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.
Saint Mark's Place features a wide variety of retailers. Venerable institutions lining St. Marks Place include Gem Spa, Yaffa Caf, 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.
Notable buildings and sites
The three block street has numerous historic and notable addresses:
#2 Beginning in 1962 it housed The Five-Spot, one of the city's leading jazz clubs. Innovators such as Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker and Charles Mingus all appeared there. It later became "The Late Show", a vintage clothing store that was popularized by The New York Dolls and owned by their valet, Frenchie.[2] GG Allin also lived in the building.
#4 The Hamilton-Holly House was built in 1831 by Thomas E. Davis and sold to Colonel Alexander Hamilton, the son of Alexander Hamilton, first Secretary of the Treasury, in 1833.[3] From 1843 to 1863 it was owned by Isaac C. Van Wyck, the candle and oil merchant. The building was owned from 1863 to 1903 by butter merchant John W. Miller, who added a two-story addition and a meeting hall on the first floor. From 1901 until 1952 the building was owned by the C. Meisel company, a manufacturer of musical instruments. Between 1955 and 1967 it housed the Tempo Playhouse, New Bowery Theatre, and Bridge Theatre, noted for experimental theater, music, dance, and independent film.[3] In 1964 it housed the New Bowery Theatre, a showcase for the American Theatre of Poets. From 1967 until 1975 it housed Limbo, the street's first "hippie" clothing boutique[citation needed], and later became the location of Trash and Vaudeville, a clothing store.[2] The building was designated a New York City landmark in 2004.[1]
#6 The Modern School, founded in 1901 in Barcelona by Francesco Ferrer, opened a New York branch here in January 1911. It was led by anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, who founded the Francisco Ferrer Association in 1910, "to perpetuate the work and memory of Francisco Ferrer", who had been executed in October 1909 for plotting to kill Alfonso XIII, the King of Spain, and masterminding the events of Tragic Week, a mass riot in and around Barcelona.[4] Beginning in 1913 the building housed the Saint Marks Russian and Turkish Baths. In 1979 the building was renovated and renamed the New Saint Marks Baths, a gay bath house.[5] The New Saint Marks Baths was closed by the New York City Department of Health in 1985, due to concerns of HIV transmission. The building subsequently housed a Kim's Video and Music location, until early 2009.
#8 The New York Cooking School, founded by Juliet Corson in 1876, was the country's first cooking school. It figured prominently in the city's first known Mafia hit in Manhattan, the 1888 killing of Antonio Flaccomio, when it was La Triniria Italian Restaurant. 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" and "Airless Spaces", in the seventies and eighties. Home to Jonathan Lasker, American abstract painter.
#12 Designed by William C. Frohne and built in 1885, as the clubhouse for the Deutsch-Amerikanische Schuetzen Gesellschaft ("German-American Shooting Society"). The facade says Einigkeit macht stark ("Unity is strength"). The building is a remnant of Kleindeutschland ("Little Germany"), the home of many German immigrants from the mid-19th Century until the General Slocum disaster of June 15, 1904.[6] The building was designated as a landmark in 2001.[1] This was the original location of the St Mark's Bookshop,[5] before it moved across the street. In the late seventies it housed The New Cinema, featuring film and video by independent filmmakers, including Eric Mitchell, Anders Grafstrom, Scott and Beth B, Jim Jarmusch, Charles Ahearn and Amos Poe.
#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 mid 70s. The main floor and basement of the building were for many years St. Mark's Bookshop,[5] now around the corner, at 31 3rd Avenue.
#17 Site of the first Hebrew-Christian Church in America, in 1885.[2]
#1925 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.[7]
#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[6] 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.[5]
#27 In the 19th and early 20th century, this was Children's Aid Society's Girls' Lodging House.[2]
#28 From 19671971, 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 196768; 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, Cyndi Lauper, Debbie Harry, and Joey Ramone.
#34 Location of the East Side Bookstore, 1960s1980s. Home to the band Dee-Lite, in the 1980s.
#51 In the early 1980s, this was home to 51X, a gallery that featured graffiti art, 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, Kenny Scharf, David Wojnarowicz, Wendy Wild, The Fleshtones, and Fab Five Freddy performed or showed 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[8] 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.[8] 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.[9]
#79 Home of author Ishmael Reed
#80 Home of Leon Trotsky.[9] Theatre 80[10] 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[11]
#85 The 1871 birthplace of Lyonel Feininger, the painter and caricaturist.
#94 Home of UNDER St. Mark's Theatre, alternative performance venue[12]
#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. Marks 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."[8]
#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[13] and is now the site of George Jackson Academy.[14]
#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-, a neighborhood caf where Jeff Buckley performed a regular spot on Monday nights. Other musicians such as David Gray and Katell Keineg also performed there. Sin- closed in the mid-1990s.[15]
Music
In the video for the Rolling Stones's "Waiting on a Friend", Mick Jagger and Peter Tosh are seen sitting on the stoop of 96-98 St. Mark's Place.
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.[16][17] 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.
Earl Slick's 2003 solo album Zig-Zag features a song called "Saint Marks 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 album We Are Only Riders by The Jeffrey Lee Pierce Sessions Project features a song called "Saint Marks Place", a duet with Lydia Lunch.
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."
Kirsty McGee's Frost album (2004) contains a song called "Saint Marks Place".
The Tom Waits song "Potter's Field" from his 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."
The Sharp Things album, Foxes and Hounds, features a song called "95 Saint Marks Place".