St. Marks Is Dead

August 24, 2015
Calhoun, a journalist who grew up on New York City’s St. Marks Place, delivers a captivating, multidimensional history of her native stomping ground, long a magnet for the counterculture. In a vivid and fluid narrative that draws on interviews with over 200 current and former residents, Calhoun highlights pivotal aspects of St. Marks’s 400-year history: the 19th- and 20th-century social reformers who founded schools and services for the indigent, Emma Goldman and her plot to assassinate Henry Frick, the successive waves of immigration and resultant ethnic tensions, a thriving music scene that’s included both Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable and the Beastie Boys, the AIDS crisis, the 1988 Tompkins Square Park Riot, the skater scene of the 1990s, and much more. She also brings many famous and infamous residents to life, including mobster Benny “Dopey” Fein, W.H. Auden, Amiri Baraka (when he was known as LeRoi Jones), and Father Michael Allen, the “hippie” priest of St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery, who saw the future of religion in jazz and poetry. As Calhoun traces the neighborhood’s evolution from wealthy and respectable to gritty and poverty-stricken and back again, she shows how one street can become a microcosm of America’s political and cultural history.

October 15, 2015

In her debut work, journalist Calhoun (New York Post, New York Times Magazine, The New Republic) focuses on immense societal and historical change, looking at the history of one particular place that experienced, what seems like, every revolution possible. St. Marks Place, located in New York City's East Village, hosted a wide variety of people and businesses as well as artistic and political movements. Calhoun covers the area from ancient times to the present, peeling into the lives of major players such as poet W.H. Auden, artist Andy Warhol, and musicians such as the Beastie Boys, while also showcasing interviews and images from everyday visitors, including shop owners and terrified residents. VERDICT Keeping track of this book's wide cast of characters can be challenging, but it is riveting to get an up-close and personal look at the broad range of changes in such a small area. Observing the city evolve through the narratives of people that were actually there makes for an absorbing read. Those interested in NYC history and its many revolutions will enjoy. [See Prepub Alert, 5/11/15.]--Rebecca Kluberdanz, GB65 Lib., New York

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