New York in the Seventies

It was never very clear to me whether the seventies began after the Stones concert at Altamont, Watergate or the Ramones performing at CBGB’s. As progressive and fast paced as the city was, New York was sometimes hesitant to let good things go. For example, I noticed that the leaves on the trees in Central Park did not change colors until late November while their upstate country cousins had dropped theirs by mid-October.

So it was in Greenwich Village. There were still small coffee houses like the Gaslight and Folk City where you could hear folk and blues legends like Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Reverend Gary Davis and Doc Watson. These little enclaves were surviving the uptown invasion of David Bowie and the “Spiders from Mars” and the “New York Dolls” at Max’s Kansas City.

This amazing quality of the downtown community existed with painters, photographers, playwrights, musicians, poets where the revered masters made way for and encouraged a new wave of artists to innovate in their midst. Todd mentored with Dick James, Harvey Lloyd, Ernst Hass, Andre Kertesz, Louis Stettner, Mel Dixon, Helen Levitt and  was also a contemporary of Alfons Schilling, Nathan Farb, Sidney Cash, Mel Adelglass, Bob Day, Denny Brown and Maureen Lambert. Dave Griffith, larry Melkus, Michael Sarnicki and so many others……

New York in the early seventies greatly benefitted from no internet, no cable, no Walkman’s and no AIDS. There was a mutual connection to the women’s movement, Stonewall and the rage against the Vietnam war. Most of this changed as the decade ended. To be a part of this community was extraordinary like Paris in the twenties?

Today, as I check my emails, do a million zoom calls, and worry about being sneezed on by someone with Covid, I can’t help but long to hear Victor Brady playing his steel drum in Washington Square Park.

-Denny Brown Palo Alto, California, 2022