Many streets across America vie for the title of “hippest,” from Portland’s Alberta Street to Austin’s South Congress Avenue and San Francisco’s Valencia Street. Each boasts a unique cultural flavor and fervent supporters. New York City, a global hub of cool, offers its own contenders. While Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street are globally recognized symbols of the city, and streets like 110th Street in Harlem, Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village, and Ludlow Street on the Lower East Side resonate through music and lore, Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, might currently hold a strong claim to the crown of “hippest” with its trendy vibe.
However, journalist Ada Calhoun offers a compelling and personal perspective: for her, the unequivocal coolest street in America is St Marks Place in New York’s East Village. This is not just a casual observation; it’s a deeply rooted conviction born from growing up on this iconic street, a history she meticulously and lovingly chronicles in her book, St Marks is Dead: The Many Lives of America’s Hippest Street.
From its origins in 1651, when Peter Stuyvesant acquired the land from the Dutch West India Company, this seemingly small three-block stretch in Manhattan has cultivated an extraordinary concentration of cultural and historical significance. It’s a place where luminaries seem to have congregated per square inch more than almost anywhere else on the planet.
The street has served as a backdrop and a home to a staggering array of influential figures. Leon Trotsky and W.H. Auden, figures of immense political and literary stature, both resided here. Literary giants like James Fenimore Cooper, the author of Last of the Mohicans, also called St Marks Place home. Andy Warhol, a defining figure of pop art, operated a nightclub on this very street, further cementing its avant-garde credentials. The street’s visual identity has been immortalized on album covers by iconic bands like the New York Dolls and Led Zeppelin, capturing its distinctive street-corner bodegas and geometrically striking fire escapes. Music videos by the Rolling Stones and Billy Joel have also used St Marks Place as a vibrant urban stage. Debbie Harry, the face of Blondie, once lived at No. 113, while Beat Generation icon William S. Burroughs resided at No. 2. Adam Horowitz of the Beastie Boys famously penned the lyrics to “Paul Revere” while sitting on the steps of Sounds Records at No. 20. Adding to its musical legacy, Jeff Buckley recorded his critically acclaimed debut EP, Live at Sin-é, at No. 122.
St Marks Place has also been a cradle for progressive movements and institutions. Anarchist activist Emma Goldman established the Modern School here in 1911, attracting figures like Man Ray as a student and literary giants Jack London and Upton Sinclair as teachers. The legendary Five Spot jazz club, located at the corner of St Marks Place and Third Avenue, hosted jazz titans such as Billie Holiday, Thelonious Monk, Ornette Coleman, Charles Mingus, John Coltrane, and Miles Davis, shaping the landscape of modern jazz.
The street’s gritty yet vibrant atmosphere served as the setting for the controversial 1995 film Kids, directed by Larry Clark, which featured local residents like Rosario Dawson and skateboarder Harold Hunter, adding another layer to its counter-cultural narrative. Calhoun’s book vividly recounts the street’s eclectic social fabric, exemplified by anecdotes like: “When Frank O’Hara ran into Leonard Bernstein, Lauren Bacall, and Jason Robards at a bar on St. Marks Place…” This single sentence encapsulates the extraordinary intersections of art, culture, and celebrity that have defined St Marks Place. It’s a street that has stood at the epicenter of successive waves of immigration – Jewish, German, Italian, Polish, Ukrainian – and pivotal cultural movements, from beat poetry to punk rock, earning it the enduring, somewhat tongue-in-cheek nickname “St Marx,” highlighting its history of radical politics.
Calhoun’s book transcends mere historical recounting; it becomes a spirited rebuttal to the recurring sentiment that New York’s best days are behind it. She argues against a simplistic nostalgia, suggesting that every generation tends to romanticize the past. She posits that future generations will likely look back at the St Marks Place of the early 21st century with similar fondness. This is the St Marks Place where episodes of the HBO series Girls and Comedy Central’s Broad City were filmed, capturing its contemporary vibrancy for a new audience. Theater 80 St Marks continues to host theatrical performances, and Jules Bistro offers live jazz, keeping the street’s performance traditions alive. The street even became the epicenter of spontaneous public celebration when Barack Obama was elected in 2008, erupting in a massive street party. Millennials in the future, Calhoun suggests, will reminisce about entering the speakeasy-style bar Please Don’t Tell through a phone booth hidden within a hot dog restaurant, echoing the clandestine allure of Prohibition-era establishments like Scheib’s Place, accessible via a butcher shop and a hidden alley.
Calhoun’s interviews reveal a consistent pattern: people have perpetually declared St Marks Place “dead,” longing for a bygone era. One interviewee recounts, “In 1953, everyone said, ‘You should have been here during the thirties! It was so great. It’s terrible now.’” This cyclical nostalgia underscores Calhoun’s point that the street’s perceived decline is a recurring theme, not a novel phenomenon.
“When people are saying that St Marks Place is dead I’m like, go there at 2am and tell me about how dead it is,” Calhoun remarked in an interview, highlighting the street’s enduring nocturnal energy. “You see crazy stuff happen … It’s incredible.” Indeed, St Marks Place continues to draw crowds of young people day and night, attracted to its diverse array of bars, restaurants, karaoke venues, clothing stores, tattoo parlors, and e-cigarette shops, maintaining its status as a vibrant hub of activity. On weekend nights, the street pulsates with laughter, conversation, and music well into the early hours. As John Gruen observed in 1966, “Walking on St Marks Place on a weekend night, you become aware of a rhythm. It has an imperceptible underground beat and you feel it increasing as the night wears on,” a sentiment that remains strikingly accurate today.
St Marks Place remains a magnet for counterculture. As a resident, the author attests to the continued presence of “crusty punks” and groups of cannabis-smoking teenagers, contributing to its bracingly nonconformist atmosphere. Despite the arrival of mainstream establishments like Papaya King and Chase bank, the street hasn’t been completely sanitized.
But does St Marks Place still foster creativity to the same extent it did throughout the 20th century? Calhoun firmly believes it does. She points to figures like the burlesque performer Dirty Martini, who resides on the street, and venues like Under St Marks, an alternative performance space that hosts “edgy, weird countercultural performances” every weekend.
Calhoun argues that the creative pulse of St Marks Place may be overlooked in its contemporary forms, just as past countercultural movements were initially dismissed. “When everybody looked at the punks, they thought that was nothing. And when they looked at the hardcore kids, they thought that was nothing, and also scary. And when they looked at the hippies, they seemed like they weren’t going anywhere; they were just high, and weird.” She concludes, “So I think people are very quick to dismiss the teenagers who are on St Marks Place now as nothing and I think: you don’t know yet.”
The opposing viewpoint often centers on gentrification. Calhoun acknowledges the rising cost of living, noting that in 2014, a typical two-bedroom apartment could command $3,450 a month, a sum likely beyond the reach of aspiring artists like a young Debbie Harry starting out today. Jimmy McMillan, founder of the “Rent is Too Damn High” political party, also calls St Marks Place home, highlighting the issue of affordability.
However, Calhoun remains skeptical of the notion of perpetually escalating rents. “A friend of mine … said, ‘Well, you know, rents are just going to keep going up for ever,’ and I thought, ‘That’s not really possible. That doesn’t happen,’” she recounts. She emphasizes the historical fluctuations of St Marks Place, “In the history of St Marks Place you’ve never had a sustained period where rents just keep going up and up and up for more than, like what?, 40 years or something before something happened. It started off richer probably compared to the rest of the city than it is now. In the 1830s [founding father] Alexander Hamilton’s widow lived here. Judges lived here. This was the place where the people who could live anywhere and had all the money chose to live . Now it’s getting really expensive, but I think it’s crazy to think that there won’t be a change at some point. It’s always changed.”
Calhoun also provides a balanced perspective by addressing the less romanticized aspects of St Marks Place’s past. She cautions against glorifying the “Fear City” New York of the 1970s and 1980s, a period often nostalgically portrayed. Growing up on the street during that era, she and other children witnessed “an endless parade of murderers, pedophiles, and drug addicts,” experienced harassment, and encountered disturbing elements in public spaces.
“When you were a child it sucked,” Calhoun recalls. “It was absolutely terrible. It was a really dangerous place. It was filthy. And there were always homeless people sleeping in the lobby. There was always a junkie nodding out on the corner. There were always drug dealers walking down the block, and they’d be hissing at you … I’m like 11; I’m not going to buy pot from you.” She describes the constant sense of vulnerability and the self-protective measures she had to adopt as a child.
Despite the challenges of that era, it was also a period of immense creative output in New York, giving rise to punk, hip-hop, and disco. The arrival of the Gap on St Marks Place in 1988 was seen by some as a symbolic end of the counterculture, but Calhoun, then a young teenager, and her peers were fascinated by it, seeing it as “magical, mysterious” and appreciating its novelty.
Ultimately, Calhoun argues for a nuanced understanding of St Marks Place. While acknowledging the difficulties of the past, she emphasizes the present-day street’s relative safety and pleasantness compared to previous decades. In her book, when she asks longtime residents to identify St Marks Place’s golden age, their unanimous answer is: “Now.” This resounding affirmation suggests that despite ongoing changes and challenges, St Marks Place continues to thrive, retaining its unique and dynamic character as America’s hippest street.
