Posted on 07/15/2019 6:17:10 AM PDT by reaganaut1
In 1969, Forest Hills was a long way from Christopher Street, and a bizarre incident of vigilante tree chopping showed just how far.
Only days before the Stonewall uprising in Greenwich Village, a mob of some 20 local men descended on the southern edge of Flushing Meadows Corona Park. Using power saws and axes, they leveled a grove of trees that was known as a gay cruising spot.
According to a New York Times report at the time, “15 dogwood trees, 11 London planes, a number of wild-cherry trees and other greenery” were felled. The parks department estimated the trees would cost $15,000 to replace — more than $100,000 today. All while police officers reportedly stood by.
By the morning of June 21, all that remained were heaps of severed trunks and tree stumps oozing sap.
A number of the “vigilantes,” as they were referred to in the press, lived in an apartment complex near the park. A few weeks earlier they had formed a committee and started harassing men who met among the trees. The locals patrolled the area nightly, using walkie-talkies to communicate with one another. When they would find a couple, they shined flashlights on them and rousted the men — who were often closeted, married or both — from the park. Eventually, they razed the site.
An eyewitness to the destruction of the trees, Joan Luxenburg, told The New York Times some days later that she had reported the vandalism to the police in the area and offered to identify at least one of the men, but that the officers ignored her. According to her, the police said that the men “were doing a job which the police were not able to do to the satisfaction of the community.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
All of politics is local.
This is a local neighborhood taking care of itself. Cops don’t have to do EVERYTHING.
LOL! The NYT believes that America loves Queer child rapists. They need to stop watching Hollywood movies and get out amongst the people.
Cutting down the trees was not law enforcement. It was a way to prevent the deterioration of the neighborhood. And, frankly, it doesn’t matter if it was men buggering each other, or heterosexuals having sex, or drug addicts shooting up. It’s about removing a condition that attracts pests.
Ask gardeners about this.
Every rest stop in Connecticut is closed after dark for this very reason.
Those trees had provided much happiness with the hard cider drunk by many generations of free Americans.
Good times, good times...
A friend used to empty pay phones (google it) for the phone company. Him and his fellow workers called the rest areas on the Li Expressway “pickle park” for the goings on there…and in the daytime no less.
I won’t give the Times the click but, on the basis of what you’ve excerpted here I think a couple of things should be pointed out:
1. The Times so so badly wants to talk about how much the world hates gays that it runs this article, as “news,” about something that happened fifty years ago.
2. The headline — “ax wielding” obviously suggests that the ax wielders were going after human beings with axes. Of course if you read the article you find that they were doing with the axes what one is supposed to do with an ax: chop down a tree.
I guess there wasn’t enough “hate” happening yesterday (i.e. enough people doing things that the Times disagrees with) so they had to go find very very old news and then report on that with a distorted headline.
What a shame. Once upon a time it was a good newspaper.
No where do they mention public sex unless i misses that part
Some enterprising blackmailer should install cameras in these places and shake these creeps down. I’m sure their wives would want to know. If only from a disease point of view.
Portland Maine.
cruising hit a high point and there was not a park or promanade that was not filled with jiggling bushes.
Many people left the city.
It is now in leftist hands and although it looks better than other places on the surface, the rot is deep.
The Good Old Days
When, I wonder.
Mostly people did not know how much they were being lied to, not only with what was in the paper, but what was excluded.
Fast forward to a few years ago, a family friend told me that her brother, a homosexual, confessed that gays liked the thrill of these "clandestine" hookups because they brought back the extremely elevated sensations they remember when they first entered the "perverted" lifestyle. This brought to mind the deep-seated hunger that drug addicts have to recreate the high they experienced when they first started using.
Before the psychiatric community cowered under LGBTQ pressure, it was IIRC regularly said that "homosexuality" was nothing more than a perverted form of sexual addiction.
Seems reasonable for the time, to clean up a neighborhood.
It still is,it makes a excellent liner for my cats litter box.
Communities rallied to chase out fags, child molesters, perverts of all stripes. I fail to see the controversy.
This would be the same NY Times that a year before had published the lies about "38 witnesses" to the Kitty Genovese murder.
The NY Times has been in the fake news business for a looooooong time and ANYTHING they publish (or have published) should not be taken at face value
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