In the May 28, 1970, issue of The Villager, an article described the arrest of 20 New School students for “criminal trespass” after they refused to vacate the Graduate Faculty Center at 65 Fifth Ave. The arrested students accused the administration of “hypocrisy” for calling the police on them and going against the school’s “reputation of liberalism and leftism.” The protest had started as part of a nationwide student strike over the “invasion of Cambodia by U.S. troops” three weeks earlier.
The same issue of The Villager reported that police were still sifting through the ashes and rubble of 18 W. 11th St., searching for clues to the identity of the last of three bodies found in the wreckage left when the Weathermen blew up the building. The article described “a series of dynamite explosions March 6” and letters from the Weathermen to The New York Times bragging that “the various Weathermen being sought by police and the FBI had not left the country, and that, indeed they came and went at will in American cities.”
As part of a 1970 initiative to improve and increase New York’s correctional facilities, local Congressmember Ed Koch gave questionnaires to 1,750 prisoners, with envelopes to be returned to him, the paper reported. About half responded. Influenced by the questionnaires and what he saw during his tours of the Tombs, Koch requested, and was granted, approval from Governor Rockefeller for methadone to be provided to incarcerated addicts.
In 1970, Village residents were, even then, up in arms about “high-density, luxury apartment construction,” according to a Villager article in the May 28 issue about a zoning hearing.
In The Villager’s announcement of the 75th birthday of Romany Marie, “one of the most beloved of the Bohemians,” in the paper’s May 26, 1960, issue, Marie was said to often declare that the Village “just isn’t the Village it used to be.”
In the same issue, an editorial about Memorial Day reminded readers that there would be a moment of silence on the morning of the holiday and asked them to “observe it and offer up a prayer that somehow, someway peace will be forever preserved.”
On May 24, 1960, New York members of the Episcopal Society for Cultural and Racial Unity held a panel discussion of southern students who participated in sit-ins in favor of integration in the South, part of the society’s efforts “to rid the church of all divisions based on race, color, national origin or class.”
Lilly O’Donnell
