Streetscapes | St. Marks Place: Be There or Be Square, 1830 to the Present
January 7, 2011
It was apparently the English-born developer Thomas E. Davis who bestowed plain old Eighth Street with a new name, appropriating the prestige of St. Mark’s Church two blocks north.
According to research by Jay Shockley of the Landmarks Preservation Commission, Mr. Davis covered both sides of the block from Third to Second Avenue with commodious brick and marble houses, among the largest development efforts of the time. He required an eight-foot setback, giving the stretch a comfortable character lacking on the more slotlike streets nearby.
The houses surviving at Nos. 4, 20 and, in fragments, 25, show a demure sophistication: Flemish bond brickwork, headers alternating with stretchers, in a soft, orangey red, with striking marble trim. At the basement level and around the doorways, chunky squarish blocks interrupt the surrounding bands, the whole called a Gibbs surround, after the 18th-century Scottish architect James Gibbs. Above, utterly plain facades rise to pitched, dormered roofs, the perfect picture of the simplicity of the early Republic.
The earliest occupants were people like Col. Alexander Hamilton, the son of the first secretary of the Treasury. He lived at 4 St. Marks Place with his mother, Eliza, who was struggling with debts incurred by her late husband in building their country house, Hamilton Grange. A soldier and a lawyer, Colonel Hamilton later represented Eliza Jumel in her divorce proceeding against Aaron Burr, who had killed his father in a duel.
In the 1850s family names like Livingston, Schuyler and Van Alen indicated St. Marks Place’s position; Samuel Packwood, who lived at No. 25 with his family of nine and four servants, was one of several who could enter “none” to the census query as to occupation. But the gilt edge had worn off by the 1880 census, which found in the now-divided houses barkeepers, cooks, porters and a “dancing house” worker with birthplaces like Prussia, Westphalia, Hungary, Pomerania and Poland.
In the same year a help-wanted ad appeared in The New York Sun for a “first class knife cutter on ladies’ underwear, steady work year round” and requested applications at 20 St. Marks Place, the address of Joseph Stollwerk, “costumer,” a common occupation.
In 1900 the census recorded a single family at No. 20, that of Emil and Martha Moeller; she had arrived from Germany in 1889 and ran several boardinghouses in the area. Emil was left alone in 1904 when Martha and their two sons perished with more than a thousand others when the sidewheeler General Slocum burned in the East River.
In 1915 a Turkish-bath operator got Mr. Davis’s setback requirement struck down in court; 10 years later the street made news again when fearful mothers crowded around a streetcar that had crushed a 4-year-old who turned out to be Irving Lieder, son of Isadore Lieder, a clothing cutter who lived at No. 25.
By the 1950s St. Marks had developed a bohemian air, and Colonel Hamilton’s house had become the Tempo Playhouse, home to plays by Eugène Ionesco, Gertrude Stein and Jean Genet.
In the next decade the influx of hippies — or, like me, aspirational hippies — remade St. Marks Place; today it is still seriously ’60s, awash in hash pipes, vulgar T-shirts, sidewalk craft vendors, tattoo parlors and cheap food joints.
Were Colonel Hamilton to walk into the parlor floor of his house today and gaze upward, he would recognize the intricate vine-leaf-vine plaster decoration and the perforated band of acanthus leaves running around the ceiling, paint-choked though they are. But if he dropped his gaze he would be besieged by the Goth-Glam offerings of the store Trash Vaudeville: feather boas, studded leather jackets, red vinyl bras and skull-and-crossbones comforters.
The Moellers’ parlor floor at No. 20 is now St. Marks Sounds, which sells vintage CDs. The store wasn’t open on my four visits, but through a crack in the vestibule door I caught a glimpse of a large ceiling rosette and delicate plaster moldings. The stonework around the front door is gently worn, but that at the basement level is chipped and pitted.
No. 25, where Samuel Packwood and young Irving Lieder lived their very different lives, has a vintage clothing store, Search and Destroy, on the main floor. Next Christmas, if you are looking for scout uniforms, pasties with tassels, wind-up sex dolls or a straitjacket for a special friend, this is the place for you. The long-ago elegance of the parlor floor has been stripped away, and only the delicate Gibbs surround of the front door survives; it is painted black.
E-mail: streetscapes@nytimes.com
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