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After staging their DIY productions in Clearwater, Florida, the Harris family decided to dive into show business by moving to New York. “I recall sitting around in a room, with Mom and Dad having discussed it,” Walter Michael Harris said, “and they decided to put it to us kids, and they asked us what we thought.” Mary Lou recalled, “We had those pivotal moments where somebody would say, ‘It’s time to jump.’ We always did, and I feel like we always jumped to the right place.” In January 1962, Big George moved to the city ahead of the rest of the family to check out the situation. He got his Equity card right away with a play called Wide Open Cage and, purely by chance, met Ellen Stewart. They became close, and she helped find the first apartment his family would move into—a cramped walkup apartment on First Avenue, just around the corner from La MaMa. “Thanks to Ellen,” George said, “I had a place to live, current New York credits, and introductions to playwrights and producers.” The next person to move to New York was G3, in 1963. “My brother George came back and forth a few times,” Jayne Anne said, “and then when I was eight, going on nine, I remember getting on the train with him, and it was a twenty-four-hour ride. We ended up in a car full of nuns who took us under their wing because we were in coach and they had little rooms.” By 1964, the rest of the family was in New York. Eloise Harris’s first sight after arriving in the city was steam coming out of the sewers and a massive Camel cigarettes sign that blew smoke rings into the air. “Imagine taking your kids and moving to the Lower East Side with the idea that everybody is going to be actors, and then everybody just went ahead and did that,” said Eloise. “No one was thinking, like, ‘How are we going to make money?’ There was no real plan.” Ann Harris recalled that they just decided to do it. “I mean, with no knowledge of anything except suburban life,” she said, “and this was the nitty-gritty city in the East Village.”
From Chapter 7 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore