St. Mark's Place (Manhattan)

Saint 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 on 10th Street at Second Avenue. St. Mark's Place, which is a section of 8th Street, runs from Third Avenue to Avenue A. The block between 2nd and 3rd avenues is a popular shopping destination.

Saint Mark's Place has long hosted retailers, appealing particularly to teenagers. Venerable institutions lining St. Mark’s Place include Gem Spa, Yaffa Café, the St. Mark's Hotel, St. Mark's Comics, and Trash & Vaudeville. There are several open front markets that sell sunglasses, clothing and jewelry. There are also a number of restaurants and bars, as well as several record stores.

Vehicular traffic runs east along this one-way street. 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.

Contents 1 Notable buildings and sites 2 In popular culture 3 References 4 External links

Notable buildings and sites

The three block street has numerous historic and notable addresses:

• #2 – The present St. Mark's Ale House in the St. Mark's Hotel (formerly the Valencia Hotel, 2 St. Mark's Place at the corner of Third Avenue) was for many years The Five-Spot, one of the city's leading jazz venues, known as a base for innovators such as Thelonious Monk, who started appearing there in 1957; GG Allin also lived in the building. It later became "The Late Show", a vintage clothing store that was popularized by The New York Dolls and owned by their valet.^[2]

• #4 – The Hamilton-Holly House was built in 1831 and was owned by Col. Alexander Hamilton, the son of Alexander Hamilton, who purchased it in 1833.^[1] After the Civil War, when St. Mark's Place was the center of Little Germany (Kleindeutschland), the building was used for apartments and a meeting hall.^[1] From 1901–1952, it housed the musical instrument importer and wholesaler C. Meisel. In 1964 it housed the New Bowery Theatre, a showcase for the American Theatre of Poets. It later housed several avant-garde theatre companies, including the Bridge Theater, associated with Yoko Ono and other Fluxus artists. From 1967 until 1975 it was the was second location of Limbo, the street's first "hippie" clothing boutique, and later became the location of the Trash and Vaudeville clothing store.^[2] The building was designated a New York City landmark in 2004.^[1] James Fennimore Cooper lived here in the 1830s.^[3]

• #6 – The anarchist Modern School; Emma Goldman once served on its board.^[2] In the late-sixties it became the Saint Mark's Baths.^[4] It was later renovated and re-opened as the New St. Mark's Baths in the mid-seventies. It subsequently served local cinephiles and music connoisseurs as Kim's Video and Music until early 2009.

• #8 – The New York Cooking School, founded by Juliet Corson in 1876, was the country's first cooking school. It was the site of one of mid-19th-century New York's leading abortionists; at La Triniria Italian Restaurant, it 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).^[2]

• #11 – Home to Shulamith Firestone, feminist, activist, author of "The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution", in the seventies and eighties. Home to Jonathan Lasker, American abstract painter.

• #12 – Built in 1885, designed by William C. Frohne, as the clubhouse for the Deutsch-Amerikanische Schuetzen Gesellschaft ("German-American Shooting Society") a German-American marksmen's club – although they did their shooting elsewhere. The crest at the top of the building says Einigkeit macht stark ("Unity is strength"). The building is one of the remnants of Kleindeutschland ("Little Germany"), the home of many German immigrants from the middle of the 19th Century until the General Slocum disaster.^[5] A New York City Landmark (2001)^[1] This as the original location of the St Mark's Bookshop,^[4] before it moved across the street.

• #13 – Home to Lenny Bruce in the mid-1960s.^[2] Sylvain Sylvain, guitarist for the New York Dolls, lived in the basement apartment in the early-mid 70s. The main floor and basement of the building were for many years St. Mark's Bookshop,^[4] now around the corner on Third Avenue at Stuyvesant Street.

• #17 – Site of the first Hebrew-Christian Church in America, in 1885.^[2]

• #19–25 – As Arlington Hall, this was 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. Arlington Hall also had some notable speakers including Police Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt (1895) and William Randolph Hearst (1905). The building later housed the Dom Restaurant, with its well-known Stanley's Bar – where The Fugs played in the mid-1960s – Andy Warhol and Paul Morrisey turned The Dom into a nightclub in 1966, which served as a showcase for the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, Warhol's multimedia stage show for the Velvet Underground. In early 1967, the Dom morphed yet again into The Balloon Farm. Later that year, the lease was transferred to Brandt Freeman International, LTD, and renamed the Electric Circus.^[6]

• #20 – The Daniel LeRoy House was built as part of an elegant row of houses in 1832, of which this Greek Revival building is the only survivor. It is a New York City Landmark (1969),^[1] and is on the National Register of Historic Places^[5] Daniel LeRoy was related to the Stuyvesant family and his wife was a member of the eminent Fish family.

• #24 -This was the original location of the Limbo clothing boutique, which opened for business in 1965 and moved to #4 in 1967.^[4]

• #27 – In the 19th and early 20th century, this was Children's Aid Society's Girls' Lodging House.^[2]

• #28 – From 1967–1971, this storefront housed Underground Uplift Unlimited (UUU), which created and sold some of the most noteworthy protest buttons and posters of era, including "Make Love Not War."^[2]

• #30 – Abbie and Anita Hoffman lived in the basement in 1967–68; the Yippies were co-founded with Jerry Rubin there.^[2]

• #33 – Home to poet Anne Waldman in the late 1960s/mid-1970s; in 1977, the storefront had Manic Panic, the first U.S. boutique to sell punk rock attire, which developed its own line of make-up and vibrant hair dyes;^[2] Manic Panic was visited by numerous performers, including David Bowie, Cindy Lauper, Debbie Harry, and Joey Ramone.

• #34 – Location of the East Side Bookstore, 1960s–1980s. Home to the band Dee-Lite, in the 1980s.

• #51 – In the early 1980s, this was home to 51X, the gallery that broke graffiti art into the mainstream, representing artists such as Keith Haring, and Jean-Michel Basquiat.^[2]

• #52 – Annex to the Hebrew National Orphan Home, founded in 1912; it had its main entrance on 7th Street.^[2]

• #57 – Club 57 was an important art and performance space in the late 1970s and early 1980s; Ann Magnuson, Keith Haring, Klaus Nomi, John Sex, Wendy Wild, The Fleshtones, and Fab Five Freddy performed there, among others.^[2]

• #60 – St. Mark's Hospital of New York City; later home of abstract expressionist painter Joan Mitchell, where she lived and painted from 1951 to 1957.^[2]

• #75 – The Holiday Cocktail Lounge has had a range of visitors including W. H. Auden, Allen Ginsberg^[3] and other Beat writers, Shelley Winters, and Frank Sinatra, whose agent lived in the neighborhood.^[2]

• #77 – Home to W. H. Auden for almost 20 years.^[3] The basement of this building was the location where the newspaper Novy Mir ("New World" or "New Peace"), a Russian-language Communist paper, was founded in 1916. It was edited by Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin, and Leon Trotsky worked there. The paper stop publishing after the Russian Revolution of October 1917.^[7]

• #79 – Home of author Ishmael Reed

• #80 – Home of Leon Trotsky.^[7] Theatre 80^[8] saw the premiere of You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown in 1967. Formerly the Jazz Gallery, site of the last performance by Lord Buckley. Now also the home of The Exhibition of the American Gangster, a museum of the American Gangster^[9]

• #85 – The 1871 birthplace of Lyonel Feininger, the painter and caricaturist.

• #94 – Home of UNDER St. Mark's Theater, alternative performance venue^[10]

• #96 & #98 – The Led Zeppelin album Physical Graffiti features a front and back cover design that depicts these two buildings, which feature carved faces. Keith Richards and Mick Jagger are in front of same building in the Rolling Stones music video "Waiting on a Friend".^[2]

• #96 – Once the home of the Anarchist Switchboard, a 1980s punk activist group.

• #101 – From the mid-1970s to 1983, the poets Ted Berrigan and Alice Notley, who were married to each other, lived here. In Berrigan's "The Last Poem", he wrote: "101 St. Mark’s Place, apt. 12A, NYC 10009/ New York. Friends appeared & disappeared, or wigged out/ Or stayed; inspiring strangers sadly died; everyone/ I ever knew aged tremendously, except me."^[3]

• #102 – Home of independent filmmaker Scott Crary

• #103 – Home of singer/performer Klaus Nomi in the 1970s. Home of Joey Arias in the 1970s.

• #104 – Location of the Notre Dame Convent School from 1989 to 2002^[11] and is now the site of George Jackson Academy.^[12]

• #105 – Early 1860s home of Uriah P. Levy, the first Jewish commodore of the U.S. Navy and who was also known for purchasing Monticello to work toward its restoration and preservation.

• #122 – This building used to be the location of Sin-é, a neighborhood café where Jeff Buckley performed a regular spot on Monday nights. Other musicians such as David Gray and Katell Keineg also performed there. Sin-é closed in the mid-1990s.^[13]

In popular culture

Music

• On the southwest corner of St. Mark's Place and Second Avenue, at 131 Second Avenue, is Gem Spa, a newspaper, magazine and tobacco store, which is known for its fountain egg creams.^[14][15] On the back cover of the first, eponymous New York Dolls LP, the band is pictured standing in front of Gem Spa.
• The narrator of Tom Paxton's "Talking Vietnam Potluck Blues," upon smelling marijuana on someone's breath during the Vietnam War remarks, "He smelled like midnight on St. Mark's Place."
• In Andy Warhol's Trash, most of the street scenes of Joe Dallesandro were filmed on St Mark's Place.
• In Lou Reed's song "Sally Can't Dance," Sally walks down and lives on St. Mark's Place (in a rent controlled apartment).
• In the King Missile song "Detachable Penis" the search for the missing member ends when the singer states, "Then, as I walked down Second Avenue towards St. Mark's Place / Where all those people sell used books and other junk on the street / I saw my penis lying on a blanket next to a broken toaster oven."
• The music video for Billy Joel's 1986 song "A Matter of Trust" was shot in the Electric Circus building and features extensive footage of the block.
• The Replacements' 1987 song "Alex Chilton" contains the line, "Checkin' his stash by the trash at St. Mark's Place."
• The Tom Waits song "Potter's Field" from the Foreign Affairs album contains the line "You'll learn why liquor makes a stool pigeon rat on every face that ever left his shadow down on St. Mark's Place."
• The Rank and File song "I Went Walking," on their 1982 album Sundown, presents a cynical look at the St. Mark's Place of that time, containing the lines: "Have you ever seen a sheep in a porkpie hat? Ever see a lemming dressed all in black? Well, you might have been there, but I'll tell you just in case: Just take a walk down St. Mark's Place."

Television

• In the Sex and the City season 3 episode "Hot Child In The City", Sarah Jessica Parker's character Carrie goes to get her shoe fixed on St. Mark's Place and ends up dating a man who works at a comic book store on the block. Part of the episode is filmed at the actual St. Mark's Comics.^[16]
• In the opening credits to Saturday Night Live (c.2010), a shot of Cherries adult entertainment store's neon signage is featured in the opening credits.

References

Notes

External links

• "St. Marks Place" at the Lower East Side History Project
• 8th Street/St Marks Place: New York Songlines – A history of buildings and establishments along 8th Street