'Mad Men' notes: New York becomes an LSD playground

A mind-twisting exhibit at the Riverside Museum, formerly at 310 Riverside Drive/103rd Street, makes it on the cover of a national magazine. But not everybody would enjoy the trip.


WARNING The article contains a couple spoilers about last night's 'Mad Men' on AMC. If you're a fan of the show, come back once you're watched the episode. But these posts are about a specific element of New York history from the 1960s and can be read even by those who don't watch the show at all. You can find other articles in this series here.

Sure, it's 1966. I thought maybe Peggy Olsen might be the one to trip the light fantastic. (She was otherwise engaged this week.) But I never expected hallucinogenics to materialize as they did on last night's 'Mad Men'. After a staggeringly serious dinner party narrated with empty philosophical conversation, Roger Sterling and his wife are invited to take the drug LSD by their host. Far from the dorm rooms and basement clubs of Greenwich Village where one might expect such experimentation, this evening of psychedelia was presented as a drawing-room intellectual exercise, with serene music unspooling from a reel-to-reel and no object more trippy than a mantel mirror.

Lysergic acid diethylamide, which I doubt can actually be said while experiencing its effects, was considered a mind-opening tool for some early psychiatrists, laying bare subconscious feelings and forcing the user to confront difficult issues in a surreal environment. By the mid '60s, its leading advocate was Timothy Leary (below), a psychologist who had studied the benefits of psychedelic drugs to explore the mental capacities. Today we might naturally lump him with the trappings of '60s counter-culture, but in 1966, with the parameters of psychiatry still in flux, his experiments also appealed to intelligentsia.

The depiction of 'Mad Men's after-dinner drug soiree seem to follow Leary's instruction quite explicitly. In 1966, he advised, "Don't take LSD unless you are very well prepared, unless you are specifically prepared to go out of your mind. Don't take it unless you have someone that's very experienced with you to guide you through it. And don't take it unless you are ready to have your perspective on yourself and your life radically changed, because you're gonna be a different person, and you should be ready to face this possibility."

An article in March 25, 1966, LIFE Magazine laid out the details of the drugs in almost an introductory fashion. "A black market dose costs only $3 to $5. But that's enough to send a person on a 10-hour 'trip'."

The same article also underscored a growing fear: "A few pounds of it dumped into the water supply of a major city would be enough to disorient millions."

The federal government had been concerned of this supposed conspiracy as early as the 1950s, fearful that Russians might pollute New York's water and "turn drug-addled American citizens against their own government." [source] Of course, the CIA itself experimented with LSD during this period with its covert Project MKULTRA, which conducted experiments in New York during the mid-50s, using prostitutes and junkies they found in local bars in Greenwich Village. An experiment performed on CIA operatives themselves led one agent in 1953 to leap from a window at the Statler Hilton, today's Hotel Pennsylvania. (Or was it murder?)

By the 1960s, the drug had become a virtual entrance exam for New York's blossoming counter-culture music scene, or so the more hysterical believed. "In New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles, a girl just off the bus from Boise can find it quicker than the YWCA merely by asking around for 'a trip'," warned Life Magazine.

The fear of an unwitting populace overtaken with LSD only grew with the 1960s, and this time, some thought it was New York's counter-culture rebels itself who may be wielding it.  A 1967 journal opined on the urban legend with all seriousness. "[A] single ounce will provide fuel for 300,000 trips, reported one periodical, and it is believed that a few pounds dumped into the water supply of New York City would disorient the nearly 8,000,000 residents."

Perceptions of LSD were slowly divorced from its supposed therapeutic qualities, especially as the drug soon found itself as the subject of films like Roger Corman's 'The Trip' and 'Enormous Midnight', where town water supply is poisoned with LSD and turns its citizens into orgiastic zombies. In New York, LSD entered the club world; hallucinogenic mid-60s destinations like Cerebrum and the Electric Circus (which became Andy Warhol's preferred spot in 1966) seem almost conceivable without it.

New York legislators quickly vowed to outlaw the new drug. Bellevue Hospital reported over 200 new patients affected by the drug. In April 1966, two local crimes energized the press: a Brooklyn girl accidentally ingested a sugarcube coated with LSD, and a week later, a ex-mental patient killed his mother-in-law, allegedly under the influence of the drug. With the Stagger-Dodd bill in 1968, the possession of LSD became illegal in the United States.

While that effectively ended the living-room therapy sessions such as the one experienced by Roger Sterling, the drug, now underground, would increasingly influence all aspects of New York bohemian culture.

From the Cerebrum club mentioned above:






Pictures courtesy Newsweek and Life Google Images. For more information on the CIA's LSD experiments, you might be interested in watching this video.


If you're watching 'Mad Men' when it broadcasts at 10 PM EST, then follow along with me on Twitter at @boweryboys. I'll be giving a live fact-Tweeting, dropping little factoids about the events being depicted on the show

Rays of light: Madonna and the music video club, 1984

Girl gone wild: Madonna enjoys the video opulence of Private Eyes with former boyfriend and producer Jellybean Benitez, July 17, 1984

It's 1984, and the hottest trend in American pop culture is the music video . MTV had debuted a channel of non-stop music videos in 1981, and just three years later, most new pop superstars were being defined by them-- Michael Jackson, Prince, Duran Duran, Cyndi Lauper, Wham, Culture Club.

One of the more notable New York club opening in the summer of 1984 was Private Eyes, a trendy gay lounge at 12 W. 21st Street, poised to meet the video future with full-on glittery radness. With MTV revolutionizing pop music by the early 80s, nightclubs rushed to incorporate the new trend into their aesthetic. At Private Eyes, clubgoers needn't have worried about a frenetic disco floor; they were literally invited to be mesmerized. "There is no defined dance area -- it's like a living room with the coffee table pushed aside." the owner told Billboard magazine in November 1984.

The club was state-of-the-art for its day, with almost three dozen television sets, an immense library of 3/4th inch VHS cassettes and the technology to make "beat-for-beat transitions between videos, as well as wipes, fades and full mix effects for the club's six tape decks." New York Magazine listed it among their 'environment clubs' of 1984, "like a department-store television section, except at Private Eyes you can have a beer and you can't change the channel."

In its opening months, Private Eyes scored a few appearances by music video's biggest female star of the day -- Madonna.

As a friend of owner Robert Shalom, Madge allegedly swore by the club, sometimes popping in after a day of recording her album Like A Virgin over at the Power Station studios on W. 53th Street*. "I don’t have MTV," she remarked. "I do see videos, I go to Private Eyes."  Her record label hosted a party in celebration of her new album, released in November that year. Several months later, Madonna was photographed at the club with her rowdy companion Sean Penn on their first date.

Below: Madonna, inside Private Eyes with Grace Jones, sometime in 1984, perhaps both having difficulty watching music videos with sunglasses on

The strict notion of a 'video club' in New York faded when it became cheaper for smaller clubs to install multiple screens and access video material. And, of course, as more common clubs joined the video revolution, the swankier ones eschewed it. Dance clubs that did opt for visual entertainment embraced ambient sets of computer animation by the early 90s, often leaving standard music videos for MTV and other cable networks. (Eventually even MTV left music videos.)

Private Eyes morphed with the times, eventually becoming the Sound Factory Bar in the 1990s, a spin off of sorts to the renown but troubled all-hours club on W. 27th Street, in the shadow of the West Chelsea's elevated tracks. It refreshed its image a few years later under the name Cheetah.

Madonna, who had starred in five music videos by the time she first stepped foot in Private Eyes in the summer of '84, has gone on to make a total of sixty-nine of them, including one that was just released this week.

*The year before, Bruce Springsteen recorded portions of 'Born In The U.S.A.' in the same studios.


Top picture courtesy Life Google images. Second image courtesy Madonna Scrapbook

J. Edgar Hoover parties at New York's hottest nightclub

Work hard, play hard: The FBI director in his early days

There are at least three scenes in the new Clint Eastwood-directed J. Edgar Hoover biopic 'J. Edgar' set in New York, one of which might surprise you.

The first features Hoover on Ellis Island, but he's hardly there to greet new arrivals. The FBI director's early career was spent ferreting out and deporting anarchists, and his biggest target was Emma Goldman. On October 27, 1919, Goldman was put on trial at Ellis -- in the film, the Statue of Liberty stands at odds in the background -- and she was eventually expelled from the United Statues using a tenuous interpretation of the status of her American citizenship.

The second scene, depicting the rural Bronx of 1933, typified Hoover's career in the 1930s as a stiffly facaded embodiment of law enforcement. Here the movie envisions the arrest of Bruno Hauptmann, accused kidnapper of the child of Charles Lindburgh. Hoover's interest in the case represented an expansion of federal powers for the agency, even if Hoover's actual involvement is questionable.

But it's the third view of old New York that I found more intriguing. Hoover was a teetotaler early in life and demanded his agents aspire to clean, moral living. So its interesting that he -- and his companion Clyde Tolson -- were regular habitues at New York's hottest nightclub of the 1930s -- the Stork Club.

Sherman Billingsley, a former bootlegger, would have been made Hoover's enemy list during Prohibition. Instead, he regularly hosted the FBI director as his swanky club at 3 East 53rd Street (at Fifth Avenue).

Hoover schmoozed here with people who were useful to him, journalists like Walter Winchell who assisted with the capture of most-wanted criminals from his banquette in the Cub Room. The unscrupulous columnist was instrumental in the surrender of Louis "Lepke" Buchalter, leader of the mob's assassination unit Murder Inc., and helped play up the image of Hoover's G-Men to his millions of readers. In return, Hoover sometimes provided Winchell with FBI employees as bodyguards or drivers.

Winchell and others considered the Stork Club an invaluable nexus of social connections, and Hoover too made it his hangout when he was in town, often downing champagne and chatting with glitterati. The director was so associated with the nightclub in the 1930s, Tolson at his side, that adversaries sometimes called him 'the Stork Club detective'.

In a telling incident a few years later, in 1951, iconic entertainer Josephine Baker was denied service at the Stork Club. She filed a complaint with the police department, and supporters organized a protest outside the nightclub (pictured at right). When it was recommended that Hoover intervene on the behalf of Baker, he replied, "I don't consider this to be any of my business." [source]

Here's a collection of photos of the Stork Club with musical accompaniment. Mr. Hoover appears in one image around minute 2:40:


Stork Club logo courtesy Daddy O's Martini blog