GILBERT SORRENTINO
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ecology worked out in terms of the composition of the neighbor–
hood. The Puerto Ricans and the blacks were living in a careful
relationship with the old Ukrainians, Italians, Poles, Russians, and
Jews. The artists came, but they came slowly and they were serious
and they were as broke as everyone else. They became a new part of
the community and were not resented, they were able to live' there.
When the summer of love came in 1967, it was a disaster. All these
kids came with their £lowers and their bells and their drums and their
feathers and their funny clothes and their drugs and their money–
their goddamned money. It was unheard of. Here were people who
had lived their lives in poverty, who were used to being poor, but
they didn't live degraded lives. Delicately, delicately, they made an
arrangement with life. Here came these kids who dressed as if they
were bums: no shoes, no socks, pants with big holes in them, their
hair uncombed, their faces dirty, and yet they all had fifty, sixty
dollars in their pockets. So it seemed to the old natives. They could
buy anything they wanted and they lived this way? Great resentment
began to build against the artist because so many of these kids came
there with "artistic" ideas and clad in what the old-timers considered
artistic c1othes-a hippie and a poet: they both had beards and
couldn 't speak Russian or Italian or Spanish, so they were the same
thing; so the feeling went. Confusion. It got bad for artists there. The
rents became insane. The real-estate guys started to see these kids
come in and if they asked them for seventy-five dollars the kids
would say, "Sure." The kids were dummies. They thought seventy–
five dollars was what you were supposed to pay on the Lower East
Side. Artists £led. Between 1967 and 1970 the Lower East Side
changed from a poor but very, very good neighborhood to a true
jungle, shattered in terms of morale and economy.
Barone:
How much of it all-the artistic community, the "new"
writers-was chance?
Sorrentino:
Like any "movement" it was essentially accidental –
people of the same age, with the same ideas, in the same place; it all
came together at the same time, within two or three years. It was one
of those curious things that just occur. Why were the painters living
on Tenth Street? Why, just two blocks away, did a Chinese restaurant
turn into a bar hospitable to painters? Why, at that time, did the
beats decide to travel from San Francisco back to New York: Kerouac,
Ginsberg, and Corso? Why did Black Mountain close? My genera–
tion, when the war ended, was anywhere between sixteen and twenty
years old, so in the mid-fifties we were all between twenty-six and
