Tomorrow-Land

by Joseph Tirella

  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.”

  Some greeted the article with acclaim, a new direction for the staid “Old Gray Lady,” but to others it was the opening salvo against New York’s gay community—the Times article had explained that “gay” and “straight” were now words of choice among homosexuals to describe sexual identities—and it was much discussed in the ensuing weeks. And it certainly fueled the city’s oppressive clean-up campaign downtown, carried out with the help of Police Commissioner Murphy and under Mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr.’s watch.

  To someone like Frank O’Hara, a prominent member of the New York School of Poetry and an openly gay man, it was a malicious attack against him and his friends. O’Hara wrote John Ashbery, his friend and fellow poet, who was then in Paris, a sarcastic, angry letter informing him of the shifting atmosphere in New York: “You may be interested to know that the New York Times had a front page (and a full page continuation inside) story on how New York is the world center of homosexuality, with somewhere between 100,000 and 600,000 of THEM prowling the areaways of fair Gotham. Kind of exciting, isn’t it?” By spring, O’Hara characterization of the situation to friends wouldn’t be so tongue in cheek.

  As America attempted to restore its social equilibrium, across the Atlantic, Great Britain seemed on the verge of losing its own: Beatlemania wasn’t just sweeping the charts, it was akin to a seismic shift of the nation’s tectonic plates; riots and melees erupted in any city or town where the Liverpool quartet appeared. A December 1 article in the New York Times Magazine—the first appearance of the band in the pages of the Paper of Record—began like a dispatch from the front lines of war: “They are fighting all over Britain. Rarely a night passes without an outbreak in some town or other. Sometimes it is a mere skirmish involving a few hundred police, but more often there is a pitched battle with broken legs, cracked ribs and bloody noses.”

  The band’s fans were hardly criminals or even dime-store leather-clad juvenile delinquents—known as “Teddy Boys” in England. In Carlisle, the historic English town near the border of Scotland, a four-hour-long melee erupted between police and four hundred schoolgirls as the distraught youngsters tried to buy tickets to the band’s show. When the Beatles arrived in Dublin, there was a mad rush among the young teens resulting in injuries and broken bones. “It was all right until the mania degenerated into barbarism,” complained a Dublin police chief.

  There had been teen idols before: Frank Sinatra in the 1930s and the Beatles’ favorite, Elvis Presley, in the 1950s. But this was different. Unlike Sinatra and Presley, the Beatles were a group that wrote, recorded, and played its own songs; they were a self-contained unit and didn’t have to rely on anyone besides themselves to create their music. Then add to the mix their Northern England working-class cheekiness and rebellious attitude toward any form of authority—they refused to adhere to Britain’s rigid, traditional class system; they were utterly authentic both onstage and off.

  The Beatles were something entirely new on the pop landscape. The Times declared the band to be spokesmen for “the new, noisy, anti-Establishment generation, which is becoming a force in British life.” It seemed that all at once, the youth of Britain had new idols to worship, new role models to emulate, and soon enough American teenagers—and much of the rest of the Free World’s youth—would follow. “We came out of the fucking sticks to take over the world,” Lennon would later say.

  The Beatles were not the only rising stars with big dreams. In December, back in New York, folk hero Dylan was having a different kind of impact on the youth of America. Already deemed a poet, a prophet, and “voice of his generation,” Dylan was a bit lost. Earlier in the month he had accepted a Tom Paine Award by the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee at their annual Bill of Rights Dinner at the Americana Hotel. It was a prestigious honor by the group, a product of the battle-scarred Old Left, who had fought McCarthyism and other progressive-smearing tactics. Dylan, it would seem, was in good company; that same night novelist James Baldwin, whom the mainstream press treated as if he were the spokesman for black America, was also honored.

  But Dylan wasn’t having it. He didn’t want to be the voice of his generation. Seemingly drunk—or high—Dylan accepted the award and then proceeded to insult the crowd. Like Lennon in front of the British Royal Family and their blue-blooded, moneyed kin, Dylan couldn’t accept being accepted by the Establishment, even if it was an Establishment that he was, at least politically, simpatico with. “I only wish that all you people who are sitting out here today or tonight weren’t here and I could see all kinds of faces with hair on their head,” he bellowed. “You people should be at the beach. You should be out there and you should be swimming and you should be just relaxing in the time you have to relax.”

  At first the crowd laughed uneasily. Dylan’s rambling speech got odder and more belligerent, and the crowd didn’t know what to make of this young baby-faced folksinger. Then, to make sure his older audience understood just where he was—or wasn’t—coming from, Dylan committed an act of political heresy. “I got to admit that the man who shot President Kennedy, Lee Oswald,” he said. “I saw some of myself in him.” Here was the man-child who wrote “Blowin’ in the Wind” comparing himself to a man who, just three weeks earlier, had murdered a president. After a smattering of boos, Dylan said he accepted the award on behalf of James Forman, one of the founders of the SNCC, and left.

  Although the Tom Paine episode was the beginning of Dylan’s public rupture with the political activists who bought his records, he was still, in his own way, committed to their cause. At the end of the month, Dylan attended a national council meeting of the Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS—the national organization of student radicals that would in a short time become a national political force—in Brooklyn Heights. After listening to what the organization’s top tacticians like Tom Hayden and Todd Gitlin had to say, the folksinger pledged his support. “I don’t know what you all are talking about, but it sounds like you want something to happen, and if that’s what you want, that’s what I want,” he told them.

  Two weeks after the meeting, Dylan released his third album in less than two years, The Times They Are a-Changin’, a record that would further cement his reputation as a songwrite
r of unparalleled talent and only amplify the roar of the critics who labeled him the voice of his generation. As one critic would comment, the title track was sung by “a prophetic voice trumpeting a changing order.” Whatever people thought of Dylan, no one who had witnessed the surreal, tragic, bloodstained events of 1963 could argue with the veracity of the album’s title.

  Part Two

  Something New

  14.

  “When the modes of the music change, the walls of the city shake.”

  —Allen Ginsberg

  Robert Moses found himself dealing with the same old problems in the new year of 1964. He had been complaining loudly—and to anyone who would listen—for the last two years about the US Federal Pavilion, the largest of the World’s Fair’s buildings. He was unimpressed with architect Charles Luckman’s clean and sleek modernist design—it was nothing more than “a square doughnut on stilts” in his estimation—and, try as he might, he was unable to influence the pavilion’s exhibits.

  Moses had little faith in the Commerce Department, including Under Secretary of Commerce Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr. the son of his bitter enemy. He detested Herb Klotz, the coordinator for the pavilion, and had little time even for his old ally, New York–based developer Norman K. Winston. Moses worried that the host country’s pavilion would be “second-rate.” (By the end of the Fair’s first season, one Flushing Meadow executive said “third-rate” was more like it.)

  Winston contacted Moses early in the new year with a request: The US Federal Pavilion owed $223,000 in electrical contracting expenses but was cash-strapped, so he wanted to know if Moses would “deobligate” the pavilion of the payments it owed the World’s Fair Corporation. Moses wouldn’t hear of it. “It is certainly no fault of the Fair that you are short of funds,” he shot back in a memo. Moses said he would take the matter under consideration, but being unable to resist a cheap dig at his friend, insisted on imposing “one condition . . . namely that you cease to use the word deobligate. It’s not in the dictionary.” He also made sure his written response was carbon copied to top World’s Fair and Commerce Department executives. Maybe he felt guilty or maybe he was just in a more generous mood, but a few weeks later, Moses allowed Winston to defer in his other Fair payments so the pavilion wouldn’t default on its bills.