New York’s Summer of Love Was Real. History Just Buried It
On June 1, 1967, the Grateful Dead played their first show east of California, and New York gave them a parade. The Summer of Love you were taught happened on one coast. It didn’t.
Everyone learned the same story. The Summer of Love was born in San Francisco, in Haight-Ashbury, in the Panhandle and Golden Gate Park. But the East Village had its own counterculture, and it was older. Folk singers filled Washington Square in the 1940s. The Beats took Greenwich Village in the 1950s. By 1967 the East Village had Ed Sanders running the Peace Eye Bookstore, Allen Ginsberg a few blocks away, Paul Krassner editing The Realist, and the country’s first head shop around the corner.
The two coasts got opposite summers. San Francisco organized theirs, with a free clinic, arranged housing, and the Diggers giving away food in the Panhandle. New York’s opened with a police clash in Tompkins Square Park over Memorial Day weekend, months after the NYPD had raided the Peace Eye Bookstore and arrested Ed Sanders. San Francisco was feeding its counterculture. New York was policing it.
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