The
End of the Hippie Era
On October 6, 1967
dozens of mourners gathered in the panhandle of
Golden Gate Park in San Francisco to mark the death
of Hippie, an imaginary character killed off by
overexposure and rampant commercialism. A broadside
distributed at the event stated, "H/Ashbury was
portioned to us by Media-Police and the tourists came
to the Zoo to see the captive animals and we growled
fiercely behind the bars we accepted and now we are
no longer hippies and never were." The mock
funeral celebrated not the end of ideals and beliefs
but hippie commercialism and its ultimate core site,
the Haight-Ashbury. Two days later death would also
mark the beginning of the demise of the East Village
enclave when a hippie couple was found murdered in
the basement boiler room of a tenement building at
169 Avenue B.
Following the murders,
representations of an East Village liberated from the
ghetto of the Lower East Side were replaced by those
of urban decline. Fueled by dozens of articles and
reports in the Village Voice, Newsweek, Time,
The Daily News, and The New York Times,
news of the murders evinced a nearly instantaneous
reversal of the lionized identity of the East Village:
youthful innocence became reckless naivete and racial
harmony became racial fear. "There’s no
love here anymore. Everyone is scared to death."
The poverty, violence and danger of the minority
ghetto reemerged in dominant representations of a
threatening and marginal space. Prophetically, the
majority of East Village hippies chose the course
taken by hundreds of thousands of earlier residents
and departed the neighborhood en masse. By
1969, the spatial foci of hippie culture was no
longer the city but the countryside as hippie
communities and communes popped up across upstate New
York and Vermont and, on the west coast, in northern
California, Oregon and Washington.
As hippies departed
the East Village, one by one the landmarks of the
counterculture disappeared from the landscape and
were not replaced by any new uses. Andy Warhol’s
Electric Circus closed in 1971 as did the Fillmore
East after a final concert featuring Frank Zappa,
John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Storefronts along St. Marks’
Place and Second and Third Avenues were vacated and
the increasingly empty streets took on a much seedier
character. According to an owner of an East Village
"head shop" and bookstore, "People are
noticing the junkies in the area now, but they’ve
always been here; its just in the absence of the
suburban trendie they’ve become more visible."
Links (click to follow)
Here is a profile on Archie Shepp.
Check out Archie-Shepp.com!
Click here to listen to some Archie Shepp.
Here is a history of Shepp’s
music (and FM radio.)
Here are links related to Andy
Warhol.
Click here for a short tribute to Frank Zappa.
Here is a
bunch of information on John Lennon and Yoko Ono.
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The book upon which this
web site is based,
Selling
the Lower East Side,
is available
directly through 
or order through 
Site design © 2000:
Kurt
Reymers and Dan
Webb.
(University at Buffalo, Department of
Sociology)
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