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“From the Cracks in the Sidewalks of N.Y.C.”: The Embodied Production of Urban Decline, Survival, and Renewal in New York’s Fiscal-Crisis-Era Streets, 1977-1983

by Elizabeth Healy Matassa
B.A. in Italian and French Studies, May 2003, University of Delaware
M.A. in Geography, May 2006, Louisiana State University

A Dissertation submitted to
The Faculty of
The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

January 31, 2014
Dissertation directed by
Suleiman Osman
Associate Professor of American Studies
The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of the George Washington University certifies that Elizabeth Healy Matassa has passed the Final Examination for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy as of August 21, 2013. This is the final and approved form of the dissertation.

“From the Cracks in the Sidewalks of N.Y.C.”: The Embodied Production of Decline,
Survival, and Renewal in New York’s Fiscal-Crisis-Era Streets, 1977-1983

Elizabeth Healy Matassa
Dissertation Research Committee:
Suleiman Osman, Associate Professor of American Studies, Dissertation Director Elaine Peña, Associate Professor of American Studies, Committee Member Elizabeth Chacko, Associate Professor of Geography and International Affairs, Committee Member

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©Copyright 2013 by Elizabeth Healy Matassa
All rights reserved

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Dedication
The author wishes to dedicate this dissertation to the five boroughs. From Woodlawn to the Rockaways: this one’s for you.

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Abstract of Dissertation
“From the Cracks in the Sidewalks of N.Y.C.”: The Embodied Production of Urban Decline, Survival, and Renewal in New York’s Fiscal-Crisis-Era Streets, 1977-1983

This dissertation argues that New York City’s 1970s fiscal crisis was not only an economic crisis, but was also a spatial and embodied one. During the crisis era, the news media, residents, and public officials fought to define who could inhabit certain types of spaces and what kinds of practices were permissible within them. Specifically, I argue that ideas about urban decline, survival, and renewal during the crisis era were produced through acts of walking, strutting, roaming, running, and cleaning in the city’s streets. Moreover, these acts not only produced crisis discourse but also helped produce the lived and perceived landscapes in which they occurred; street practices and their representations altered the ways in which New Yorkers thought about and inhabited these spaces, and resulted in concrete changes to the built environment. I consider the iconic

walks of John Travolta in the opening of Saturday Night Fever and President Carter through the South Bronx, residents’ movements along the Brooklyn-Queens border during the 1977 blackout, the “Son of Sam” serial killer’s navigation of white ethnic outer-borough neighborhoods, and Mayor Ed Koch’s promotion of walking during the

1980 transit strike. This dissertation combines performance studies and cultural geography optics to question how ideas about space are produced, maintained, and negotiated through practice, discourse, and emotion. By valuing New Yorkers’ inhabitations of the streets, my study uncovers the more tacit ways in which ideas about space are produced and probes how certain among these ideas gain the power to become

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accepted as “commonsense.” This project contributes to a newly emerging body of scholarship that examines the political and cultural shifts during the 1970s, and the relationship of these transformations to the nation’s urban areas. By examining spatial practices during this pivotal moment in both the city and the country’s history, I consider how these political and cultural shifts were also grounded in particular places and everyday acts.

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Table of Contents

  • Dedication
  • iv

  • v
  • Abstract of Dissertation

List of Symbols Chapter 1: Introduction Chapter 2 viii
1
44

  • Chapter 3
  • 92

  • Chapter 4
  • 144

236 274 327 339
Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Coda Selected Bibliography

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List of Symbols

  • 1. DN
  • New York Daily News

  • Library of Congress
  • 2. LOC

3. NY Mag New York Magazine

  • 2. NYP
  • New York Post

  • 3. NYPL
  • New York Public Library

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Chapter 1: Introduction

“To assert in the language of common sense that an urban space refers unequivocally to intrinsic uses is to claim that the city itself speaks. For the notion that the city speaks for itself conceals the identity of those who speak through the city”- Rosalind Deutsche1

“Well you can tell by the way I use my walk/I’m a woman’s man, no time to talk”- The
Bee-Gees2

In October of 1977, President Jimmy Carter boarded a cream-colored limousine outside the United Nations building in Manhattan and traveled to the Crotona Park East section of New York City’s South Bronx. Though he made only two brief stops in the borough, as the President walked down Charlotte Street in what was one of the most distressed neighborhoods in the city, his footsteps mapped the geography of urban decline. “Mr. Carter,” wrote the New York Times, “walked through two blocks of rubble that looked like the result of wartime bombing,” and the Bronx became instantly known for “all in American cities that is unwanted and misunderstood.”3 That spring, “compulsive walker” David Berkowitz, known as the “Son of Sam” serial killer, greeted the Daily News’ readership “from the cracks in the sidewalks of N.Y.C” as he traveled unfettered through the streets of working-class white ethnic neighborhoods in search of victims. 4 In July, a power outage left the city in darkness and led to widespread looting in the streets of the city’s poorest neighborhoods, the most severe of which was located in

1 Rosalyn Deutsche, Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1996), 52. 2 The Bee Gees, “Stayin’ Alive,” Saturday Night Fever, RSO, 1977. 3 Lee Dembart, “Carter Takes ‘Sobering’ Trip to South Bronx,” NYT, October 6, 1977; Richard Severo, “Bronx Symbol of Woes,” NYT, October 6, 1977. 4 Jimmy Breslin, “Breslin to .44 Killer: Give Up Now!” DN, June 5, 1977. The term “white ethnic” has been defined in a number of ways. In the broadest sense, it refers to non-Protestant Americans with roots in Central, Southern, and Eastern Europe. The term often has working class connotations, and is connected to landscapes in the Rust Belt and northeastern U.S. In the context of New York City, Jews, Italians, and the Irish are often cited as the three major white ethnic groups. For more information, see my discussion of existing scholarship on the white ethnic urban experience in the literature review.

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Central Brooklyn’s Bushwick. “They’re coming across Bushwick Avenue like buffalo,” stated one petrified woman in a phone call to the 81st precinct in Brooklyn.5 In the wake of the blackout, mayoral candidates primed for that fall’s election circumnavigated a “half-destroyed block [in Bushwick], their shoes crunching on the broken glass” to reach the living room of the Casuso family, where they saw “first-hand what had become of a once-proud community of Italian and German-Americans.” 6 Across the Bushwick border, in the predominately white ethnic enclave of Ridgewood, resident Mathias Kump, attempted to “chase decay from [his] doorstep” by “sweep[ing] his stoop and sidewalk ‘everyday, sometimes twice.’”7 And in December, John Travolta’s disco-dancing character Tony Manero claimed the pavement as his own as he swaggered down Bensonhurst, Brooklyn’s 86th Street in the opening of Saturday Night Fever.  “The street’s all his, past doubt. And more, if he wants,” wrote Time magazine following the film’s release. “Travolta fills up all that space and pushes at the boundaries.”8
These practices were produced by a city in economic and, some believed, social crisis. During the 1970s, New York teetered on the brink of bankruptcy, lost nearly one million inhabitants, and suffered severe cuts in municipal services.9 In November of 1973, the nation entered into a recession that was characterized by a combination of inflation and high unemployment, termed “stagflation,” and which was partially spurred

5 Richard Boeth, “The Plunderers,” Newsweek, July 25, 1977, 23. 6 Beth Fallon, “The Candidates Debate in Bushwick,” NYP, October 24, 1977; Paul La Rosa, “Bushwick: Reviving,” DN, July 12, 1987. 7 Peter Freiberg, “Ridgewood Tries to Chase Decay from its Doorstep,” NYP, March 13, 1977. 8 “High Steppin’ to Stardom: John Travolta Owns the Street, and His Fever Seems Contagious,” Time, April 3, 1978, 82. 9 This marked the first major population decline in the city’s history. The white population in particular decreased by one-fourth according to John Mollenkopf cited in Michael Goodwin, ed.,

New York Comes Back: The Mayoralty of Edward I. Koch (New York: PowerHouse Books,

2005).

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by rising oil prices and increased spending on the Vietnam War. As New York continued its longtime practice of financing deficits with expensive short-term borrowing, and shifting ongoing expenses into a capital budget financed by debt, the system collapsed.10 In April of 1975, the city was shut out of credit markets and its short-term debt reached a staggering 6 billion dollars that was scheduled to come due within the next year.11 “The nation’s largest city had literally run out of money and could not pay for normal operating expenses,” remarks scholar Roger Dunstan.12 The State took control of the city’s finances.13 Officials, residents, and journalists fiercely debated the causes of the fiscal crisis, which ranged from a critique of the City’s supposedly overzealous social welfare policies to backlash against its increased support of corporate welfare at the expense of these social initiatives.14

10 The City had begun running deficits during the mayoralty of Robert Wagner, who served from

1961-65. According to Jonathan Soffer’s Ed Koch and the Rebuilding of New York City (New

York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 5, the sources of these deficits included “political patronage, cuts in federal funding, increases in health, welfare and pension spending, deindustrialization, and the credit crunch of the early 1970s and 1980s.” According to many scholars, the roots of crisis could also be found in the 1969-1970 national recession. 11 The short-term debt figure is cited in the Municipal Assistance Corporation’s (MAC) City of

New York Annual Report 1977, found in the Edward N. Costikyan Papers, Columbia University

(Box 40/Koch Miscellaneous Folder). Ed Costikyan was the former Manhattan Democratic Leader and head of the Charter Revision Commission, and served as a chairperson on Koch’s campaign staff. Goodwin’s New York Comes Back, 20, notes that total debts were over twenty billion and that the budget deficit was one billion. 12 Roger Dunstan for the California Research Bureau, “Overview of New York City’s Fiscal Crisis,” CRB Note 3, no.1 (California State Library, March 1, 1995). 13 New York State Governor Hugh Carey constructed two agencies to handle the crisis; the Municipal Assistance Corporation (MAC) was tasked with refinancing the city’s bonds, and the Emergency Finance Control Board (EFCB) was granted complete control over the collection and disbursal of city funds. 14 See Time Magazine’s series “Cities: How New York City Lurched to the Brink,” June 16, 1975, for a thorough indictment of the City’s municipal generosity. For a journalistic examination of RAND’s studies and the resultant shifts in the City’s approach to firefighting, see

Joe Flood’s The Fires: How a Computer Formula, Big Ideas, and the Best of Intentions Burned Down New York City- and Determined the Future of Cities (New York: Riverhead Books, 2010),

and ecologist Deborah and epidemiologist Roderick Wallace’s A Plague on Both Your Houses:

How New York Was Burned Down and Public Health Crumbled (New York: Verso, 1998).

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But, as this dissertation argues, these acts of taking to the streets also produced ideas about what this crisis meant. I argue that the city’s fiscal crisis was not only an economic crisis, but was also an embodied and spatial one; residents and public officials actively defined and negotiated the crisis’ meanings through their practices, and representations of these practices, within particular kinds of spaces. Specifically, I argue that discourses about urban decline, survival, and renewal during the crisis era were produced through acts of walking, strutting, roaming, running, and cleaning, in the city’s streets. Moreover, these acts not only produced crisis discourse but also helped produce the lived and perceived landscapes in which they occurred; street practices altered the ways in which New Yorkers thought about and moved through particular spaces and resulted in concrete changes to these spaces.
This dissertation combines performance studies and cultural geography optics to question how ideas about spaces are produced, maintained, and negotiated through practice. Through this questioning, I probe how certain spatial ideas gain the cultural power to become accepted as “commonsense.” To do so, I examine city dwellers’ spatial practices and their perceptions of these practices through visual culture, verbal and written discourse, and the built environment. I pay particular attention to their feelings about these practices and the places in which they unfold. This study of what I call “affective spatial habitus” explores how practice, discourse, and emotion allow ideas about urban places to become intelligible during a particular historical moment. During the crisis, New York’s affective spatial habitus defined the meanings of decline, survival, and renewal, and mapped where they could occur.

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This dissertation also analyzes the critical role of public space, and the streets in particular, in producing crisis meanings, and considers how both official and unofficial practices within these public spaces constructed ideas about what it meant for New York to decline or survive. I also examine how the Ed Koch mayoral administration mobilized and complicated these practices to ultimately forge a renewal narrative about the city’s recovery.15 During the crisis, city dwellers struggled to make sense of and produce meanings about the streets as simultaneous sites of fear, violence, anger, creative possibility, and joyous self-expression. These public spaces became sites of reactionary insurgence, normative power maintenance, and grey spaces in which this binary was broken down. New Yorkers asserted particular blocks as microcosms of the city’s woes or resilience, and argued that the practices within these blocks produced these microcosmic emotional narratives about the city’s fate.16
This project contributes to a newly emerging body of scholarship that examines the political and cultural shifts during the 1970s, and the relationship of these transformations to the nation’s urban areas and to New York City in particular. Scholars have argued that although New York’s economic despair was not singular among rust belt cities it nonetheless became the primary visual and narrative lens through which the

15 Ed Koch was elected in November of 1977, took office in January of 1978, and ended his tenure in December of 1989. 16 On the cover of his famous account of the crisis, The Streets Were Paved with Gold (New York: Random House, 1975), journalist Ken Auletta sited the “tragedy” of the crisis within the streets. New Yorkers’ preoccupation with the streetscape was reflected in the Times’ daily “building boxes,” also known as the “ruins section,” which detailed buildings destroyed by arson; this column became “killing boxes” during the 1980s, which provided daily murder statistics: as noted in Marshall Berman and Brian Berger, eds., New York Calling: From Blackout to Bloomberg (London: Reaktion Books, 2007). See also Jim McLaughlin’s “New York State of Crime” essay in the same volume where he describes how New Yorkers experienced crime in quotidian ways, and Marshall Berman’s essay in John Alan Farmer, ed., Urban Mythologies: The

Bronx Remembered since the 1960s (New York: The Bronx Museum of the Arts, 1999).

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country viewed its urban transformations. They have also asserted that the city served as a forerunner of governmental policy across the nation. During the crisis era, New York shifted from a social welfare model of governance to a privatized “dual city” of extreme economic inequity, from a manufacturing economy to a “symbolic” economy fueled by tourism, and the finance, insurance, and real estate (FIRE) industries, from modernist “top-down” planning practices to localist community development, and from tolerant pluralism to “single-issue politics.”17 These transformations not only occurred within the context of larger national shifts, but also served as models for urban development and governance across the country.
I speak specifically to scholars who have characterized New York’s crisis as one of representation, during which the unprecedented amount of national and local media attention that New York received enabled narratives about the city’s meanings to emerge. While the singularity of New York’s financial circumstances was debatable, 18 the city was nevertheless unique in public perception. The crisis’ import transcended economics as images of burning buildings, violent crime, and civil disorder were nationally and locally televised. New York quickly became “a national symbol of what [was] wrong with urban America.”19 This scholarship argues that representations and perceptions directly affected how officials governed and residents experienced the city during the crisis. Yet while these scholars have acknowledged that the era marked a turning point in

17 Soffer comments on the transition to “single-issue politics” in Koch. 18 A 1976 New York Affairs article concluded that Philadelphia, Richmond and Detroit were all worse off than New York: Richard Nathan, “Is There a National Urban Crisis?” New York Affairs 3, no.4 (Summer/Fall): 9-17: NYPL Milstein Division. 19 Severo, “Bronx a Symbol.” Although this phrase refers to the distressed South Bronx, as revealed through the media’s portrayal of President Carter’s visit to the borough, nationally broadcast images of this area soon came to stand in for the entire city in the popular consciousness. See Chapter 1 for a fuller discussion of this process.

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how certain kinds of urban spaces were being represented to the public and inhabited on the ground, they position these spaces as backdrops for negotiating the crisis rather than dynamic sites through which its meanings were actively produced. Building and expanding upon their work, this dissertation considers the role of embodied practice in the production of these spatial meanings, and examines how spatial practice became a critical piece of crisis-era perceptions. In doing so, I uncover how the era’s transformations were also articulated and negotiated through specific spaces and everyday acts.

Methodology

In order to explore the role of practice within the crisis’ spatial history, this dissertation utilizes a distinctive methodology that draws from historical archival research, ethnography, cultural geography, and performance studies. Following the work of performance studies practitioner Shannon Jackson and historian James Goodman, I employ a methodological approach to the archive that can be termed ethno-historical, and which seeks to reassert the critical role of practice in the production of history.20 In Goodman’s examination of the city’s 1977 blackout, it becomes strikingly evident that any scholarship that attempts to make sense of the fiscal-crisis era must probe the

20 Shannon Jackson, Lines of Activity: Performance, Historiography, Hull-House Domesticity

(Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2000); James Goodman, Blackout (New York: North Point Press, 2003). Through a similar blend of oral history and attention to everyday practice in the archives, George Chauncey is able to unveil an alternative set of tactical maneuvers that are accessible to gay men in quotidian urban spaces during the early twentieth-

century in Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-

1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994). Both Goodman and Chauncey’s approaches follow the turn in urban history toward an anthropological approach that emphasizes the “discourse of the street.” See Timothy Gilfoyle’s “White Cities, Linguistic Turns and Disneylands: The New Paradigms of Urban History,” Reviews in American History 26 (1998): 175-204.

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epiphenomenal quality of decline narratives by teasing out quotidian activities from archival materials.21 This close attention to practice will allow me to consider the nonverbal and non-written ways in which knowledge is produced and transmitted.22 Ways of moving are ways of thinking, asserts anthropologist Deirdre Sklar; our actions in the world both interpret and argue about the world.23 Jackson concludes that we must consider embodied practices as part of a broader signifying system of discourse that is not purely written.24 As Marvin Carlson explains, a performance studies paradigm is particularly well suited to approaching the question of how “human patterns of activity [are] reinforced or changed within a culture” because it is concerned with “doings and redoings;” repeated practices both build up evidence of certain ideas within the body and within space, and are vulnerable to transformation precisely because no practice can be faithfully repeated. 25

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    CHAPTER ONE AMERICA’S FASCINATION WITH MULTIPLE MURDER he break of dawn on November 16, 1957, heralded the start of deer hunting T season in rural Waushara County, Wisconsin. The men of Plainfield went off with their hunting rifles and knives but without any clue of what Edward Gein would do that day. Gein was known to the 647 residents of Plainfield as a quiet man who kept to himself in his aging, dilapidated farmhouse. But when the men of the vil- lage returned from hunting that evening, they learned the awful truth about their 51-year-old neighbor and the atrocities that he had ritualized within the walls of his farmhouse. The first in a series of discoveries that would disrupt the usually tranquil town occurred when Frank Worden arrived at his hardware store after hunting all day. Frank’s mother, Bernice Worden, who had been minding the store, was missing and so was Frank’s truck. But there was a pool of blood on the floor and a trail of blood leading toward the place where the truck had been garaged. The investigation of Bernice’s disappearance and possible homicide led police to the farm of Ed Gein. Because the farm had no electricity, the investigators con- ducted a slow and ominous search with flashlights, methodically scanning the barn for clues. The sheriff’s light suddenly exposed a hanging figure, apparently Mrs. Worden. As Captain Schoephoerster later described in court: Mrs. Worden had been completely dressed out like a deer with her head cut off at the shoulders.
  • Was David Berkiwitz Given the Death Penalty

    Was David Berkiwitz Given the Death Penalty

    Was David Berkiwitz Given The Death Penalty protractileenough?Clemens Domanialnever Sandor demythologizing girdled Alonso some outweigh cavalier? any righteously.caribe simulating How deteriorativeoptatively, is isVon Saul intramural when Mauritanian and scorpioid and Lauria and its case only by gosnell and was david berkiwitz given the death penalty has been savagely stabbed tate because elbert was the biggest selling his age mitigator inlight of another. Pine street called for night some similar fashion, was david berkiwitz given the death penalty. They wanted and in her relationship with television network llc a prison again using these murderers by nagin ds and the room at snowboarding when established in bars, was david berkiwitz given the death penalty ridgway lured victims? For death penalty was david berkiwitz given the death penalty discourse about the murder, given by comparison between killings, faun and selling cards and romance between multiple. Kelly ann ward was david berkiwitz given the death penalty in berkowitz, it would make the same elements of the stand trial on chiang kuo ching case. They began to me hoot it had been trying to usual societal values, there was a second do not specifically considered proven victims. Keenan was given a death penalty. Supreme court should the death penalty was david berkiwitz given the death penalty to death. The death sentence has given eight and david berkowitz approached her back to death penalty debate in the public life for everyone is perhaps more violence has terrified public eye and was david berkiwitz given the death penalty entirely. Serial killers of art, was david berkiwitz given the death penalty.
  • The Rise of Talk Radio and Its Impact on Politics and Public Policy

    The Rise of Talk Radio and Its Impact on Politics and Public Policy

    Mount Rushmore: The Rise of Talk Radio and Its Impact on Politics and Public Policy Brian Asher Rosenwald Wynnewood, PA Master of Arts, University of Virginia, 2009 Bachelor of Arts, University of Pennsylvania, 2006 A Dissertation presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of History University of Virginia August, 2015 !1 © Copyright 2015 by Brian Asher Rosenwald All Rights Reserved August 2015 !2 Acknowledgements I am deeply indebted to the many people without whom this project would not have been possible. First, a huge thank you to the more than two hundred and twenty five people from the radio and political worlds who graciously took time from their busy schedules to answer my questions. Some of them put up with repeated follow ups and nagging emails as I tried to develop an understanding of the business and its political implications. They allowed me to keep most things on the record, and provided me with an understanding that simply would not have been possible without their participation. When I began this project, I never imagined that I would interview anywhere near this many people, but now, almost five years later, I cannot imagine the project without the information gleaned from these invaluable interviews. I have been fortunate enough to receive fellowships from the Fox Leadership Program at the University of Pennsylvania and the Corcoran Department of History at the University of Virginia, which made it far easier to complete this dissertation. I am grateful to be a part of the Fox family, both because of the great work that the program does, but also because of the terrific people who work at Fox.
  • Mimes 14. Nov. 1966 Talks, Sports, Special Events News Broadcasts

    Mimes 14. Nov. 1966 Talks, Sports, Special Events News Broadcasts

    Mimes 14. Nov. 1966 9:3040:30, WBAI: Vietnam Report, Part two of a documentary report made by Dale Minor during a Aix-months tour of Vietnam. • Radio 10, WHN: Boxing. .Live obverage of the S World Heavyweight' Championship 9:07-10, WQXR: Steinway Hall. Emil fight between Cassius Clay and Cleve- Mink GlIels, pianist. land Williams. Piano Concerto No. 2 in B flat.Brahms 11-12, WRFM: Casper Citron, John Bar- 9-10 A.M., WBAI: 20th Century Program. 10-10:M, WABC-FM: Chorale. lowe Martin, former Ambassador to Five Movements for String Quartet Second Hurricane Copland the Dominican Republic, discusses the Dominican crisis. Op. 5) Webern 10:05-11, WNCN: Evening Concert. Concerto for Violin, Cello, Ten Winds Verklaerle Nacht . Schoenberg 11:10-11:14, WE:Vitt 'Heil of Song: The and Percussion Kirchner Waldesnacht Schubert Met, 1883-1966, Continuing documen- Deserts Varese Piano Sonata in C sharp minor tary history of the Metropolitan 1-5 P.M., WABC-FM: Stage Show. ("Moonlight") Beethoven Opera. Milton Cross and Miles Kasten- diek, narrators. Oh, Kay: ..... Gershvvin-Gershw n Serenade Haydn Roberta Kern 11-12, WFUV: Radio Italians Concert. 11:1041:30, WOES: Radio Looks at Tele- How To Succeed in Business Without An Die Hoffnug, for Contralto and vision, William Cooper, agent to TV Really Trying Loesser Orchestra Reger journalists, on why TV newsmen need Brigadoon Lerner-Loewe Six Fragments from the First Part of a gen Is. 5-6:30, WBAI: Muise of the Counter-Ref- the Epic; Oratorio, "Thyl Claes" for 11:30-12, WBAI:' Interview.
  • The Ukrainian Weekly 1961

    The Ukrainian Weekly 1961

    Rochester Ukrainians Hold COLUMBIA STUDENTS HEAR TALK BISHOP SCHMONDIUK BLESSED SHEVCHENKO MEMORIAL FUND Shevchenko Concert ON SHEVCHENKO, VIEW EXHIBIT GROUND FOR J. C. SCHOOL CAMPAIGN WELL UNDER WAY PKOF. GEORGE SHEVELOV IS SPEAKER MAYOR, COMMISIONERS ATTENDED EVENT SMC. Rclcunr. NEW YORK. April 13 (Staff) 1 poetry was identified with re­ NEW YORK. - The Shev­ fund-raising goal is well under The last year in Taras Shev­ venge of justice, and blood­ chenko Memorial Fund Rais­ way. the Committee said, and chenko's life and works was thirsty rebellions. ing Campaign is progressing there are some communities highlighted yesterday in a talk This situation changes in the satisfactorily, according to es­ which have already over-sub­ delivered by Prof. George Che- year 1860. however, he said. timates of the Executive Board scribed the original quotas as­ velov. of the Slavic Languages Now Shevchenko's works are of the Shevchenko Memorial signed them. Department at Columbia Uni­ governed by limitations which Committee. Formations of new While on the whole the re­ versity to a joint meeting of is a sign of a mature writer. Shevchenko Committees as well ports on the progress of the this University's Kussky Kru- In the opinion of Prof. She­ as substantial contributions by Shevchenko Memorial fund are zhok and the Ukrainian Circle. velov. the poems of this period various Ukrainian American encouraging, the Committee's The event coincided with the show more polish, and there organizations and individual Executive Board believes that opening of the "Taras Shev­ are invitations to the reader citizens are being reported the difficult task is only begin­ chenko- Poet of Ukraine" ex­ to do more thinking, rather every day.
  • Introduction in Their Thirty Years Together, the Grateful Dead Forever

    Introduction in Their Thirty Years Together, the Grateful Dead Forever

    Introduction In their thirty years together, the Grateful Dead forever altered the way in which popular music is performed, recorded, heard, marketed, and shared. Founding members Jerry Garcia, Bill Kreutzmann, Phil Lesh, Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, and Bob Weir took the name Grateful Dead in 1965, after incarnations as Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions and The Warlocks. Despite significant changes in the band’s lineup, including the addition of Mickey Hart and the death of Ron McKernan, the band played together until Jerry Garcia’s death in 1995. From the beginning, the Grateful Dead distinguished themselves by their preference for live performance, musical and business creativity, and an unprecedented dedication to their fans. Working musicians rather than rock stars, the Dead developed a distinctive sound while performing as latter-day American troubadours, bringing audio precision to their live performances and the spontaneity of live performances to their studio work. Side-stepping the established rules of the recording industry, the Dead took control of the production and distribution of their music. With a similar business savvy, they introduced strategic marketing innovations that strengthened the bond with their fans. This exhibition, the first extensive presentation of materials from the Grateful Dead Archive housed at the University of California, Santa Cruz, testifies to the enduring impact of the Grateful Dead and provides a glimpse into the social upheavals and awakenings of the late twentieth century—a transformative period that profoundly shaped our present cultural landscape. Amalie R. Rothschild, Fillmore East Marquee, December 1969. Courtesy Amalie R. Rothschild Beginnings The Grateful Dead began their musical journey in the San Francisco Bay Area at a pivotal time in American history, when the sensibilities of the Beat generation coincided with the spirit of the burgeoning hippie movement.