St. Mark's Place (Manhattan)
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St. Mark's Place is a street in the East Village neighborhood of the New York City borough of Manhattan. It is named after St Mark's Church in-the-Bowery, which was built on Stuyvesant Street but is now on 10th Street. St. Mark's Place once began at the intersection of the Bowery and Stuyvesant Street, but today the street runs from Third Avenue to Avenue A.
The street has long hosted alternative retailers, appealing in recent years particularly to suburban teenagers. Venerable institutions lining St. Mark’s Place include Yaffa Café, Crif Dogs and St. Mark's Hotel. There are also a number of authentic Japanese restaurants and bars, as well as many record stores with rare and competitively priced merchandise.
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[edit] History: cultural and countercultural
St. Mark's Place has often figured prominently in New York's counterculture. In the St. Mark's Hotel (formerly the Valencia Hotel) at the corner of Third Avenue, at 2 St. Mark's Street the St. Marks Ale House is the former site of The Five-Spot, long one of the city's leading jazz venues, known as a base for innovators such as Thelonius Monk. G.G. Allin also lived in the building. Number 4 was the Bridge Theater, associated with Yoko Ono and other Fluxus artists; it is now the Trash and Vaudeville clothing store. Number 6 once held the anarchist Modern School; Emma Goldman once served on its board. Later, the same building was a gay bathhouse. Across the street, number 13 was one of the last homes of Lenny Bruce; the main floor of the building was for many years the redoubtable St. Mark's Books. Abbie and Anita Hoffman lived in the basement of number 30 in 1967–68; the Yippies were founded there. East of Second Avenue, number 51 was home to 51X, the gallery that broke graffiti art into the mainstream, representing artists such as Keith Haring, and Jean-Michel Basquiat, and abstract expressionist painter Joan Mitchell lived and painted at number 60 from 1951 to 1957. Leon Trotsky and W.H. Auden each lived at number 77, Ted Berrigan at number 101, and Klaus Nomi at number 103. Club 57 was an important performance spot in the late 1970s. Number 122 used to be Sin-é, a neighborhood café where Jeff Buckley performed a regular spot on Monday nights. Other musicians like David Gray and Katell Keineg also performed there. Sin-é closed in the mid-90s. [1]
The Led Zeppelin record Physical Graffiti features a front and back cover design that depicts the carved face buildings 98 & 96. The album's front-cover displays an inexplicably centered & full daytime view of the buildings but the back-cover displays the same two buildings at night. The view is inexplicable in the sense that if you stand on the opposing north side of the street, you will be much too close and low to obtain the view captured on the cover. Furthermore, the actual building has five visible stories (discounting the basement level) whereas on the album cover, it only has four, the result of photo touching up. The original album jacket for the LP included die-cut windows on the building shown on the cover; as the inner sleeves for the discs were inserted in different orientations, various objects and people would appear in the windows. Number 98 currently houses the Physical Graffiti boutique and number 96 has Starfish & Jelli, clothing, accessories and gifts.
The street has also figured in the more mainstream culture and in the history of New York charity. Number 4 was home to James Fenimore Cooper from 1834 to 1836, and the Pearl Theater (number 80) was the site of the premiere of You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown. The New York Cooking School at number 8, founded by Juliet Corson in 1876, was the country's first cooking school. Number 27 was the Children's Aid Society's Girls' Lodging House and number 52 was part of the Hebrew National Orphan Home, whose main entrance was on 7th Street. Number 60 was St. Mark's Hospital of New York City.
St. Mark's Place has some far seedier history than merely being home to countercultural figures and institutions: Number 8 was the site of one of mid-19th-century New York's leading abortionists, and also figured prominently in the city's first known Mafia hit in Manhattan: the 1888 killing of Antonio Flaccomio (the killer dined there with his victim, then stabbed him a few blocks away). Numbers 19–25, as Arlington Hall, were the site of a 1914 shootout between "Dopey" Benny Fein's Jewish gang and Jack Sirocco's Italian mob, an event that marked the beginning of the predominance of the Italian American gangsters over the Jewish American gangsters; the same building was later the Electric Circus, home to Andy Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable.
In August 1988, 200 protesters marched down St. Mark's Place and into Tompkins Square Park in the East Village of Manhattan to protest a newly-passed curfew for the park. A riot erupted when police (who eventually numbered 450) brutally charged the crowd. Bystanders, artists, residents, homeless people and political activists were caught up in the police action that took place on the night of August 6 and the early morning of August 7, 1988. The event has become known as the Tompkins Square Park Police Riot.[1]
[edit] Traffic
Vehicular traffic runs east along this one-way street, but driving is not recommended. The city narrowed the sidewalks to improve vehicular travel, but this resulted in most of the pedestrians walking on the street at night when the area is most active. For years retailers and residents have petitioned the city government to re-widen the sidewalk.
[edit] References
- ^ "Melee in Tompkins Sq. Park: Violence and Its Provocation," by Todd Purdham, The New York Times, August 14, 1988, Section 1; Part 1, Page 1, Column 4; Metropolitan Desk
[edit] Sources
- 8th Street/St Marks Place: New York Songlines – A history of buildings and establishments along 8th Street.
