Traffic closure turned St. Mark’s Place into a nightly open-air scene

Evidence

St. Mark’s Place was theirs—the scene of a nightly Be-In. From 7:00 p.m. to midnight, the block between the Bowery and Second Avenue, home to the Electric Circus, was closed to traffic, thus creating an open-air souk-cum-acid dance party. The flashpoint was Tompkins Square Park. The neighborhood’s only green space, located on the border between the Ukrainian and Puerto Rican areas, had been “a peaceful, if boring, park before the hippies came,” explained Don McNeill, the young Voice writer who made the East Village his beat. Memorial Day 1967: The park was crowded and, as McNeill put it, the Ukrainians were sick of hippies sprawled on the grass, playing their bongos and chanting Hare Krishna. They filed a noise complaint. The police arrived—ignored and ridiculed by the hippies until they returned in force. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1070

Categorization

• SHARE: The city closed a street to traffic nightly for months, creating an impromptu public festival — a concrete NYC-policy nugget worth sending to a city-planner or urban-studies friend.