assistance.

Elements of the story were found in
The Last Innocent Year
(which includes Martin Luther King's response);
The Making of the President: 1964
by T. H. White (Atheneum, 1965); and
Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus
by Rick Perlstein (Nation Books, 2001). Tamar Jacoby is one of the few writers to devote time to the subject, as she does in her book
Someone Else's House: America's Unfinished Struggle for Integration
(Basic Books, 1998).

Most helpful of all was Professor Brian Purnell, whose work I first encountered when I found his PhD thesis online. He later turned the thesis into a book chapter, “ ‘Drive Awhile for Freedom': Brooklyn CORE's 1964 Stall-In and Public Discourses on Protest Violence,” in
Groundworks: Local Black Freedom Movements in America,
edited by Jeanne Theoharis and Komozi Woodward (NYU Press, 2005). I am also grateful to Professor Purnell for answering my questions about the stall-in and its significance in the history of the civil rights movement in the North. Moses' comments and reactions to the episode were found in the files of his papers in the New York Public Library. James Farmer wrote about the episode in his autobiography,
Lay Bare the Heart
.

 

21.

The opening day events at the World's Fair were culled from newspapers and magazines covering the day's festivities, as well as
The End of the Innocence
and Bill Cotter and Bill Young's two Fair books. The
New York Times
covered the clashes on the 7 Train and the events inside the World's Fair, especially the booing of President Johnson, whose speech was found online at the LBJ Presidential Library (lbjlibrary.org). The many memos, letters, etc. found in the Robert Moses Papers and World's Fair Archives helped illuminate the picture. The material about the planned stall-in came from the sources listed in the previous chapter.

 

22.

The June 5, 1964,
Time
cover story was found in the magazine's online archives. The May 23, 1964,
Saturday Evening Post
's story on Moses, “The Old S.O.B. Does It Again,” was found among the Robert Moses Papers; both are invaluable documents on Moses and the Fair. The information about the actual Fair was drawn from Bill Cotter and Bill Young's photo books;
The End of the Innocence
; the Walt Disney biography;
The 1964 World's Fair Guidebook
(published by Time-Life Books); and newspaper clippings about those first days at the Fair. Also important were Ada Louise Huxtable's assessment of the World's Fair, found in her collection,
On Architecture
, and Professor Vincent J. Scully Jr.'s “If This Is Architecture, God Help Us” from the July 13, 1964, issue of
Life
magazine. Once again, John Canaday's take on the World's Fair in the
New York Times
was both unique and amusing.

The details regarding the film
Parable
were gleaned from the many memos and letters Moses exchanged with his officials on the subject. “The Jordan Mural Affair”—as Moses referred to it in his book,
Public Works
—received major coverage in the New York papers. Documents about this episode were found in the Robert Moses Papers and World's Fair Archives at the New York Public Library. As usual with Moses, the whole affair was played out in the press, and in this case, the courts. The details of the Board of Directors' meeting were found at the library.

 

23.

To recount the tale of Andrew Goodman, Mickey Schwerner, and James Chaney, I relied primarily on
The Last Innocent Year
by Jon Margolis. I also relied on
Three Lives for Mississippi
(University of Mississippi Press, 2000) by William Bradford Huie, a Southerner who understood the region's history and codes, a journalist who had written about the Klan and Jim Crow for national magazines, and a novelist. He originally reported on the Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney case for the
New
York Herald Tribune
. Also invaluable in my research was
Freedom Summer: The Savage Season of 1964 That Made Mississippi Burn and Made America a Democracy
by Bruce Watson (Penguin, 2010) and
We Are Not Afraid
by Seth Cagin and Philip Dray (Bantam, 1989). I
found Lewis E. Lomax's dispatch “Road to Mississippi” in a 1964 issue of
Ramparts
at the Brooklyn Historical Society.

My account of the Harlem riots depended largely on the reporting of the
New York Times
, Arthur Gelb's
City Room
, and James Farmer's
Lay Bare the Heart
. The riots are also touched upon in other books, including
Freedom Summer
,
Sweet Land of Liberty
,
America Divided
, and
The Last Innocent Year
. I found the great Ralph Ellison's
Harper's
piece on Harlem in their digital archive. Richard J. Whalen's September 1964 cover story for
Fortune,
“New York Is a City Destroying Itself,” touches on the riots and Robert Wagner's time as mayor.

 

24.

Among the documents of the Robert Moses Papers and the World's Fair Archives at the New York Public Library, I found the letters from would-be Fairgoers who wrote Moses asking for his assurance that they would be safe if they came to New York in the summer of 1964; others wrote to tell him they were not coming. Also in the Moses Papers were the memos detailing his thoughts and plans for Season Two of the Fair. Moses' problems with the Lake Amusement Area made it into various periodicals, including the
New York
Times
,
The New Yorker,
and the
New York World-Telegram
, among others.

Sally Rand's history performing at various World's Fairs, as well as the role of burlesque shows and stripteases at various Fairs, was found in Robert Rydell's
World of Fairs.
Edward Ball wrote a great piece about sex in the utopian visions of World's Fairs in “Degraded Utopias,”
The Village Voice
, Fall Art Special 1989. Thanks to Heidi B. Coleman of the Isamu Noguchi Archives for helping me find it. This chapter also benefited from my interviews with Bill Cotter and the great Al Kooper, who shared his memories about growing up in Queens, playing the World's Fair, and playing with Dylan at both the Newport Festival and the Forest Hills concert in 1965. A special thanks to him.