The scruffy underground scene was sanitized into a celebrity venue.

Evidence

The gala opening, Tuesday night, June 27, 1967, was a benefit for the Children’s Recreation Foundation, co-founded by Senator Robert Kennedy. Jack Newfield, who was friendly with the senator, reported on the event for the Voice: “The immediate reaction was that Rome must have been like this in that middle period when decline was becoming decay.” … Third Avenue was clogged with rented limos. The line snaked down St. Mark’s to Second Avenue. Newfield reported that some 3,000 people filed past the sign limiting occupancy to 740. Literati (Truman Capote, Mary McCarthy, George Plimpton) cavorted with the glitterati (Yves Saint Laurent, Gloria Vanderbilt, Diana Vreeland), stars (Bette Davis, Muhammad Ali), and rubbed up against neighborhood characters (Tuli Kupferberg, Phil Ochs), although Senator Kennedy spent the evening with a millionaire discussing his slum program for Bedford-Stuyvesant. “It looked like the cover of the next Beatles album,” per Newfield, and, in the absence of air-conditioning, felt like a steam bath. … Andy Warhol was amused by the transformation from jerry-built sensory bombardment to manufactured light show, citing the evolution the small alcove off the side of the dance floor where a few funky old mattresses had been thrown for people to “lounge” and Eric Emerson to bring his conquests during the EPI shows: “Now, under the new Electric Circus management, [Eric’s Fuck Room] was transformed into the ‘Meditation Room,’ with carpeted platforms and Astro-turf and a health food bar.” — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 974

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Directly illustrates the gentrification-as-displacement thesis of ‘Grafting & Growth’ and the reader’s core crossing from scene to market: Warhol’s own observation that Eric’s Fuck Room became a Meditation Room with Astro-turf is the underground becoming real estate product.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s shelf interest in why culture stagnates — the co-optation/sanitization arc that recurs in critiques of creativity-scene gentrification.