Talkin' "White Lotus" in NYC

 

Once Upon a Time in Greenwich Village ... or ... Where Watergate Began

One fine day -- around noon on March 6th, 1970 to be exact, nearly 55 years ago -- a townhouse located at 18 West 11th Street exploded. In this beautiful, serene part of Greenwich Village, an unimaginable act of terror had occurred.

But not really. The explosion was an accident. 

Inside several young people who were part of the left-wing terrorist group the Weather Underground had been building bombs. They were planning to cross the river and attack Fort Dix in New Jersey, then Columbia University, but these young, brash, radicals had no experience handling explosives -- and tragedy ensued.

This very public act of (accidental) domestic terrorism freaked the city out -- as well as the White House of President Richard Nixon. And it set off a chain reaction that eventually led to the first Presidential resignation in American history.

In the aftermath of the Greenwich Village explosion, a young White House aide named Tom Huston wrote a 43-page memo. Dubbed the Huston Plan, it outlined how the US government should fight back against groups like the Weather Underground -- including break-ins, kidnapping, intercepting mail, wiretapping, blackmail, psy-ops, all kind of nasty and ILLEGAL stuff. Huston presented his plan to then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. No stranger to the dark arts of surveillance and disruption, Hoover actually rejected the plan -- he didn't want his agents to be put into a position where they might get arrested by local law enforcement and, as an old man, he no longer had the stomach to explain this kind of stuff to Congress. So he dismissed the Huston Plan and that, so it seemed, was that.

Nixon was pissed. He didn't want any more domestic terrorism on his watch and he ordered the plan implemented anyway -- until he backed off. But the idea that his White House might have to freelance on its own to stop America's domestic enemies remained a widely held belief amongst All the President's Men.

A year later, in April 1971, the Pentagon Papers were leaked to the press. This massive, secret report detailed how the United States had gotten mired in the Vietnam War and lied about being able to win an unwinnable war. The Republican President Nixon, at first, actually was delighted about the leak -- the Pentagon Papers indicted Nixon's two Democratic Presidential predecessors, JFK and LBJ, over their handling of the war -- and viewed it as a political boon for him. But then his National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger, told him that if the Communist Russian and Chinese governments saw that someone could leak secret information to the press and get away with it they would think that he, Nixon, was a "weakling." 

Nixon flipped out. He ordered that the man who had leaked the Pentagon Papers to the press, a former Pentagon aide named Daniel Ellsberg, be prosecuted or neutralized. And Nixon didn't want anymore leaks or terrorism or anything like it -- thus the White House Plumbers, a secret group of former FBI and CIA agents, to do dirty jobs for the White House to "plug" the leaks.

In the fall of 1971 two Plumbers -- G. Gordon Liddy and Howard Hunt -- broke into the Los Angeles office of Daniel Ellsberg psychiatrist to find information about him that they could use for blackmail. They found nothing and ended up smashing up the doc's office. They returned to the White House empty handed, the Plumbers were disbanded.

But what should have been the end of the story was only the beginning. 

Hunt and Liddy were sent to the Nixon reelection committee called CREEP (Committee to Re-Elect the president). Even though this two dopes had messed up their previous assignment, the geniuses at CREEP decided to put them in charge of "black advance" -- spying in Nixon's potential Democratic opponents and sabatoge their campaigns. Eventually this led to Hunt and Liddy and a group of Cubans breaking into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee on June 17, 1972. Thus Watergate, the most consequential political scandal began. And two years and two months later, on August 9, 1974, Nixon would resign the presidency.

It's hard to realize that such momentous history happened within less than five years in the early 1970s. And obviously Watergate is the famous scandal in history.

The seeds of this most American tragedy weren't planted in the White House or even in Washington, DC -- it happened here on the streets of NYC, where history is always happening, once upon a time. 

"True Detective" Comes to Jamaica Bay

Fourteen years ago I blogged extensively about my visit to Jamaica Bay. A massive wildlife refuge and national park located on a variety of islands in southern Queens, it's a world unto its own, part of the "blue highways" of America in a remote part of of NYC.

It's just another reminder of how huge and geographically diverse this city is.

Well, the HBO anthology show True Detective has apparently now discovered this area too. After previous seasons set in rural Louisiana, Los Angeles, the Ozarks and the wilds of Alaska, the upcoming season of True Detective will take place in Jamaica Bay.

There's no word yet on what the story will be -- it's still being written, apparently -- and no word on who will star in it (it's not yet cast) but, no doubt, I will certainly blog about when it finally premieres (scheduled for some time in 2027, around the 20th anniversary of this blog).

I'm a big fan of True Detective (although the quality of the seasons has been very uneven) but I think setting the next season in Jamaica Bay is quite brilliant -- a mysterious part of the country's biggest city, a place where doubtless lots of bodies and secrets have been buried. The idea of it is intriguing. I just hope it's good!

"Twelfth Night" on Live from Lincoln Center -- August 30, 1998

I remember seeing this production in the summer of 1998. The star power is unbelievable. It was a fun time!

You can read more about Live from Lincoln Center, including my own experience, here. 

NYC is Under Criminal Control

One of the reasons why I keep this blog running is because I feel like I'm recording history in real time. Journalism may be the first draft of history but this blog is sort of like the messily edited, marked up version before the second draft is completed.

So in this Year of Our Lord 2025 in the City of New York in the United States of America, here's the situation that history will have to try to reckon with: the Mayor of New York City is under indictment and under the control of the President of the United States who's a convicted felon.

The Mayor of New York City is under indictment and under the control of the President of the United States who's a convicted felon.

This is dystopian stuff, the abnormal that has become normalized. Right now NYC is under complete control by criminals. I never thought, never imagined, we'd be in such a situation and that apparently this is what the people of this city and this country want!

And it's having terrible side-effects: the mayor's top deputies are resigning, the people we need to keep the city running are bailing out, fleeing this profoundly messed up situation. I can't blame them but we need them!

And to make it worse: the hot gossip is that the corrupt former governor of New York State might be the criminal mayor's replacement! 

What the hell is going on? We must, as a city, demand better -- and vote for it!

"Saturday Night Live" @ 50

Here's the very first episode of SNL ever broadcast in 1975:

And here's some of the 50th anniversary celebration in 2025:

And here is the complete Mr NYC SNL archive here.

Mayor Adams: Should He Stay or Should He Go?

New York State Governor Hochul has the power to remove NYC Mayor Eric Adams from office. 

Will she do it? 

Adams is deeply compromised because the Trump "Justice" Department is ordering the dropping of Adams' corruption charges but the actual Federal prosecutors on the case are refusing to do so. Resignation is following resignation -- a rolling Constitutional Crises. 

This is an NYC version of the 1973 Watergate "Saturday Night Massacre."

Growing up in decades right after Watergate, I assumed that something like this could never happen again. That America would never elect a bad, corrupt president again. But we did -- twice -- and it's even worse than fifty-something years ago. 

And it's taking NYC with it!  

From Bill Bramhall in the Daily News -- February 12, 2025

"I Shot Andy Warhol" (1996)

I remembering seeing this movie in the summer of 1996. It blew me away and I'm happy that the entire thing is now available on YouTube. Watch it here.

You can also review the Mr NYC Andy Warhold archive here and read more about the life of Valerie Solanas and the SCUM Manifesto. 

Classic Mr NYC

In 2021 I blogged about the infamous NYC madam Polly Adler.

Now there's a great little video bio of her you can watch.

But remember, you heard about her here first -- Mr NYC ahead of his time!