Where It All Goes Down
1960s New York
Flowers for Algernon takes places in rollicking 1960s New York, around the same time the book was written. We're out of the era of the poodle skirt and just getting into the groovy kind of radicalism that pops up in the 1970s. People with disabilities are fighting for their rights and slowly gaining some ground, and super cool activists like Edward Roberts have a lot of big goals, like making places accessible to people in wheelchairs. Charlie mostly stays out of the big-city limelight, but we'd like to think he'd be protesting right alongside them if he could.
When Charlie first visits Beekman Lab, he tells us that pretty much everything looks the same. He takes a series of tests in "[t]hat same place but a differnt littel testing room," then heads on over to a room with lots of cages that "had a funny smel like old garbidge" (6-7). Charlie is about to learn that his initial impression of the sterile, clinical lab is just an illusion—instead, he gets a peek into the zoo-like, smelly underbelly of Beekman.
Charlie doesn't seem all that interested in the Big Apple until he finally makes a break from the Beekman gang in Chicago. After he moves back, everything looks different: "New York! All the things I've read about it! Gotham…the melting pot…Baghdad-on-the-Hudson" (171). New York explodes into color just as Charlie starts figuring out his independence. Even then, though, he never really gets to experience all of the big-city things he wants to do—he sees New York more as a fantasy than as a place to live permanently.