The Downtown Pop Underground

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After becoming well-known as a Beat-era poet, Allen Ginsberg became heavily involved in the downtown’s activist and arts scenes during the 1960s, when Hibiscus (George Harris III) met Ginsberg and the two became lovers. [more]

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Known as LeRoi Jones when he collaborated with Diane di Prima on the mimeo poetry zine The Floating Bear; this poet, playwright, and writer later relocated to Harlem and disassociated himself from the downtown scenes and became a leading figure in the Black Arts Movement. [more]

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Romanian immigrant and poet Andrei Codrescu moved to downtown New York in 1966, where he worked at the Eighth Street Bookshop and encountered other writers such as Ted Berrigan, Susan Sontag, and Allen Ginsberg; he later moved to the West Coast, where he lived in a commune with Hibiscus after he left the Cockettes and formed Angels of Light. [more]

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Diane di Prima was first associated with the Beat poetry movement before becoming involved with LeRoi Jones, with whom she coedited the mimeo poetry zine The Floating Bear and started the New York Poets Theatre. [more]

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Ed Sanders was a mimeo publisher, frontman of the Fugs, and potty-mouthed poet who opened the influential Peace Eye Bookstore on the Lower East Side, cofounded the Yippies, and was also involved in the underground film scene. [more]

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Poet Gerard Malanga became part of the Factory scene after being hired as Andy Warhol’s screen-printing assistant; he could also be seen wielding a whip while dancing to the Velvet Underground in the Exploding Plastic Inevitable multimedia series, and costarring with Mary Woronov in Vinyl at Caffe Cino. [more]

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Poet and antiwar activist Grace Paley cofounded the Greenwich Village Peace Center, inspiring everyone from a young Bibbe Hansen to Ed Sanders. [more]

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Experimental composer and theorist John Cage shared a studio at the Living Theatre with dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham, with whom he collaborated for performances at Judson Memorial Church and elsewhere. [more]

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Poet John Giorno was the subject of Warhol’s infamous six-hour film Sleep, which he shot as his boyfriend slumbered at night and later shared a Bowery residence with William Burroughs known as “The Bunker,” a very short walk from the Blondie Loft. [more]

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Soon after moving to New York City, Patti Smith met photographer Robert Mapplethorpe—who shared a room with her in the Chelsea Hotel and later shot the iconic cover photo for her debut album, Horses; along the way she appeared in Off-Off-Broadway shows (at La MaMa and elsewhere) and performed poetry in various downtown locations. [more]

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After moving to the Lower East Side in 1966 and became part of the underground poetry scene, Richard Hell eventually transitioned to rock ‘n’ roll with his old friend Tom Verlaine, with whom he started the Neon Boys and then Television, before quitting to form the Heartbreakers and then his own band, Richard Hell and the Voidoids. [more]

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Poet Ted Berrigan, who founded the mimeographed zine C: A Journal of Poetry, would hold court in front of Gem Spa smoking unfiltered Chesterfields and while surrounded by younger poets such as Andrei Codrescu. [more]

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Tom Miller met Richard Meyers in the mid-1960s at a boarding school in Delaware and were both drawn to New York, where they settled into a life of letters before starting a band together and rechristening themselves Tom Verlaine and Richard Hell. [more]

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Beat poet Tuli Kupferberg could be seen selling his own mimeo poetry publications at Jonas Mekas’s film series and in 1965 joined forces with Ed Sanders to form the Fugs after Sanders’s Peace Eye Bookstore opened next door to where he lived on East Tenth Street. [more]