ExplorerPod.com

New York has many streets of distinction and world fame, Broadway is about as well known as any street in the world. U2 Way this week at least is a close second.  But another well known street, The Bowery pre -dates all the famous streets of America.    Our friends at East-Village.com will take you on a guided tour and history lesson of The Bowery.

The legendary street we know as the Bowery ( a derivative of the Dutch word for “farm”, bouwerij) was at one time a Native American footpath which wound through swampy marsh and thick forest between modern day Battery and Central Parks.

8th Street (and what is now called St. Marks Place between 3rd avenue and avenue A), was a smaller path which crossed the Bowery path at modern-day Astor Place. Between 1812 and 1816, 2nd and 3rd Avenues were developed and ran through what had once been Peter Stuyvesant’s farm (roughly spanning modern day 4th and 23rd streets.)

E. 8th Street was created in 1826, and the first block of St. Marks Place (E.8th Street between 3rd Avenue and 2nd Avenue) was developed by English born real estate developer Thomas E. Davis in 1831.

Davis, capitalizing on the success of neighboring Astor Place, erected a handful of generous-sized town houses on spec (some of which still exist), and sold them off to some of New York City’s elite.

Residential development slowly expanded east along St. Marks Place between the 1830s and 1850, when Tompkins Square Park was opened to offer the wealthy community a large open-space recreational area.

By the end of the century, with the large influx of European immigrants arriving on the Lower East Side, many local estate owners started selling off their lots to tenement developers, and the area’s working-class roots began to take hold.

By the 1950s, students, artists, musicians, and free spirits of all persuasions moved into the area. Here they settled in among the remaining Ukrainian and Polish working-class and the newly arrived Puerto Rican immigrants who settled in Alphabet City.

During the 50s, widely influential cultural movements emerged in the neighborhood, including Bebop, the Beatniks and the Abstract Expressionism; In the 60s, the “alternative” arts and theater experiments and radical activism; Nuyorican music, arts and poetry of the 1970s; the Urban Contemporary Graffiti and Pop artists of the 80s, truly an age of experimentation and creativity in America.

St. Marks place (as well as the greater lower East Side) has played an important role in political, artistic, social, and medical advancements in the United States. Some of the worlds most influential people spent time here.

So, next time your strolling around comparing prices on everything from tattoos to bubble tea, consider the following events in St. marks history:

4 ST. MARKS PLACE:
The Hamilton-Holly House is an 1831 landmarked, Federalist style building which has housed the clothing store Trash And Vaudeville since 1971 (and has sold spandex to famous and not so famous rock and rollers ever since.)

Founding-Father Alexander Hamilton’s widow and his son’s family were the original occupants in 1833 (Alexander Hamilton was killed in a pistol duel with Arron Burr a few years prior.)

8 ST. MARKS PLACE:
In the 1860s this was the site of Madame VanBuskirk’s abortion clinic; by the 1870, it was home to the New York Cooking School; by 1888, it was home to an Italian Restaurant where the city’s first mafia killing was recorded.

17 ST. MARKS PLACE:
In 1885, this was the site of the first Hebrew-Christian Church in America, whose goal was to convert Jews to Christianity.

19-25 ST. MARKS PLACE:
Now home to a sprawling mini-mall, this was originally the site of three buildings built by Thomas E. Davis in the 1830s. It was, in different incarnations, the site of everything from a National Guard riot, a German singing hall, a Polish community center, a banquet hall which hosted speeches by Theodore Roosevelt and William Randolph Hurst; and a famous mob shoot-out.

Oh, that is just up until the first half of the 20the century. By the 1960s, this was home to the famous Electric Circus and Dom nightclub, which hosted performances by Jimi Hendrix and the Grateful Dead and gave birth to the careers of Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground, among others.

24 ST. MARKS PLACE:
This building housed the offices of the Children’s Aid Society in the 19th century. The Children’s Aid Society was founded in 1853 on 9th Street and Avenue B (across from St. Brigid’s Church) where between 1853 and 1929, more than 150,000 abandoned, abused and orphaned children were rescued from the streets and slums of New York City and taken by train to start new lives with families on farms across the country.

In just a five-month period over the winter of 1875, the Children’s Aid Society’s five Manhattan lodging sites provided lodging for 68,982 needy, and served about 277,200 meals.

28 ST. MARKS PLACE:
From 1967-71 the storefront was occupied by Underground Uplift Unlimited (UUU), a head shop that invented and produced iconic buttons and posters with slogans like “Make Love, Not War” and “More Deviation, Less Population”. UUU was the largest seller of protest pins in the country and sold hundreds of different political, social and Vietnam protest pins for 25 cents each, many of which today can be worth hundreds of dollars.

30 ST. MARKS PLACE:
In 1967, American counter-culture icon Abbie Hoffman invented the YIPPIE movement in this building, where he lived with his wife Anita Hoffman. The Yippie offices then moved to 9 Bleeker Street (which is now a Yippie museum/cafe).

This is just a SAMPLE from ONE block of St. Marks Place.

To read more details about these events and others, visit: [east-village.com]

The East Village History Project [east-village.com]