The Whole Story

The first cognitive memories that I have of St. Mark’s Place, the name designated to the stretch of East 8th Street between Avenue A and the Bowery, date back to the early 1990s. There was music blaring out proudly from every store front on the block, in every genre and subgenre one can imagine. The stoops and side stairs of many a shop or apartment had gangs of punks drinking out of paper bags or spitting on the graffiti covered doorsteps. The air smelled thickly of cigarette smoke and incense from the many head shops where would sell bongs and other trinkets, some of them hawking from displays outside the main store front right out on the sidewalk. Further up the block past a couple dive bars and eccentric clothing shops, in the shadow of Kim’s video, (which if it existed today would still have a far larger and more culturally varied selection of movies than either Netflix or Hulu) was the legendary Trash and Vaudeville, where it was quite common to see the manager Jimmy out front, who with little prompting would orate extensively about adventures with Alice Cooper, or the New York Dolls, or Guns and Roses coming to the store. Here and there would always be stumbling a toothless crazy or two who’d wandered down from the Bowery Mission, smelling powerfully of liquor and asking every adult in sight if they could spare a cigarette, whether they were smoking or not. Growing up, St. Marks was always this nucleic masterpiece of counterculture reflective of the social evolution of the East Villlage as a neighborhood, but I believe that this microcosmic representation actually goes back quite far in the rich history of St. Mark’s Place, and is likely to continue into the future.
The land on which St. Mark’s place was built was originally owned by Peter Stuvesant, who served as the Director General of the New Amsterdam, who purchased the Bowery (which is an anglicism for the Dutch word bouwerij ) in 1651. Although little remains of the bygone era of Peter Stuyvesant, his grave still remains at St. Mark’s-in-the-Bowery Church, which was erected over his own private chapel on nearby 10th Street, and which gave the block its namesake.
St. Mark’s place has been a home to many significant characters in our country’s history. One of the earliest and most prominent was Eliza Hamilton, the widow of the former secretary of the treasury, Alexander Hamilton. After being left in a great amount of debt by her late husband, Eliza moved herself, her daughter, her adult son and his wife into one of the large federal houses built by real estate developer Thomas E Davis between 1831 and 1833. Of those early residential structures only three still stand today, one of which is number 4 St. Mark’s, which was the address of Eliza Hamilton, and to this day is still referred to as the Hamilton-Holly House. The Hamiltons also would have been neighbors to James Fenimore Cooper, writer of such books as The Last of the Mohicans, The Deerslayer, and The Pioneers, who lived at number 6 St. Mark’s Place at the same time in history.
By the mid 1800s the area surrounding Tompkins Square Park was facing a large influx of German immigrants, causing the area known today as the East Village to be given the sobriquet Kleindeutschland (which means “Little Germany”). There are still a few hints of German heritage visible today on St. Mark’s, in particular a building that still displays the sign of the Deutsche-Amerikanische Schützen Gelleschaft (“German American Shooting Society”). During the Civil War this was a meeting place and social club for German-American militia companies, and during the decline of their cultural influence, the clubhouse became a vital link for a lot of German New Yorkers to their roots and their old neighborhood.
As the immigrant population expanded at ever-accelerating levels in the late 1800s and early 1900s, the population in the East Village grew to include not just Germans but many Russians, Ukrainians, Poles and displaced Jews who had escaped persecution in Europe. A Russian public bath, was erected at number 6, where James Fenimore Cooper had once lived. During the early twentieth century, number 80 St. Mark’s Place became home to the Russian revolutionary and politician Leon Trotsky. At the time he was writing for the Novy Mir (“New World”) which had its headquarters at 77 St Mark’s Place.
As the neighborhood evolved culturally the style of the housing evolved as well, from private family homes, to profitable boarding houses, and then faced with mounting populations with and limited funds, to tenement houses. At the time the tenement situation was considered neither cruel nor unusual for the average East Villager. After many campaigns from real estate developers encouraging wealthy New Yorkers to move to the Uptown, and West Village areas, and the dissolution of the Elevated Subway systems (known as the “El Trains”) providing easy access to the East Village area, much of the neighborhood fell into disrepair and squalor, and as more people got off the boat at Ellis Island and spilled out into Lower Manhattan, the problem grew worse for decades, making tenement living a very typical experience for most people of the era and social class of that period on the block.
It was at this time that the poet W.H. Auden moved into one of the rooms at number 77 St. Mark’s (where the paper Trotsky had written for had existed just a few years before). Like many of the tenement slums in the East Village, Auden’s St. Mark’s apartment did not include a lot of what today we consider basic human needs for a living space. Indeed, he had to use the bathroom at the liquor store next door because his apartment was not equipped with toilet facilities. Nevertheless, W.H.Auden made St. Mark’s his home for many years, settling there until right before his death. There are stories of sightings of him sitting at the Holiday Cocktail Lounge, at number 75 St. Mark’s, sitting alone with his drink, at times writing furiously in a leather-bound notebook. He was even a parishioner at St. Mark’s-in-the-Bowery during his time living on the block.
The middle of the Twentieth Century saw St. Mark’s yield to the beatnik generation, with poets like Allen Ginsberg taking up residence above Gem Spa (which incidentally is not a spa but a delicatessen once known for its egg creams which is still there to this day) and writers like William S Boroughs and Jack Kerouac frequenting the cafés and galleries which had sprung up in place of the drab tenement storefronts. 1962 saw the birth of The Five Spot, arguably one of the city’s most influential jazz clubs, which hosted performers like Thelonius Monk and Charlie Parker. In the late sixties when the hippies descended on the block en masse, a club called the Electric Circus opened up in the space between 19 and 25 St. Mark’s. This space took counter-culture entertainment to a new level for its time, with flame throwers, wild light shows, psychedelic art exhibitions, and a variety of music, from experimental bands like The Velvet Underground to jam bands like the Grateful Dead. Electric Circus was also a frequent performance spot for Jimi Hendrix.
But the sixties wasn’t just a time for creative structural development for St. Mark’s or the surrounding area. This time period also saw the stirrings of creative social change with the arrival of Abby Hoffman, who came to live at Number 30 St. Mark’s Place. Along with Jerry Rubin and notable comedian Lenny Bruce, who lived at number 13 St. Mark’s, Hoffman founded the Youth International Party (known colloquially as “Yippies”) who gained notoriety for their theatrical gestures when making political statements that tend to lie in the realm of anti-authoritarian and anarchist thought.
The anti-establishment attitude of the yippies paved the way for the following generation of punks, who would take over St. Mark’s in the 1970’s and hang on until the late nineties. Cutting-edge gallery spaces were opened like 51X and Club 57, showcasing work by street artists like Keith Haring, Jean Michel Basquiat, and performances by Klaus Nomi (another resident of St. Mark’s Place himself). The seventies saw the birth of the Manic Panic boutique, the country’s first destination for punk rock attire, which sold its own line of brightly colored hair dyes, bullet belts, studded jackets and leather pants, and attracted famous clientele like David Bowie, who used to live nearby on Lafayette Street, or Debbie Harry, Cyndi Lauper, and Joey Ramone. Trash and Vaudeville popped up around the same time, and catered to the growing crowds of punk and metal heads, as well as the performers they worshipped. In 1979, the Russian bath house was converted into the New Saint Mark’s Baths, a notorious gay bath house that was shut down in 1985 due to concerns over the spread of HIV in the East Village, and subsequently became Kim’s video for the next quarter of a century. At this time GG Allin, one of the most extreme voices of the punk music movement, known for his envelope-pushing antics on stage and in public, was living at number 2 St. Mark’s Place. Number 96 Saint Mark’s Place became the headquarters of the Anarchist Switchboard, a punk activist group formed in the 1980s that still provides those jaded with conventional societal beliefs with an outlet for influence.
Throughout the years St Mark’s has acted as a concentrated reflection of the growth and cultural change in the surrounding East Village neighborhood, and while that has consistently been the case there is a growing concern amongst long-time residents that the block is losing its unique, eccentric quality that has driven people there for so long. This is an understandable viewpoint when we see the internationally famous restaurant Dojo, a St. Mark’s institution since the early eighties and a favorite of the artists, hippies, beatniks and punks alike, shut down in 2005 and replaced immediately by a PinkBerry, with a Chipotle following closely across the street. Seeing a 7-11 pop up on the block where the Vintage Store Andy’s Cheepee’s used to be was a very big blow to the city’s counter-culture scene, and many concerned citizens have been bemoaning the end of the era of creative expression on the block. While it is unfortunate to see franchises surfacing in an area of New York that has for the better part of a century been known for birthing some of the most radical anti-establishment creative movements in our history to date, it is nice to see that there are some unique restaurants opening up and down the block, and this wave of epicurean globalization may give way to a whole new cultural movement, which it could be argued is an apt reflection of the current social state of the East Village at large, as we see this latest increase of immigration to this particular area. Over the centuries the neighborhood has seen waves of gentrification, de-gentrification and re-gentrification and St. Mark’s Place has evolved several times over to complement that. So it does not seem like this street, with its rich cultural history and influence over the East Village, New York and the world at large, is in any danger of losing its unique sense of spirit and inspiration. It is simply finding a form for the next generation to shape it into.