Merchants organized against panhandlers even as scene insiders defended them

Evidence

There was even a merchant’s organization, the Washington Square South Association, distributing store-window posters urging patrons not to contribute to the panhandlers who, attracted by the tourists, had wandered down. The association was opposed by Israel “Izzy” Young, the thirty-one-year-old proprietor of the Folklore Center, a tiny store down MacDougal from the Gaslight that served as a folksingers’ hangout, selling finger picks, songbooks, and records, often at absurdly low prices. Devoted to the music, he organized concerts and readings and dispensed advice. The scene’s benign Dutch uncle, Young told Voice reporter John Wilcock that these panhandlers (many of whom resided at the Greenwich Hotel, a $1.25-a-night flophouse off MacDougal on Bleecker) were human beings and a storekeeper had no right to tell patrons not to hand a down-and-outer some change. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 49

Categorization

• XREF: Direct early evidence for the reader’s gentrification-origin thesis: merchant organizations trying to clean up the scene even at its birth, alongside $1.25 flophouses.