Behold this delightful reel of home movies shot in Times Square on the above date. Theaters are showing Dean Martin as Matt Helm in ‘The Silencers’, Paul Newman as ‘Harper’ and the supposedly worst movie ever made (it isn’t but it’s pretty lousy) ‘The Oscar’ is proudly in its first–and probably last–run. The legendary mid-town Howard Johnsons makes an appearance, a Horn and Hardat automat is still alive and well and the whole vibe is very 60s Manhattan. The area was then in transition and we can feel the onset of the seediness that overtook it just a couple of years later. Most of this is shot from the middle island–perhaps the tourist who photographed it was afraid to cross the street?–and it gets a bit repetitive but I love zoning out on the city and its period energy. As I write this Times Square is thirty or so blocks from me but it’s this Times Square that I would take a walk to and visit, not the present repulsive, over-crowded, weed/vape/smoke filled assault on the senses that it’s become. This is the midtown that my father ventured into every day (he worked at Rockefeller Center, just a few blocks from here). On this date, twenty or so blocks north, I was a one-and-a-half year old being ushered about Central Park. Also on this date the following events appeared, courtesy of Wikipedia:

On the day this video was shot Leonid Brezhnev was elected unanimously as the party leader of communist party of Soviet Union. Time magazine released one of its most controversial cover “Is god dead?” and two boys, aged 13 and 12, who ran away from their homes in North Carolina, sneaked on to a railroad box car and then found themselves locked inside for the next 13 days. The sealed car was carrying a cargo of nearly empty beer bottles to the Schlitz Brewing Company in Wisconsin, and for nearly two weeks, they survived by drinking small amounts of stale beer, until April 21, when they arrived in Milwaukee and workmen at the brewing company heard their cries for help.