8th Street and St. Mark's Place

Tribute in Light as viewed from St. Mark's Place, Sept. 11, 2006

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; nevertheless, the street is somewhat of a crust punk haunt. Venerable institutions lining St. Mark’s Place include the Yaffa Café, Sock Man, the St. Mark's Hotel (one of the few hotels in the city to still offer hourly rates), St. Mark's Comics, Trash & Vaudeville, and a handful of open front markets that sell sunglasses, and silver jewelry. There are also a number of authentic Japanese restaurants and bars, as well as many record stores with rare and competitively priced merchandise.

Notable addresses

The glare from St. Mark's Place and its bawdy air.

The three block street is incredibly historic, but unlike Greenwich Village, was never gentrified by a large influx of residents, retaining its atmosphere.

• 2 - The present St. Marks 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.
• 4 - home to James Fenimore Cooper from 1834 to 1836 later the Bridge Theater, associated with Yoko Ono and other Fluxus artists; it is now the Trash and Vaudeville clothing store.
• 6 - the anarchist Modern School; Emma Goldman once served on its board. Later it was the Bruce Mailman-owned New St. Mark's Baths during the gay liberation era; 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).
• 13 - One of the last homes of Lenny Bruce in the mid-1960s; the main floor of the building was for many years the redoubtable St. Mark's Books.
• 19–25, as Arlington Hall, 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 same 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, with the Velvet Underground serving as the house band; by 1967, the Dom morphed yet again into the Electric Circus, home to Andy Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable.
• 27 - Children's Aid Society's Girls' Lodging House.
• 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."
• 30 - Abbie and Anita Hoffman lived in the basement in 1967–68; the Yippies were founded there.
• 33 - home to poet Anne Waldman in the late 1960's/mid-1970s; in 1977, the storefront had Manic Panic, the first U.S. boutique to sell punk rock attire and developed its own line of make-up and vibrant hair dyes; Manic Panic had visits from numerous performers, including: David Bowie, Cindy Lauper, Debbie Harry, and Joey Ramone.
• 34 - 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.
• 52 - annex to the Hebrew National Orphan Home, founded in 1912 and had its main entrance on 7th Street.
• 57 - Club 57 was an important performance spot in the 1970s and 1980s, including Keith Haring, Klaus Nomi, John Sex, Wendy Wild, The Fleshtones, and Fab Five Freddy.
• 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.
• 75 - the Holiday Cocktail Lounge has had a range of visitors including Allen Ginsberg and other Beat writers, Shelley Winters, and Frank Sinatra (whose agent lived nearby).
• 77 - home of Leon Trotsky and W. H. Auden.
• 80 - Theater 80 saw the premiere of You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown in 1967.
• 85 - the 1871 birthplace of Lyonel Feininger, the painter and caricaturist.
• 94- Home of UNDER St. Marks Theater, alternative performance venue

96 & 98 St. Mark's Place

• 96 & 98- The Led Zeppelin album Physical Graffiti features a front and back cover design that depicts the carved face buildings 98 & 96. Keith Richards and Mick Jagger are in front of same building in the Rolling Stones music video "Waiting on a Friend". The front cover of Physical Graffiti displays a daytime view of the buildings and the back-cover displays the same two buildings at night. The view on the front cover is not based on a natural perspective. If you stood on the opposing north side of the street, you would 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. Prior to this, number 96 was the home of the Anarchist Switchboard, a 1980s punk activist group.
• 101 - home of poet Ted Berrigan.
• 102 - home of independent filmmaker Scott Crary.
• 103 - home of singer/performer Klaus Nomi in the 1970s.
• 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 / preservation.
• 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-1990s.

Popular culture

On the southwest corner of St. Mark's Place and Second Avenue, at 131 Second Avenue, is Gem Spa, a news stand and cigarette store, which is known for its fountain egg creams. On the self-titled first New York Dolls Lp, the band is pictured in front of Gem Spa on the back cover. The narrator of Tom Paxton's "Talking Vietnam" blues, upon smelling marijuana on someone's breath during the Vietnam War remarks "He smelled like midnight 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 Replacements' 1987 song "Alex Chilton" contains the line, "Checkin' his stash by the trash at St. Mark's Place."

Protests

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) 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.

Today, few notable artists remain on the thoroughfare, although indie film director Jonathan Blitstein has an office on the block near 3rd Avenue.

Traffic

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.

In 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.

Sources

• 8th Street/St Marks Place: New York Songlines – A history of buildings and establishments along 8th Street.
• http://www.fodors.com/news/story_3018.html