What is so rare as a day in June? Well, one 24-hour stretch 50 years ago proved to be one of the most extraordinary June days ever seen in New York.
On the afternoon of June 27, 1971, 5,000 people took part in the second annual Gay Pride March, which kicked off from Christopher Street and led to Central Park. The gathering marked the anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising, widely considered to be the birth of the gay rights movement in the United States. Two years earlier, homosexuals and lesbians at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village had rioted over their treatment at the hands of police, who routinely raided that bar and others to harass and arrest patrons, with little or no cause. They were also fed up with their exploitation at the hands of the club’s Mafia owners.
A subsequent headline in the Daily News proclaimed, “Homo Nest Raided, Queen Bees Are Stinging Mad.” It was exactly the kind of treatment that gay people had come to expect, and would no longer stand for.
It was a time of great upheaval in American society. The war in Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, released just two weeks earlier, were fueling distrust of government; the assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King Jr. had sparked numerous conspiracy theories; and the Woodstock Music and Art Fair, in 1969, had given new momentum to the hippie and antiwar movements.
One of the great echoes of the 1960s still resounded on Second Avenue and East Sixth Street in the East Village: the Fillmore East, a former Yiddish theater that became the best place in New York to hear the top music acts of the day. In three years it had presented John Lennon, Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, the Who, the Byrds, Led Zeppelin, the Grateful Dead, Santana, Miles Davis, Jefferson Airplane, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, other superstars and upcoming stars. But now, on this day, it was all coming to an end. As the day’s Gay Pride events wound down, the party was just beginning at the Fillmore.
Bill Graham, the Fillmore’s impresario, had grown tired of the hassles, costs and commerciality of the music business. Music fans howled at the loss of their beloved venue, where so many classic albums had been recorded, but Graham was adamant about closing it. In fact, he blamed Woodstock, in part, for ushering in an era of expensive, large-scale concerts in mega-sites. He had made a brief, controversial appearance in the Woodstock documentary, suggesting ways to keep people from entering the site without paying.
If the 2,600-seat Fillmore, with its excellent sound and psychedelic Joshua Light Show, had run its course, it was going out with a bang. The headliners in the final weekend were stellar in their own right: the Allman Brothers Band, the J. Geils Band and the bluesman Albert King. Joining them in an invitation-only concert on the final Sunday night would be an all-star lineup of rock acts: Mountain, Edgar Winter’s White Trash, the Beach Boys and Country Joe McDonald (without the Fish). The concert was broadcast live by WNEW-FM and lasted till dawn – not unusual for the Fillmore, whose
patrons, myself among them, regularly stumbled out on weekend mornings into broad daylight.
In her 1999 book “Live at the Fillmore East: A Photographic Memoir,” Amalie R. Rothschild wrote: “June 27 finally arrived, and we all lived it in a kind of a trance. The day seemed endless, but somehow it still passed in the blink of an eye. … afterward, we probably all went next door for breakfast at Ratner’s, but this is one morning I simply don’t remember.” I contacted McDonald for his reminiscences about that night, and he too said he couldn’t recall it at all. It brings to mind the joke from Robin Williams: “If you can remember the ’60s, you weren’t there.”
That Monday, June 28, would become memorable – notorious, in fact – for another reason. A huge rally was planned for Columbus Circle, staged by the Italian-American Civil Rights League. The organization was headed by Joe Colombo, who had conceived of it as a way to counteract negative publicity about Italian-Americans, largely brought about by government pressure on the Mafia. It had the support of show-business figures, public officials and business executives, who mostly overlooked the fact that Colombo was the head of the organized crime family that bore his name. He had created a public-relations machine and convinced the media that Italians were wrongfully stereotyped, which was largely true. He picketed the FBI’s Manhattan offices, made Gov. Nelson Rockefeller an honorary member of his organization and even got the producers of “The Godfather” to remove the words “Mafia” and “Cosa Nostra” from the script. In Italian neighborhoods across the city, a new sense of pride was heralded by the group’s red, white and green stickers with the number “1” superimposed on the map of America.
Ten thousand people crowded Columbus Circle before noon, as Colombo made his way to a stage for a televised speech. Three gunshots suddenly popped and he fell to the ground with three bullets in his head and neck. Chaos ensued. A 24-year-old Black man, later identified as Jerome A. Johnson, had clearly done the shooting, with a black German Menta .32 automatic pistol manufactured during World War I, and passed to him at the scene by a female associate. He himself was quickly shot three times and lay dead, presumably at the hands of one of Colombo’s bodyguards, who disappeared into the crowd and was never found. The girl also slipped away. Colombo was paralyzed and lapsed into a coma, in which he lingered for almost seven years, until he died.
Johnson was a con man and petty criminal who had posed as a news photographer to get close to Colombo. The police were baffled as to what reason he could possibly have had for murdering a mob boss. They finally pieced together a theory: that he had been led to believe he could escape and survive the suicide mission, crafted by mobsters increasingly angry about the attention Colombo was drawing. One suspect was “Crazy” Joe Gallo, whose resume, he claimed, to some dispute, included the rubout of Albert Anastasia, the Lord High Executioner of Murder Inc., in a barber’s chair in the Park Sheraton Hotel in 1957. The police questioned Gallo but released him; no one else was ever charged or discovered to have participated.
Gallo was a high-living street thug who had artistic pretensions and lived a double life: murderous mobster by day, glamorous associate of the rich and famous by night. He was befriended by Jerry Orbach, who parodied him in “The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight,” the film of a book by Jimmy Breslin; played by Peter Boyle in “Crazy Joe” and Sebastian Maniscalco in “The Irishman”; and celebrated in song by Bob Dylan. He was rubbed out himself on his 43rd birthday in 1972 as he ate dinner at Umberto’s Clam House in Little Italy.
Bill Graham died in a helicopter crash in 1991. The music scene he cherished had perished long before that. The Fillmore East building had several reincarnations, including a gay nightclub. The site that was so much a part of the counterculture, which presented so much music that was the essence of peace, love and anti-commercialism, now houses a chain restaurant and a bank branch. The corner of Second Avenue and East Sixth Street was renamed in Graham’s honor.
Columbus Circle is more popular now with tourists and shoppers than with protesters. A large mall with expensive shops overlooks the statue of Columbus.
More than 50 years later, the Gay Pride March is bigger than ever. It started as a cry of outrage and became a celebration of human dignity, but even it has had corporate sponsors.
Photo credits:
Fillmore East marquee: Fillmore East Preservation Society
Stonewall Inn: Rhododendrites, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons
Bill Graham: Mark Sarfati - sarfati@osw.com http://osw.com, CC BY 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons
Duane Allman: By Ed Berman - CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3475720
Joseph Colombo: Public domain
Apple Bank: By Jim.henderson - CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=80946492
Fillmore plaque: By Historicplaques - CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=53257982