Saturday Afternoon in Bushwick: Potion Collective presents the Second Annual McKibbin Street Fair

We took the L train from Lorimer Street

a few stops southeast this afternoon

to the start of the Second Annual McKibbin Street Fair on the block of the McKibbin Lofts.

The street fair is a project of Potion Collective,

an evolving, diverse community of musicians and artists

based in Bushwick whose mission is to support and nurture the arts by creating outlets

for artists and enthusiasts

across all mediums to develop, produce and promote their art.

It was a fun event and we're sure since we were there before things got hopping, it's even livelier and crowd-filled about now.

As the New York Times wrote a couple of years ago,

To spend a few days at the McKibbin lofts

is to experience what it is to be young,

hungry for acceptance,

and willing to put up with just about anything

in order to gain a foothold in the city’s

competitive, and thriving, underground art

and music scenes.

This could have been Greenwich Village 60 years ago, or SoHo 30 years ago, or the East Village in the 1990s.

When we got there, the band Miss ng was performing on the McKibbin stage on the north side of the street,

and then Erik Meier did a set on the Potion stage on the south side of the street.

We enjoyed them both and really liked
Miss ng's cover of "Go Ask Alice," but then we're like sixty years old so what would you expect.

The age factor also made us tired after teaching last night and this morning at Brooklyn College,

so we stayed about an hour and then went back to Lorimer Street for what we know nobody else at the McKibbin Street Fair needed: a nap.

But it's really thrilling to live in Brooklyn at a time like this

when interesting stuff and people are all around us.



And while we were there, there was a lot to see,

like great dancing.



Artist/Poet/Emcee/Bboy Nelson "CHIEF 69" Seda was doing body art.

And even a fairly established artist like Antonio Tovar was there with some of his beautiful work.

Sadly, while we were on McKibbin Street, nobody was playing pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey

or hopscotch - yet, anyway.

But there was a lot more going on.

We thought the McKibbin Street Fair was a lot of fun even for old people, at least those who can appreciate things like the songs by Erik Meier (joined later by Bill Batholomew), which were really good.

We are grateful to Potion Collective for being in Bushwick and would have liked to stay longer if we had been younger and less tired.

The street fair was the bomb, something we'd like to see in other places.

Friday Afternoon at Brooklyn College: The Brooklyn College Dorms - Poster at Hillel Gate

Coming on campus via Hillel Gate this afternoon to teach our first class of the semester, we saw this big banner advertising the new Brooklyn College residence hall. Weird to see for old-timers like us (B.A. '73, M.F.A. '76).

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.