Lower Manhattan’s art-network personnel organized the Be-In with rent-free bohemian housing.

Evidence

Organized by anti-war activist Jim Fouratt, rock critic and Crawdaddy! editor Paul Williams, E.A.T. administrator Sue Hartnett, and Chilean poet-playwright Claudio Badal, a onetime associate of the Bread and Puppet Theater who managed to live rent free above a Fourteenth Street girdle shop next door to Taylor Mead, the Be-In had the tacit cooperation of the police and parks departments. … It seemed open to all. … It was as if Dean Fleming’s trippy Park Place show had spilled out of the gallery and taken root in Central Park. The Be-In was a magnet for photographers, among them Fred McDarrah, Diane Arbus, and Garry Winogrand. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1057

Categorization

• XREF: Badal living rent-free above a girdle shop is the cheap-rent material condition at the reader’s thesis core, and the gallery-to-park spill is the scene-becomes-market mechanism.
• FICTION: A character who manages a rent-free life above a girdle shop then organizes a 10,000-person be-in is a perfect period-specific detail for fiction.