The Downtown Pop Underground

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Abbie Hoffman was an activist who co-founded the Youth International Party (better known as the Yippies) and helped organize Washington, D.C.’s first major antiwar demonstration, where Ed Sanders and others attempted to levitate the Pentagon. [more]

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Alan Betrock launched his DIY paper New York Rocker in early 1976, not long after he produced the first Blondie demos (Debbie Harry’s first cover story was in New York Rocker, with a photo taken by Lisa Jane Persky). [more]

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Best known for his Pop Art silkscreened work, Andy Warhol was a key connector figure who circulated not only through uptown art circles, but also within the underground film, poetry, theater, and music scenes. [more]

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Ramones manager Danny Fields was a ubiquitous presence downtown, which he documented in his column for the SoHo Weekly News. [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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West Village writer and activist Jane Jacobs engaged local independent media outlets like the Village Voice to help preserve sizeable swaths of the downtown landscape, allowing people to transform largely abandoned industrial areas into places to live and make art. [more]

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The actor, activist, and scenester Jim Fouratt was a regular at Caffe Cino, Max’s Kansas City, and other downtown hangouts; in addition to cofounding the Yippies, he witnessed the Stonewall Rebellion firsthand and later managed Studio 54 and Danceteria. [more]

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Cartoonist John Holmstrom cofounded Punk magazine with Eddie “Legs” McNeil and Ged Dunn Jr. after attending the School of Visual Arts with Blondie's Chris Stein, who became a regular contributor to the magazine. [more]

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Lenny Kaye met his longtime musical collaborator Patti Smith at Village Oldies, where he was working at Village Oldies while also freelancing as a music writer and compiling Nuggets, an influential garage rock anthology that inspired many a punk rocker. [more]

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Lisa Jane Persky first met Harry Koutoukas in 1965, when she was about ten years old and her family moved into 87 Christopher Street; by 1973, Koutoukas had cast Persky in her New York stage debut at La MaMa, which was followed by a role in Tom Eyen’s Women Behind Bars opposite Divine in 1976, the same year she became a founding staffer for the New York Rocker and shot Debbie Harry's first cover photo. [more]

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Playwright and Village Voice theater critic Michael Smith championed the Off-Off-Broadway scene and print when he wasn’t directing and writing plays, and later running Caffe Cino after Joe Cino’s suicide. [more]

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Paul Krassner published the influential satirical magazine The Realist—which pioneered an envelope-pushing style that laid the groundwork for “New Journalism”—and he also cofounded the Yippies with Ed Sanders, Abbie Hoffman, Jim Fouratt, and others. [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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After Richard Goldstein left the Village Voice, Robert Christgau began his long tenure as the paper’s self-proclaimed “Dean of Rock Critics,” chronicling the rise of punk and other leftfield rock acts. [more]

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Valerie Solanas had previously been known around downtown as a hustling street urchin who wrote the satirical-but-serious SCUM Manifesto in 1967 before shooting Andy Warhol after he and others declined to producer her play Up Your Ass. [more]