Suppressed History: 1967 Memorial Day Police Riot

Photo by Loren Bliss (C) 1969,
2026 (Leica M4, 35mm f/2 
Summicron, Tri-X at 
800 ASA in D-76.) 

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     Memorial Day Is About Remembrance,
     but the Atrocities of 30 May 1967 in
     New York City's Tompkins Park Are a                 Memorial Day the Ruling Class Has
     Disappeared in the Hope We'll Forget  

(Reprinted from the 29 May 2011 edition of Dispatches from Dystopia (with minor revisions and an important update, below), this because Dispatches was slain and its contents destroyed by the death of TypePad, its server.)  

A GROUP OF young men and women – some of them professional  musicians with a performance permit issued by the City of New York –  were first illegally rousted, then attacked by NYPD riot cops for the   “crime” of making music in Tompkins Square Park, on Manhattan's     Lower  East Side.  

            The episode was so outrageous I convinced Walter Bowart – founding editor of The East Village Other, (the newspaper of the neighborhood's then-burgeoning community of artists and bohemians), to put out an extra, which is where – along with a half-dozen images by other photographers – the riot photos below first appeared.

Walter then acted as an ad hoc agent for all of us who had contributed pictures; the topmost was published in Newsweek and, according to him (he paid me but never managed to get me the tear-sheet), in Paris-Match as well.

I was in the park that day by accident – filmmaker Ron Schade had asked me to photograph him and his wife Joanie at play with their son Jason – and I had only one camera with me,  my IIIg Leica with its 50mm f/2 Summicron and most likely loaded with Panatomic X. My wife-to-be Adrienne, an art student who always enjoyed watching me work and often made useful suggestions, was with us.

But when I saw the confrontation developing, I sent Adrienne running back to our East 5th Street apartment instructed to “bring me every 35mm camera body, every lens and every roll of Tri-X you can find.” (I normally kept as many as 20 36-exposure rolls of that film in our refrigerator.)

Adrienne did as requested, brought me my G.I. musette bag full of gear.  I thanked her, hugged and kissed her, tried to reassure her I'd be ok, hugged and kissed her again, handed her the Leica that was too slow to rewind to be useful for covering the violence I knew was coming, ducked into the musette bag's strap,   then said “now get the hell out of here while you still can” and sent her home.

I watched to make sure she got safely out of the park. Forty-four years later I still remember her reluctance to leave and how she repeatedly glanced back over her shoulder as she walked away, her green eyes huge with concern – Adrienne a slender blonde who like a smaller Veruschka moved with the leggy grace of a danseuse – her long hair bright as pale fire in the surprise gloom of an afternoon suddenly beclouded, as if Nature were hiding her face from the atrocity that was about to obtain.

Then I clipped my Working Press badge to my jacket lapel and – now thanks to Adrienne properly equipped with two VT Canons (lever-drive, screw-mount rangefinder cameras, one with a 35mm f/2 Leitz Summicron, the other with an 85mm f/1.9 Canon), plus a Pentax H1A SLR mounting a Spiratone f/2.8 135mm; probably a dozen rolls of Tri-X in my pockets – I loaded the cameras, hung the two Canons around my neck and the Pentax on my right shoulder and began shooting film. The topmost image below, published by Newsweek and Paris Match,  was one of my first pictures that day. 

At least 40 people were arrested that day. A pregnant woman and three men were hospitalized as a result of beatings inflicted by the NYPD's Tactical Police Force (the acronym for which, TPF, was ever after said to mean “Tasmanian Pig Fuckers”). Many of those arrested remained in jail for several days – the infamous Tombs for men, the even more infamous House of Detention aka “House of D” for women – while the Jade Companions of the Flower Dance, the neighborhood association for Lower East Side hippies and other bohemians, worked overtime to raise bail money.

Then as now, poverty was itself a crime – in the eyes of the Ruling Class an offense perhaps even more heinous than chanting the Hare Krishna and making other sorts of peaceful music on a day of war memorials. As to the blessed consciousness expressed by that music, Tina Turner's compelling version of the Om Chant (though it would not be recorded until 2011, 44 years later) -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XP-f7wPM0A&list=PLNB7VTPWjLJLtmgcz4-RqPzxsI6K4jskk --  nevertheless eerily duplicates the original emotional ambience of the day, its Zen-like sense of an embracing unity soon to be destroyed by NYPD bigotry goaded into criminal violence by the bottomless hatefulness of the Ukrainian Nazi war criminals the always-potentially pro-Nazi U.S. Plutocracy had given sanctuary in our neighborhood. I remember thinking the park's troubadour-permitted musicians were providing the perfect soundtrack for the dance of photographing parents and child contentedly at play in one of the park's sandboxes...until the music suddenly stopped, and I saw what stopped it. 

 

Alas the incident has since been quite methodically disappeared down the Orwell hole: as I discovered when I returned to the City during the '80s, the EVO extra has been carefully snipped from the New York City Public Library's microfiche file – which means the censorship is official, imposed by a librarian acting on Ruling Class orders.  And of course in my case there was also the fire. But because I had a copy of that extra in my portfolio case, I now own what is undoubtedly the only extant copy. 

But ah the Jade Companions of the Flower Dance: how could such an exquisite name be lost to time and oppression and puritanical malevolence?

Say it aloud: Jade Companions of the Flower Dance.

Even now the words resonate with forbidden sensuality and resurrected sensibility, the lost rhythms of which we are reminded by Minoan frescoes and echoes of forgotten music, harps and flutes and drums, the choreography of women free enough to arch their backs and swirl their unbound hair, of men bold enough to join them – the Counterculture's breathtaking ghost-image remembrance of the once-was when God was a Woman and its implicit glimpses of what might have been and yes its premonitions of what might yet be. -- LB/29 May 2011 

  

 

   

Photographs by Loren Bliss copyright 1967, 2011, 2022, 2025 (From top: 1st and 3rd images, Canon VT, 35mm f2 Leitz Summicron; 2nd image, Pentax H1A, f /2.8 Spiratone 135mm; bottom:  Canon VT, f/1.9 Canon 85mm; all Tri-X at 800 in D-76) 

 

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UPDATE 11 JULY 2024 (expanded 23 November 2025): The cover of EVO's government-suppressed Extra and my contributions to its photographic content have been thoughtfully resurrected by Scott Orr, the Paris-based publisher of B Scene Zine, in that art magazine's Volume 1, Issue 9 (August 2022), copies of which are for sale at bscenezine@gmail.com. My deepest thanks to Mr. Orr for this welcome blow against censorship, particularly given that the photographs he published were among the very few escapees of the 1 September 1983 arson that destroyed all my life's significant work.

My photograph of the sad-eyed woman below was the image on that issue’s cover but had no chronological connection to the Tompkins Park police  riot. It began its journalistic life as the lead picture on a local story about an abysmally  failed 1971 anti-Vietnam-War demonstration in Bellingham and was probably disseminated by United Press International, as one of my younger friends says she remembers seeing it in a Seattle daily. But the emotion it expresses  is thematically perfect in its present role, and I applaud Mr. Orr’s perceptive choice. Meanwhile the riot itself has authoritatively been connected to the organizational prelude of the Central Intelligence Agency’s infamous Operation Chaos, its clandestine effort to destroy the entire Counterculture.* Given that I could recognize the Counterculture as I did (explanation follows) -- so could the Ivy-League-educated aristocrats the Agency hires as its analysts. See https://www.maebrussell.com/Mae%20Brussell%20Articles/Operation%20Chaos.html -- and, en passant,  recognize therein yet more irrefutable proof Trump is neither accident nor anomaly.

Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 1971, 2022, 2025 (Nikon F, 105mm f2.5 Nikkor, Tri-x at 800 ASA in D-76).

All the images herein were archivally processed and selenium toned c. 1967-1974 and the fire survivors still look as good as new because I printed them on on the best, highest-silver-content photographic paper ever made, the late and still lamented DuPont Varilure, which tragically was discontinued forever in 1973 by the skyrocketing cost of silver triggered by the Arab Oil Embargo. All but one of these photos survived the fire because they were amongst the three dozen matted exhibition prints in my portfolio case, which I had with me the night of the fire. The smirking-cop photo was cropped from an otherwise un-salvageable print dug out of the post-fire rubble in 1984; the image had been the back cover of a Manhattan neighborhood weekly, appropriately the lead illustration of yet a another police-brutality story, the back cover of a Manhattan weekly. But the arson destroyed nearly all my photography, hundreds of prints and contact sheets from thousands of negatives dating to my first camera, given me by my father in 1952 for my 12th birthday. The flames destroyed all my award certificates; most of the contents of my clip books; nearly all my photographic tear sheets; all but five volumes of the annual journal I began keeping in 1956, and all my unpublished writing. What little was saved – including hundreds of negatives that raised my hopes but proved to be too scorched or otherwise too fire-and-water damaged to print – was recovered the rubble in the same excavation that rescued the cop image.

By far the most devastating loss was "Glimpses of a Pale Dancer," a work-in-progress that argued the Counterculture was not the spoiled-youth tantrum our masters wanted us to believe, but was instead the first wave of a spontaneous, potentially global revolution against patriarchy. The product of 24 years of reportorial investigation that consumed most of my days-off, weekends and vacations, it so impressed the late Cicely Nichols, the prominent book editor and longtime friend promised to mother it to major publication much as she had parented Sisterhood Is Powerful (Random House: 1970). But the arsonist(s) destroyed all my research notes, all of the approximately 150-thousand words of extensively footnoted drafts of “Dancer” text and all but 10 of its approximately 150 pre-selected photographs in a blaze lit at the exact moment Cicely and I met in the Lions Head to finalize and celebrate our working agreement. Our anything-for-capitalism-no-matter-how-Evil government in action? Message received loud and clear.

The emotional shock of the fire -- specifically its nightmare obliteration of a consciousness that blended journalism and progressive activism into a life of positive expectations, all of my potential reduced in an indescribably wrenching instant to inescapably wretched, permanently non-productive existence – flung me into post-traumatic depression, just as I’m certain was intended. At age 43, especially without my four filing-cabinet drawers of research notes, there was no possible way to reconstruct 24 years of work, and the realization I now had no more prospects than the Bowery bum featured in the January 1967 image below --  ironically long a mainstay of my working portfolio -- was literally overwhelming. (To potential clients, I typically described it as "a fortuitous grab" in my social-documentary efforts on the Lower East Side; to my political comrades I admitted what it actually was, my best-ever photographic icon  of capitalist reality.)  

 

 Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 1967, 1971, 2025 (Konica FM, 28mm f 2.8 Spiratone, Tri-x at 1600 in Diafine)

It took me so long to recover from the post-traumatic depression that predictably followed the loss of all my life’s efforts, it forced me onto welfare in 1988, which mandates bureaucratic supervision of any subsequent quest for productive employment. The resultant odium excluded me forever from the newspaper and magazine staff jobs that had been my lifeblood since my 16th year, reducing my professional efforts to occasional, woefully underpaid freelancing in a dwindling market. When I protested the bureaucrats' opportunity-killing involvement in my quest for work and threatened a lawsuit against their repeated, brazenly anti-male refusals to refer me to appropriate employers, the always-tyrannical bureaucrats -- the era's real “welfare queens" -- arbitrarily and contrary to the advice of their own bureaucrat-psychologists proclaimed me “unemployable” and in 1990 forced me onto Social Security as a permanently disabled person. Though no longer depressed and now officially retired -- I shed the always-hurtful stigma of “disabled welfare bum” in 2005 -- I disclose these  facts for three reasons:  

• firstly to exemplify how disabled people on welfare are undoubtedly the most scorned and despised demographic in this realm, which is today, post-Nazi-Germany, by far our species’ most incorrigibly self-destructive Hatefully Christian Nation;
• secondly to exemplify the operational meaning of the infinitely damning numbers I discovered in my investigative reporter’s swan song, a briefly Internet-published and quickly suppressed 1995 freelance expose´ revealing that from 1970 through 1990, our federal, state and local welfare bureaucrats nationally increased their salaries and other administrative costs by 5,390 percent – say again 5,390 percent (not a typo) – even as they slashed stipends and services to impoverished and/or disabled persons by 66 percent;
• lastly, to point out that this (mostly unreported) financial treachery is yet another of the key factors that prompted so many (politically ignorant) members of the 99.9 Percent to embrace Trump and the terminally ecogenocidal apocalypse these ChristoNazi tyrants are inflicting on ourselves, our fellow living creatures and our Mother Earth.

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*As noted, a  credible report I encountered by accident three or four years ago reported the CIA involvement in the riot. Regretfully I do not remember the source,  and the link I bookmarked at the time was lost forever when Firefox radically shrunk and revised my bookmarks in 2023 with an infuriating intrusion they described as a routine update. Therefore I extensively searched the Internet for it before writing this footnote -- time spent 14.5 hours over two days -- but had no success. What I do remember is the article stated that the captain who temporarily replaced  Capt. Joe Fink -- the nominal commander of NYPD's Ninth Precinct, which includes Tompkins Park -- had CIA connections. The report suggested he was put in place to enable the riot, which was then provoked on CIA command by some of the neighborhood's Ukrainian Nazis,  war criminals to whom the U.S. was giving sanctuary from Soviet prosecution. (These are the people who are in the background in the lower two of the above photos; in both images they are cheering the cops.)  The report also said that the CIA's provocation of the riot was a prelude to its war against the Counterculture, Operation CHAOS, which officially began in August of 1967. I will keep searching, and if I can find it, I'll of course post the link here. Meanwhile, my apology; obviously, the fact I despise book-keeping and am thus a truly awful clerk has again bitten me on my backside.  

LB/23 November 2025             

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