The Origin of the Amish Druids in the East Village

The Amish Druid Liberation Front arose out of a heretical Amish cult in the late 1960s centered around a young Amish powwow artist who left the faith to go and live on East 13th Street in New York City's East Village. At the time East 13th Street between Avenues A and B was the center of a burgeoning Mennonite colony founded by the "I-W Boys" who had come to the city to do their alternate service at local hospitals. Soon they were joined by other Mennonite farmboys -- gays, hippies and nogoodnik rebels -- who found the strictures of Mennonite life in rural Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana altogether too binding and suffocating for comfort.

The gays played the organ or sang in the choir at upscale uptown Episcopal churches. The rebels founded a bicycle repair shop named "Toga" on Avenue B. The hippies sat on the fire escapes grooving to the sound of the mammoth Con Ed plant on 14th St and wrote poetry long into the night. And they all replaced the sacrament of Holy Communion, generally observed twice yearly in the churches back home, with weekends of experimental drug use -- pot, hash, amphetamines, LSD, and cheap wine -- in the new holy land of Tompkins Square Park. Soon they were joined by some of the more free-spirited and adventurous Mennonite women, who chafed after their own fashion at life in the hinterlands.



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