November 2, 2005
More History Comes to the Village Posted by Richard F. Snow at 12:25 PM EST I live a few blocks south of Fred Allen and, like him, in hermetic twenty-first century fashion watched the now-famous Halloween parade on television though it was whooping and roiling past a hundred yards away. The next morning I left my apartment and was on the way to work when I saw, at the north end of Washington Square Park, near the arch dedicated to the park’s namesake, someone holding aloft a big sign that read: US TROOPS HOME NOW. Naturally I thought this was about Iraq. Antiwar protests happen often enough in Washington Square—but it seemed to show uncommon zeal to be rallying at eight o’clock in the morning. Then I noticed that the man holding the sign had an afro of a frizzled immensity that I hadn’t seen in years. “Hey! Hey! LBJ!” the people around him started chanting, “How many kids did you kill today?” Clearly the job was getting to me. I got closer to the demonstration and saw that the street beyond the park was an automotive Valhalla: here was a Studebaker Lark, there an Oldsmobile Toronado, a Triumph TR-3, and that keenly-missed symbol of New York City life, a Checker cab. Oh, I thought, a good 30 seconds after I should have; They’re making a movie. They were indeed. There were a couple hundred protestors, all dressed in period costume. Each costume was carefully assembled, although among the hippies was a scattering of men whose clothes seemed to have been drawn from photographs of the Civil Rights marches of half a decade earlier: skinny neckties and fedoras. Someone called “Action!” just the way you’d imagine, and banners were lofted, signs waved, and the demonstrators moved south down Fifth Avenue while cops looked on from 1960s prowl cars. I watched, fascinated. The man next to me, who seemed about my age, was not so transported. “Once was enough,” he said to me and moved off. It was deeply strange to stand there, surrounded by the Chevys and Mustangs of my youth, while the blighted, frantic, glamorous year of 1969 surged about me. As the marchers went past, I looked more carefully at the signs. They were executed with high professionalism. Many of them looked like Sly and the Family Stone album covers; others had peace doves that might have come off Christmas cards. Then a 15-foot-tall Uncle Sam puppet swayed past, an oppressor’s cigar in his right hand. I didn’t recall anything like that in the demonstrations of 40 years ago. An immense, cunningly articulated skeleton followed Uncle Sam, and then another one of those beautifully-finished posters, this one showing soldiers and flower children and enjoining the viewer to make love, not war. It all looked just great, and I went on to work thinking how much more esthetically pleasing those long-ago marches on Washington would have been if only Hollywood had choreographed and equipped them.
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