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St Marks-in-the-Bowery

Originally a church of Manhattan's elite, St Marks became a progressive force in the neighborhood both socially and culturally. Supportive of immigrant, labor and civil rights, the church was a meetingplace for Black Panthers and Young Lords, and launched the first lesbian healthcare clinic.

Poets like W.H. Auden (who was a parishoner), William Carlos Williams, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Amy Lowell, Carl Sandburg, Kahlil Gibran, Allen Ginsberg, Patti Smith and Jim Carroll have all read here; since 1966, the St Marks Poetry Project has organized poetry events. The Danspace project has featured dance legends like Isadora Duncan, Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham. Sam Shepherd's first two plays were produced here, and Andy Warhol screened his early films.

St Marks Churchyard

Department store pioneer A.T. Stewart, whose store filled the block between 9th and 10th streets east of Broadway, was buried here in 1876, but on November 6, 1878, his body was snatched and held for $200,000 ransom. The widow eventually regained possession of the corpse in 1881, after bargaining the kidnappers down to $20,000. He now rests elsewhere.

St Marks West Yard

West Yard; the space between St Marks' rectory and the church was to be filled in by a 18-story apartment tower designed by Frank Lloyd Wright; with all due respect to Wright, it's a blessing that the Great Depression scuttled the plan. Some of the ancient maples in the yard were lost to the Asian Longhorn Beetle in 2000.

My Neighborhood: The emergence of diversity on Stuyvesant’s land.

David A Bank, April 19 2002.

Writing about my neighborhood requires me to define a  neighborhood.  I live on the northeast corner of 3^rd Avenue and 11^th Street in a New York University dormitory called Third North.  However, it is rather difficult to determine what neighborhood I live in.  I live too far west to be part of the true East Village, too far South to be categorized as Union Square, too far North to be classified with the Lower East Side and too far east to be part of the NoHo or the Central Village neighborhood.  Nonetheless, the buildings surrounding Third North are my neighbors and thus I must have a neighborhood.  I live in a region of extreme diversity; yet this area was once the home of a man who tried to prevent religious and ethnic groups from entering this city.

Peter Stuyvesant was the Director General of the entire colony of New Netherland and thereby the leader of the fort called New Amsterdam .  He initially lived in the Governor’s house in the fort, where he rebuilt the church and established the beliefs of the Dutch Reformed Church as the only acceptable creed within the colony.  In fact, Stuyvesant specifically tried to prevent Jews from entering his colony (Mooney, 1133).  In 1651, Stuyvesant purchased the land upon which I live today from the Dutch West India Company.  In today’s terms, this farm stretched from Houston to 14^th Street and from the East River to 4^th Avenue .  Stuyvesant built a road connecting his farm to the rest of the city that became known as the Bowery because the route passed by the “bouweries”, which means farms in Dutch.  However, my specific neighborhood became Stuyvesant’s manor house and chapel.  It was here that he retired after surrendering to the British in 1664 (1133).

Of course, this land is no longer Stuyvesant’s farm, but one crucial remnant still exists today, albeit in another form.  In 1678, Stuyvesant was buried in a vault below his private chapel.  Over a century later, in 1793, his great-grandson Petrus donated the chapel land to the Episcopal Church to build a new chapel called Saint Mark's Church in-the-Bowery¹ (Saint Mark’s Church website).  It is a remarkable irony that Petrus remembered his great-grandfather Peter by establishing an Episcopal Church on his burial site.  Yet, during his life, Peter prohibited the practice of any belief other than Dutch Reformed.  How could Peter’s own great-grandson be a prominent Episcopalian? 

The Episcopalian church has its roots in the Church of England.  It had tradition and prestige, and by the end of the eighteenth century, any New Yorker who had money and wanted to show it off needed to be an Episcopalian.   Despite all his efforts, it seems that this is one clear example of Peter’s failure in his attempt to prevent diversity in New York .

Nevertheless, St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery, a beautiful, yet somewhat plain looking Georgian style church was finished in 1799 and still exists today on the northwest corner of 2^nd Avenue and 10^th Street .  The Church was built of schist, the very stone that comprises the bedrock of Manhattan .  This utilitarian, grey and somewhat ugly colored stone was chosen for financial reasons.  Schist was cheap because it could be dug up and cut on site without paying for stone from a quarry.  St. Mark’s was the “first Episcopalian parish independent of Trinity in the new world” (Saint Mark’s Church website).  This very independence meant a lack of funds, thus schist was an obvious choice. 

The church has since been through a number of additions.  Architect Ithiel Town added the Greek revival clock tower and steeple in 1828.  In 1854, the Italian cast iron porch, with ionic columns and a simple balustrade completed the church (Wolfe, 124).  The porch was designed at a similar time to the surrounding houses that have brownstone fronts and rusticated bases.  These houses stretch along 10^th and Stuyvesant Streets forming Renwick Triangle, named after the architect who built them, James Renwick Jr. (Morrone, 97-98). 

It is interesting that in 1861, the date Renwick completed these row houses; he had already completed Grace Church and was in the process of building St. Patrick’s Cathedral.  Renwick was also a wealthy Episcopalian.  His mother’s family, the Brevoorts, had owned the land on which Grace Church was built.  To me, the prestige of the archtiect strongly suggests that Renwick’s Italian style row houses, which today form part of the landmarked historic district, were built as the most luxurious of homes for New York ’s old mercantile class, the gentry of New York City .  As an aside, it is interesting that Renwick, an Episcopalian, was chosen as the architect of St. Patrick’s, the magnificent, new Catholic Cathedral.

On the west side of St. Mark's is the church’s infamous graveyard, beneath which Stuyvesant was originally buried.  The graveyard was the site of one of New York City ’s major historical crimes.  In 1876, Alexander T. Stewart, owner of the first department store and one of New York’s most famous merchant millionaires was buried in the graveyard of St. Mark’s.  Three weeks later, his body was dug up, stolen and held for ransom in a case that police never cracked (St. Mark’s Church website).  Today, the graveyard is open to the public, though Stewart is no longer buried there. 

Another interesting anecdote about St. Marks is that Frank Lloyd Wright designed three apartment towers to fit behind the church.  However, due to the Great Depression, his buildings were never built (Morrone, 98).  Even though Wright’s plan never succeeded, the Church that stands today is unfortunately not the same as it was upon completion in 1854.  Rather it has been largely restored after a devastating fire in July 1978, in which the building’s roof collapsed (Wolfe, 24).

Petrus Stuyvesant did not only donate the land for St. Mark’s Church, but he also built the nearby Federal style brick house that stands on the north side of Stuyvesant Street at number twenty-one.  “Petrus gave the house to his daughter, Elizabeth, as a wedding present when she married Nicholas Fish, a Revolutionary War hero and a political ally of Alexander Hamilton” (Hall, sec. 11, p. 6).  Thus, the home became known as the Stuyvesant-Fish House², which is now preserved as a city and national landmark.  An advertising executive named F. Phillip Geraci owned the house for thirty years until he recently donated it to the Cooper Union, which decided to use it as housing for its president.  Currently George Campbell, president of the college and his wife Mary Schmidt Campbell, dean of the Tisch School at N.Y.U are living in this wonderful home (6).
            I claimed that my neighborhood was diverse in ways that Stuyvesant would never stand for, yet an Episcopalian Church and the fancy homes of wealthy local Episcopalians would not classify as the most diverse group.  However, in the 1880s a new building was built in my neighborhood.  In 1886, architect Charles Rentz finished Webster Hall³ a building found on the north side of 11^th Street between 3^rd and 4^th Avenues.  He had established a dance hall that would change the neighborhood.  “It was where the original bohemians, like Emma Goldman, Marcel DuChamp and Margaret Sangor, created unique costume balls to benefit nascent social and political causes” (Webster Hall NYC website). 

This red brick building has very little ornamentation aside from the Corinthian pilasters, the dentals at the roof, and the large rounded arches.  It is difficult to determine a style for this building though its heavy walls and round arch may suggest the German round-arch style.  Rentz's design created a building that revolutionized nightlife, as it became the first modern nightclub. “During prohibition, the balls moved from the social and political trends of the past to the hedonistic attitude of the ‘speak’"(Webster Hall NYC website).  Yet, the police did not interfere as Al Capone was rumored to be the owner.  In the 1950’s R.C.A. took over the building and used it as a recording venue.  In the 1980s, Webster Hall, now called the Ritz, became famous as “the best stage in New York City ” (Webster Hall NYC website).  Finally, since 1990, Webster Hall has returned to its original purpose as a nightclub.  The building exists more than a century after being built, yet remarkably, it is still serving the same purpose Rentz had in mind.

While Webster Hall brought bohemian life to my neighborhood, my next building was a part of a different form of entertainment, which took place amongst a thriving Eastern European Jewish population.  In the 17^th century, Stuyvesant would not let Jews into his colony, however he was ultimately unsuccessful.  This failure began in 1654, when twenty-three Jewish refugees from Brazil were the first Jews allowed into New Amsterdam , despite Stuyvesant’s protest (Angel, 620).  Over the course of almost three hundred and fifty years, many Jews, myself included, have found their way into this city.  However, the largest wave of Jewish immigration occurred towards the end of 19^th century and into the beginning of the 20^th as people fled the pogroms of Russia and Eastern Europe .  Many of these Jews settled in New York City ’s Lower East Side , which extended from Fulton north to 14^th Street (Hodges, 696).  This soon became the home to the largest Yiddish speaking population in the United States .  This population brought with it a new form of entertainment known as Yiddish Theatre.  “Between 1881 and 1903, a ready-made audience of 1,300,000 Yiddish-speaking Jews arrived in New York , eager to escape from their daily grind in the sweatshops by enjoying an evening of theatre and getting a taste of home” (Sholem.org website).

In 1892, the first Yiddish Theatre was established.  This was the beginning of a vibrant theatre district on 2^nd Avenue and Bowery in the Lower East Side (Sandrow, 1282).  On the southwest corner of 2^nd Avenue and 12^th Street sits a building called the Village East City Cinema^4a, but this was not the building’s original purpose.  Though Yiddish theatres had sat on this location before, the current building was built in 1926 by developer Louis N. Jaffe for one of New York ’s most famous Yiddish actors, Maurice Schwartz.  The architect, Harrison G. Wiseman chose a neo-Moorish design, which was also used for some synagogues built at the same time (White, 174).  There is Yiddish writing outside the lobby and a Star of David in the dome of the main auditorium (Cinema Treasures website).  Upon completion of the building, the Jewish date^4b - the 10^th of the month Sivan in the year 5686 - was carved in Hebrew letters into the exterior wall next to the corresponding Gregorian date - May 23, 1926 .

“Yiddish theatre was an important community institution: plays offered entertainment and escape, portrayals of immigrant life, and political forums” (Sandrow, 1282).  However, after the First World War, immigration restrictions weakened Yiddish Theatre by greatly decreasing the influx of Yiddish speaking people.  Later, with World War II, much of the Yiddish speaking population in Europe was wiped out and the theatres on 2^nd Avenue and the Bowery declined rapidly.  Today, little is left of Yiddish Theatre in New York City except “the Folksbiene, the oldest continually performing Yiddish company in the world” (1282).  Nonetheless, it is remarkable that the Jews of New York arrived penniless and yet they thrived on the very land that Stuyvesant had once owned.

Yiddish theatre passed its prime and many Jews moved to more wealthy neighborhoods of the city.  So what happened to my neighborhood?  It seems that as time passed, Stuyvesant’s personal land has grown farther and farther away from Peter’s goal of an exclusively white, Dutch Reformed population.  In fact, in the 1960s intellectuals, artists, musicians and writers from Greenwich Village moved east in search of cheaper homes.  This was the beginning of what we know today as the East Village .  “Soon the population consisted of whites, blacks, Latin Americans, and Asians.  Radicalism in politics and art flourished, and the area became known for its poetry houses, coffee houses, and bookshops” (Hodges, 358).  In the 1970s, drugs and crime led to a drastic, but short-lived decline, as the area improved once again in the 1980s (358). 

The future of my neighborhood was also largely influenced by New York University , which sat to the west at Washington Square .  Until the 1970’s, N.Y.U. was known as a bridge and tunnel school.  In other words, the large majority of students at the university lived at home, in the boroughs of New York , and commuted to class daily.  Those few students who did not commute rented apartments in the cheap East Village , while it was an unpleasant neighborhood.  However, as the area improved in the 1980s, real estate prices increased and students could not afford apartments.  This created a significant problem for N.Y.U.  It would be impossible to improve the University’s reputation without supplying adequate housing for its students.  In fact, in 1985 the university had only 2,380 beds, despite a “full time enrollment of 33,000 undergraduate, graduate and professional students” (Brooke, sec. 1, p. 22). 

In 1985, N.Y.U. decided to do something about this problem by building two new dormitories on the empty plots located at 33 Third Avenue between Ninth and 10th Streets, and 75 Third Avenue between 11th and 12^th.  This expansion was met with strong protest from people in the East Village community.  According to an article in the New York Times from January 13, 1985, “About 100 people, many waving ''Stop N.Y.U.'' pennants, demonstrated yesterday against plans by New York University to build dormitories on two lots in the East Village”( Brooke, sec. 1, p. 22).  The plan called for “a 475-bed dormitory on the Ninth Street lot” and “a 1,200-bed dormitory on the second lot.” However, opponents “charged that both dormitories would be out of scale for the neighborhood, and that the dormitory on Ninth Street would overshadow the adjoining St. Marks Historic District (22).

By the summer, N.Y.U. had selected a design and planned to continue with construction.  In July, a second major protest led to the arrest of nineteen people for trespassing onto the construction site.  “The police used bolt cutters to remove four people who had chained themselves to a building crane”, while others were “accused of throwing a paint bomb that hit a police officer and of putting dirt in the gas tanks of construction equipment” (“19 Arrested”, sec. 1, p. 25).  Despite all opposition, N.Y.U. was able to build Alumni Residence Hall⁵ on 33 Third Avenue and later Third North Dormitory⁶ on 75 Third Avenue .  The architect for both buildings was Voorsanger of Voorsanger and Mills Associates. 

Alumni Residence Hall was built sixteen stories high, yet Voorsanger attempted to contextualize it with the historic district on Stuyvesant Street .  In order to achieve this, he built six stories and then set the building back so that the tallest portion would face Third Avenue .  Additionally, he decorated “the façade with one-story-high horizontal bands of colored brick” (Greer, sec. 1, p. 43).  Voorsanger’s multi-colored brick building has little decoration, single paneled windows, and a curved roof that appears to hover above the building.  It does not fit with the neighboring homes despite all efforts, but it did provide a home for close to five hundred students.  Alumni Hall opened in 1986, providing students with small single bedrooms within larger suites.  It is currently the most costly of all N.Y.U. dorms, charging over eleven thousand dollars each school year.

Voorsanger built Third North, the building in which I live, as three connected fourteen-story towers with a central courtyard and a dining hall.  The bedrooms are shared by two students and the suites each have a small kitchen, living room and bathroom.  The courtyard allows all suites to have windows, facing either the courtyard or the street, thereby creating natural light within the rooms.  The building currently houses just fewer than one thousand students and charges close to ten thousand dollars each school year.

It is extremely important that N.Y.U. was able to build such large buildings through a zoning technicality.  The zoning laws in my neighborhood in 1985, indicated that “a C6-1 zone permits a floor area ratio, or FAR, of 6 (6 square feet of building for each square foot of land) when the use of the land is commercial, but only 3.4 when it is residential” (Oser, sec. A, p. 32).  “Since the university dormitories are considered a community facility, N.Y.U. was able to utilize the 6 FAR on the Avenue, and therefore was a logical purchaser of the site” (32).  It seems strange that my building can be considered a community facility.  After all, in order to enter my own building, I require identification indicating my residence or I must pass through a hand scanning machine. 

These two buildings were the start of N.Y.U.’s massive effort to provide housing for all students.  This was one crucial element of the school’s improvement over the past seventeen years.  Today, N.Y.U. is an exclusive, first-rate private university that is beginning to compete with the older, more prestigious Ivy League schools.  However, these two dormitories did not only change the face of a school, they have also revitalized my neighborhood.  Today, both Alumni Hall and Third North have small commercial stores at street level and the neighborhood is filled with bars, clubs, coffee houses and restaurants often frequented by students.  N.Y.U., “the top American undergraduate university for international students,” is the home and campus to thousands of young students of different race, religion and nationality, many of whom live on the land of Stuyvesant ’s old farm (Fleisher, 1).

Today, my neighborhood is youthful and vibrant largely because of the N.Y.U. students who live here.  However, three hundred and fifty years ago, this land was the manor house and chapel of Peter Stuyvesant’s farm.  There are probably more people living in my building alone than Stuyvesant could have ever imagined might live on his land. 

When I think of my neighborhood, I realize how drastically it has changed.  It began as the farm of one man and then with the construction of St. Mark’s Episcopalian Church , it soon became the home for wealthy Episcopalians.  It became the center for Bohemian night life with Webster Hall and then the core of Jewish life and entertainment through the Yiddish Theatre.  It became the East Village of artists and intellectuals only to be destroyed through drugs and crime and finally, my neighborhood is currently a lively, young place that is an eastward expansion of New York University .  Regardless of Stuyvesant’s attempts to limit this city to the religion of the Dutch Reformed Church, a wide variety of other groups, including those who were not Dutch, not white and not Protestant, have succeeded in New York.  It is ironic, yet fitting that many of these groups still thrive today, right here on the land that was once Stuyvesant’s private estate.   

Tiny Stuyvesant Street, crossing E. 9th Street between 3rd and 2nd Avenues, is notable for being the one and only diagonal street in Manhattan north of 8th Street and south of Central Park except Broadway. (We'll leave Greenwich Village out of it, since it's always had its very own street system quite independent of the gridiron imposed by the Commissioners' Plan (Randel Survey) back in 1811.) As in most exceptions to the rule, it has its own story to tell!

The focal point of Stuyvesant Street, St. Mark's-In-The-Bowery, was first built in 1799 on what had been the vast estate of Peter Stuyvesant, the Dutch colonial governor of New Amsterdam. Stuyvesant himself is entombed in the church's graveyard. Maps from As You Pass By by Kenneth Dunshee Peter Stuyvesant's holdings extended roughly from what is now Cooper Square north to East 23rd Street with the western boundary at the Bowery Road (now called 4th Avenue) and the eastern boundary in a line between what's now 1st Avenue and Avenue D.

This closeup of the southwest portion of the map shows a narrow lane leading from the Bowery Road northwest to Gov. Stuyvesant's manor house, which remained with the Stuyvesant family until it burned down in October 1778. His great-grandson Nicholas was the last tenant. The lane exists today as Stuyvesant Street. But why, and how, did it survive from Peter Stuyvesant's day?

Stuyvesant Street, at left, angles off from E. 10th Street just west of Second Avenue. Peter Stuyvesant's mansion was located approximately where the UPS delivery truck is parked on the south side of the street. In the triangle formed by the two streets stands the renowned Renwick Triangle, built by the renowned architect James Renwick, Jr. in 1861.

Where St. Mark's now stands, the Second Dutch Reformed Church, of which Peter Stuyvesant was a parishioner, stood in the 1600s. His family vault was placed near that church and remains today besides St. Mark's.

Petrus Stuyvesant, Peter Stuyvesant's great-great-grandson, owned most of the land in this area and his mansion, called Petersfield, was located in the block between 1st Avenue, Avenue A, and East 15th and 16th Streets. It was Petrus Stuyvesant who laid out a street system and donated land and construction funds for St. Mark's, which was completed in 1799. The area around Petersfield, extending west to the old property line at the Bowery Road, became known as Bowery Village in the early years of the 19th Century.

Because Bowery Village lay just outside the city limits, farmers could sell there without paying a market tax. Wagon stands soon flourished along 6th and 7th Streets, along with a weigh scale for Westchester hay merchants. Comfortable residences went up along the upper Bowery (Road), still a country road edged with blackberry bushes...Artisan house-and-shops arrived too; so did groggeries, a brothel, and a post office (in truth an oyster house where the postrider left mail for the village). From 1804 the community even had its own (short-lived) newspaper, the Bowery Republican.
--From Gotham by Edwin Burrows and Mike Wallace

As New York City expanded ever northward as the 19th Century rolled on, Bowery Village was incorporated and most signs of it, with the exception of St. Marks-in-the-Bowery, gradually disappeared. But Stuyvesant Street had by then become a well-established thoroughfare and so was allowed to remain after the Commissioners Plan has eliminated most of the other odd roads that would have interrupted the grid. (For example, Petersfield Street, which extended from the Bowery Road at about 11th Street to the Petersfield mansion, was eliminated when the cross streets of today were cut through.)

Petrus Stuyvesant built this house at 21 Stuyvesant Street in 1803. It was a wedding gift to his daughter Elizabeth, who married Nicholas Fish, a close friend and political ally of Alexander Hamilton. Son Hamilton Fish became New York State governor, senator, and secretary of state. It is now known as the Stuyvesant-Fish House.