Mayor v. MacDougal Street

There are a pair of questions that pop up again and again in Mayor John Lindsay’s early press conferences, to his ever fresh annoyance. “What can you tell us about the SanitationTransitWelfareCabdriversTeachers strike?”, and “What are you doing to clean up the Village?”

While the former lends some credence to the notion that the New York Lindsay had inherited January 1, 1966 was indeed “ungovernable” from the outset, with strike upon strike landing on the young, stumbling, beleaguered administration, the latter makes one wonder if Lindsay ever bothered to try to govern in the first place.

The version of the Village question posed on December 29, 1967, asks the mayor for comment on a recent decision handed down from New York State Supreme Court Justice Charles A. Tierney ordering Lindsay, Commissioner of Licenses Joel Tyler, and Police Commissioner Howard Leary to enforce existing laws concerning the rash of unlicensed coffeehouses dotting MacDougal Street. Lindsay can barely hide his frustration.

The problem of “unlicensed coffeehouses” might seem innocuous today, but it wasn't at the time. Coffeehouses in 1967 New York had to have a special kind of cabaret license to have live music with drums and vocals. They also had to close at 3 AM and were subject to a variety of regulations intended to keep the peace with local residents. When Lindsay, reporters, and others refer to “unlicensed coffeehouses," they are referring to restaurants, legal in many other ways, which flaunted the cabaret laws of the time, playing live music, employing aggressive "sidewalk hawkers" to hustle in clientele, and staying open well after 3 AM, serving alcohol long past their allotted midnight cutoff. These "restaurants" were allowed only incidental music performed by at most “3 string[ed] instruments, plus an accordion and a piano.” No singing, no drums. They frequently had both.

When Lindsay was set to take office there were approximately 25 such unlicensed coffeehouses in the area. The number of licensed ones in the neighborhood was 6. Such a surfeit of activity was naturally a huge attraction to the City's youth, but it was getting out of hand. It was felt that by enforcing current laws, the disorder plaguing the area could be brought under control.

The majority of the locals merely wanted peace and quiet, and the young people a place to hang, but once attention to the issue of scofflaw coffeehouses had risen beyond the local level, a thinly veiled subtext emerged, one that washed out the nuanced views of all those intimately involved - it became an intergenerational conflict between young, white hippies gone to seed, occupying the east coast Hashbury of MacDougal Street and Washington Square Park, and the staunch and strict middle-class values of the area’s long-standing old-law tenement residents.

The boisterous boho allure of 1960s Greenwich Village seems to have been a constant concern during the early months of Lindsay’s first term. Even before, in fact. In 1965, just before his election as mayor, Lindsay had met with the MacDougal Street Area Neighborhood Association (MSANA) and Emanuel “Wally” Popolizio, their president, to discuss the problem of the unlicensed coffeehouses along the street.

Lindsay’s initial solution was to send unpaid assistant (and future disgraced ex-Water Commissioner) James Marcus to clear up the problem in a series of February 1966 meetings with the MSANA. (Lindsay wisely but disingenuously declines to mention this in the December 29th, 1967 press conference we present above, with Marcus’ kickback indictment having occurred December 18, a mere 11 days earlier.) While Marcus was appalled by state of MacDougal Street after a Friday night visit in March of '66, saying “[t]he situation in the Village now is really desperate” and arguing for a curfew, according to Popolizio, “nothing came of the [February] meetings, except that after they stopped MacDougal Street was really wide open.”

Curiously, Marcus ultimately sought to absolve himself of some of the guilt from his later transgressions by turning in Carmine DeSapio, from whom he had taken bribes during his tenure as water commissioner. Whether their relationship began here is unclear, but it’s interesting that at the time, DeSapio was a newly anachronistic Tammany man, recently deposed as Democratic District Leader for the Village by a young Ed Koch, coincidentally enough the other main shaker in the local fight to shut down MacDougal Street’s unlicensed coffeeshops. The future congressman and New York City mayor Koch cut his political teeth in this and other battles, beginning his long rise in New York politics here. In the December 29th press conference a reporter asks Lindsay if partisan politics played a role in the MacDougal controversies. One can't help but wonder if he's in part asking about Koch.

By May of 1966, Koch and Popolizio were fed up, and were pondering litigation. Said Koch at the time, “You can’t keep telling the residents to suffer through the weekly hell of those noisy crowds while nothing is done.” Koch also mooted moving the coffeehouses to a special district, something Art D'Lugoff, proprietor of nearby club The Village Gate, would call a "demagogic, dangerous, irresponsible, laughable thing." Lindsay's efforts were no better. What likely felt like compromise to Lindsay often came across as contradiction, and frustrations were rising. Neither side was satisfied, and a year later Lindsay was still struggling to rein in the inconsistencies of his administration's actions:

The MSANA eventually sued the city and 1967 saw the suit climbing up the courts, culminating in the decision against Lindsay, Tyler, and Leary, and the December 29 post-decision press conference heard at the top of the page. Lindsay did not bring up the decision by choice that day, preferring instead to describe the new NYPD computer dispatch system and quash rumors of a Kerner Commission minority report. He was, however, fully prepared to voice his disapproval of Tierney’s “rather extraordinary decision” and mount an aggressive and obviously prepared-in-advance defense if asked. And he was.

We’ll leave it to you to listen to the recording to hear the finer points of Lindsay's elaborate reply to Tierney’s ruling, but essentially he argued the following: he had addressed the complaint. He had done so by stepping up a specially trained law enforcement unit, the tactical police force, to the MacDougal Street area. Moreover, commissioner of licenses Joel Tyler had been increasing his department's activity in the Village, reducing the number of unlicensed coffeehouses along MacDougal by nearly 20. Lindsay chose not to reveal that the presence of the tactical police force, essentially a special crowd control unit, was something that Koch and Popolizio had conceded was helpful over a year and a half ago, but was not what Lindsay and others had been ordered to enforce - Lindsay et al. had been ordered to enforce licenses. Lindsay blamed the lack of enforcement mainly on the courts’ failure to pursue the fines the licensing commission had doled out, but either way, Lindsay’s efforts fell short of satisfying Koch, Popolizio, and the MSANA - MacDougal Street was still a lively, noisy mess.

But, there was another side to Lindsay’s argument - that young people do need a place to congregate and, well, be young, and this was something he was loath to stamp out. Perhaps Lindsay was merely sweeping his MacDougal Street failures to the side, but it seems here that this was something he truly valued. In fact, the need for kids to have a place to hang is something all parties seemed to value, albeit in different ways - Koch’s political talents were sharpened by navigating both sides of the generational fault line MacDougal Street had seemingly become, while Popolizio fought for affordable artist housing in the Village before and after, asking “how can you create progress without creativity?”. Lindsay too later found himself mutually estranged from the law-and-order Republican Party on this and other issues, eventually switching to the Democratic Party after a brief Liberal Party limbo.

Tierney’s ruling wasn’t the last word on the issue, he reiterated his order in January of 1968 and another court later reversed it, but it was certainly the loudest. Immediately following the ruling a pair of area offenders, Four Winds Coffeehouse and Cafe Flamenco were publicly slapped with hefty fines, but for the most part Macdougal Street's problems simply faded from media attention. Whether those problems had been solved or were merely lost in the shuffle of the City's news cycle isn't obvious today. Lindsay moved on to other battles, and Koch continued his political ascent, eventually becoming mayor, where he hired Popolizio to head the City's Housing Authority. The Village Gate remained a neighborhood fixture until 1994, while Tierney heard new cases until his 1982 retirement and Marcus, well, he had a hearing of his own.

It's hard to imagine today's gentrified MacDougal Street inspiring such fervor - the former Four Winds location is now home to a ramen restaurant and the erstwhile Flamenco serves pizza by the slice to hungry NYU students (The Village Gate is a chain pharmacy) - but there are hints of its former glories here and there, echoing voices of the past careening along the chaotic and storied street. 

Audio courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives WNYC Collection.

WNYC archives id: 92388 (92500, 150334)

Municipal archives id: T2336, T2337 (T1834, T1871)