St. Mark's Place
A lively, and exuberantly seedy, boardwalk-style strip, St, Marks connects the Bowery to Tompkins Square Park, with three blocks that were once the Bohemian Broadway of the sixties' Village love-and-drug culture, and are now a bustling, open-air mall for young punks, students, and anyone else seeking cheap grub, vintage clothing, bongs and tattoos. (The strip is named for nearby the St. Mark's-in-the-Bouwerie church, which sits, weirdly, on Second Avenue, not St. Mark's, and where Peter Stuyvesant, New York's first mayor, is interred.)
St. Marks is more than merely a nonconformist strip mal, however. It offers bookstores, plenty of affordable ethnic cuisine (DoJo, Hummus Place, Plump Dumpling are highlights), the best place in the city to buy mix tapes and burned CDs and DVDs (Kim's Video), and some great bars (on the Eastern stretch of the strip, as you approach Tompkins Square).
photo by SSchultz
