Forty Years Ago Today in City Hall Park: The Fiftieth Anniversary Celebration of Women's Suffrage

Here are a couple of pictures we took at City Hall Park exactly forty years ago today, on the morning of Wednesday, August 26, 1970, the fiftieth anniversary celebration of the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment guaranteeing women's suffrage. It was a historic day and it opens Gail Collins' recent magisterial history of the American women's movement.

Here's fiery Manhattan Congresswoman Bella Abzug, well known for her floppy hats and her fighting liberalism.

Abzug would never win her primaries for mayor or senator but remained in Congress for a number of years. Next to Speaker Tip O'Neill, she was probably the most well-known member of the House.

In the pic above, she's talking to New York City Consumer Affairs Commissioner Elinor Guggenheimer (who the previous year had finished fifth in the primary for city council president, managing to beat only Norman Mailer's ticket-mate, the incomparable writer Jimmy Breslin).


Above is Guggenheimer talking to the press (Ralph Penza of WCBS-TV and others) in City Hall Park at the start of the rally. New York Mayor John Lindsay (for whom we'd worked the previous year, in his unsuccessful June Republican primary and for his winning general election campaign as candidate of the Liberal Party) refused to grant a permit for a march up Fifth Avenue at first, and there was a standoff that later got resolved. The march went on, as in the photo on top of this post, but we didn't stay for it. Hey, we were only a stupid teenage boy.

To Guggenheimer's right in the last photo of the rally you may recognize Betty Friedan, whose book The Feminine Mystique, in which she discussed "the problem with no name" that American women faced, really launched second-wave feminism in this country.



The lady below seemed to be fighting for her own rights, though we're not sure of the relevance to women's liberation:

Here's a protester more in the spirit of the day::

We can remember that placard really well: Male Chauvinist, You Better Start Shakin', Today's Pig is Tomorrow's Bacon!



We've got our diary entry for that day in our book, Summer in Brooklyn: 1969-1975, as well as the collected Brooklyn Diaries. Lots has changed, in Brooklyn and the world, since those days, but we feel privileged to have been even just a witness at 1970's Women's Liberation Day.

Dumbo Books publishes THE BROOKLYN DIARIES by Richard Grayson; available on Amazon Kindle

Dumbo Books has published THE BROOKLYN DIARIES by Richard Grayson. It is available in a large-sized (8.5" x 11") 623-page paperback edition for $39.99 and as an ebook at the Amazon Kindle store for one dollar.

It is a compilation of all six books of Richard Grayson's diary entries: SUMMER IN BROOKLYN (1969-1975), AUTUMN IN BROOKLYN (1978), WINTER IN BROOKLYN (1971-72), SPRING IN BROOKLYN (1975), MORE SUMMER IN BROOKLYN (1976-1979) and A YEAR IN ROCKAWAY (1980). The book is also available for free as a download at Lulu or Scribd.

Richard Grayson's MORE SUMMER IN BROOKLYN: 1976-1979 Now Available as Paperback or as eBook on Amazon Kindle

This week Supersition Mountain Press published Richard Grayson's More Summer in Brooklyn: 1976-1979. It is available in a 234-page trade paperback edition for $14.99, as well as an Amazon Kindle edition published by Art Pants Company for 99 cents.

The promo stuff says in part,

The author of WITH HITLER IN NEW YORK, LINCOLN'S DOCTOR'S DOG, I SURVIVED CARACAS TRAFFIC and other short story collections has kept a daily diary for forty years, since he was 18 in the summer of 1969. Here are entries from his diary for summers from 1976 to 1979 as he struggles with adulthood and his fledgling writing career, from his first acceptances by magazines to the hardcover publication of his book by a large New York publisher. Set in 1970s New York City, this is a vivid picture of what it was like to be a struggling young artist in that era.

It is also available on Scribd for free online reading.
may also be downloaded for free. It is the fifth volume of The Brooklyn Diaries, following Summer in Brooklyn: 1969-1975, Autumn in Brooklyn: 1975, Winter in Brooklyn: 1971-72, and Spring in Brooklyn: 1975.

Forty Years Ago Today in Brooklyn: May 15, 1970: Brooklyn College reacts to Kent State

From our diary:

Friday, May 15, 1970

It remained cool and cloudy. I woke up early and while Mom was in the beauty parlor, I drove around and took Steven to Tilden [High School] - there's been race friction there. I went to the camera store and I got back the BC photos from last week, which were uninteresting.

I finished writing Mark [in National Guard basic training at Fort Polk]. It's funny communicating with him like this.

When I arrived at school, Paul was working on the second special edition, which may come out Monday. I went to SUBO and with Leonard attended a meeting of the Brookyn chapter of the Movement for a New Congress. The main campaign in the area is Peter Eikenberry's fight to unseat Rep. [John] Rooney.

I had a quick bite and found that the Spigot office had been turned into Strike Central. They even repaired the telephone. I went into the next office and sat around with Alan Ullman and the others for awhile.

Dr. Bonchek [psychology professor] is standing up for his principles, however idiotic they may be, and is giving us a final and two quizzes next Friday. He got so exercised about the whole thing, I thought he'd have a stroke. . .

Two black students were killed by police at Jackson State College in Mississippi. Everyone is saying we're in the gravest crisis since the Civil War.

We'll end our May 1970 diary entries here. Although we were around campus all summer taking summer school courses (see our book Summer in Brooklyn for some entries), people started drifting off to the beach, jobs in the city or beach resorts or as counselors at sleepaway camps, or lured by cheap flights to Europe like those on the Icelandic "vomit comet."

A New York Times article, "19 students Seized in occupation of the New School," by Linda Charlton on Tuesday, May 26, 1970, began

Most of the country's college campuses were quiet yesterday, although National Guardsmen still patrolled Ohio State University and 19 students were arrested for occupying a graduate school building of the New School for Social Research in New York City.

Also in New York City, the governing board of the 18-college City University system adopted a resolution calling for a two-week recess immediately before the election next November 3, to allow its 180,000 students to take part in the election campaign. (Here's Basil Paterson, 1970 Democratic candidate for Lieutenant Governor, campaigning that summer at the Junction.)

The resolution was submitted by Chancellor Albert H. Bowker, who had said at the Brooklyn College exercises Friday that the frequent closing of colleges in response to such events as the United States troop move into Cambodia might be well-motivated but "are pointless in terms of their impact." The action by the City's Board of Higher Education follows similar action at a number of other colleges and universities.

We worked in several campaigns in the 1970 election, mostly right away for Pete Eikenberry in Brooklyn Heights and Williamsburg, but he lost the June primary to hawkish Rep. John Rooney. During the two-week pre-election recess, we worked with our friend Mark in the campaign of Westchester Rep. Richard (Dick) Ottinger, the Democratic (and Conservation Party) candidate for the U.S. Senate seat held by Republican-Liberal Senator Charles Goodell. Here's a pic of Ottinger campaigning by the BMT station at Kings Highway between East 16th and East 17th Streets. For more of our 1970 political photos, go here.

Although Democrats and peace candidates made gains in the 1970 elections, in New York State, Rep. Ottinger and Sen. Goodell split the liberal and antiwar vote and the Senate election was run by a Vietnam hawk and war supporter, Conservative Party candidate James Buckley.

At Brooklyn College, we tried to mobilize a strike and other actions the following spring in response to CUNY budget cuts (below is a leaflet we designed that we found a few years ago displayed in an exhibit at the Brooklyn College Library)

and the widening of the war in Southeast Asia with the incursion into Laos, but the May 1970 shutting down of colleges in response to Cambodia and Kent State was the high point of campus peace activism.

But we don't want to fall prey to nostalgia. Student activism at Brooklyn College is alive and well forty spring semesters later. Here, in a photo taken just a few weeks ago by John Salmone for the Brooklyn College Excelsior, are students marching on campus through the Campus Road gate protesting Gov. David Paterson's proposed CUNY tuition hike and budget cuts.

Looks a lot like 1970 to us.

Forty Years Ago Today in Brooklyn: The First Earth Day in Prospect Park on April 22, 1970

On Earth Day four years ago, Louise Crawford, the doyenne of Brooklyn bloggers kindly published our diary entry about the first Earth Day in Prospect Park on Wednesday, April 22, 1970. We'd like to reprint it forty years later:

A warm & sunny Earth Day. Mark called & asked me to come with him to the Union Square rally. Mayor Lindsay closed off 5th Ave. & 14th St. to traffic & the crowds were enormous.

But I didn't feel like getting into so big a crowd & went by myself to the smaller Prospect Park rally. I parked the car on 8th Ave. & walked to the meadow. A singing group called the Smubbs, dressed as pigs, sang about pollution. They also sang a song to the tune of "Give My Regards to Broadway" that was "Give my regards to Brooklyn / Remember me to Bartel Pritchard Square."

Then Gov. Rockefeller

made a speech saying, "If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the pollution." He had a lot of trouble with hecklers...

Walking back to the car when the rally ended ended, I was stunned to see Rocky waving to me from a bicycle! Too bad I'd used up all my film.

Dad came home and said he was booed by the crowd as he drove through the streets near Union Square and people banged on his Cadillac. The TV reports said the crowds were disappointing.

It remains to be seen what will be done about our environment.

--Richard Grayson

More of our diary entries from age 18, long before the age of blogs, are featured in Dumbo Books' Summer in Brooklyn.

Sunday Morning in Williamsburg: Complacencies of the Peignoir and Nature in Our Own Backyard

After getting our laundry done at the Metro Laundromat by 7 a.m., we headed for our own Dumbo Books HQ backyard, which on this late summer Sunday morning seems to be returning to a state of nature.

Who says Williamsburg isn't green?

The grapes on the vine look good.


Four hundred years ago, when Henry Hudson sailed, we figure much of north Brooklyn looked like this, no? Only without apartment buildings.

Some of the figs have ripened, but most have not, it looks like.


These buildings face Metropolitan Avenue.

It was cloudy and cool early this morning.


Twice we got tangled up in the vines as they met and held us prisoner momentarily.




We really like the vines getting all tangled.


The vines are climbing up the fire escapes.


And plants are growing by the steps to the back door.

We're really, really grateful to have use of this great Williamsburg backyard.

It's a perfect place to sit early Sunday morning to drink iced tea and read the newspaper.