The Groovy murder ended the East Village’s hippie innocence

Evidence

Three months after Newark, as presaged by Paul Thek’s sculptural self-portrait, The Tomb, popularly known as “Dead Hippie”, the East Village bubble burst. Sunday morning, October 8, two naked white bodies—Linda Fitzpatrick, an eighteen-year-old runaway from a posh Connecticut suburb, and her boyfriend, a twenty-four-year-old drug dealer, James Hutchinson, with the street name “Groovy”—were discovered in the boiler room of an Avenue B tenement next door to the Annex and a block from Tompkins Square Park, their brains bashed in with a brick. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1077

Categorization

• SEED: The Thek sculpture The Tomb (‘Dead Hippie’) as a real-world predictive memento mori could anchor an essay on artists foretelling their own scene’s death — an artists-as-prophets-of-gentrification angle.
• DEEPTHINKING: A sculpture presaging a real murder — art literally predicting the death of its scene — collapses the inside/outside boundary the avant-garde claims. This is a dense, layered moment.