St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery

St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery

The St. Marks Church in-the-Bowery sits on the site of Gotham godfather Peter Stuyvesant's family church (the name "Bowery" is derived from the Dutch word for Stuyvesant's "farm"), and still safeguards his remains, peg-leg and all, in the small graveyard. Set at an angle off Second Avenue, the Church is a striking anomaly in cheek-and-jowl Manhattan, and, built in the eighteenth century, an intriguing mix of colonial architectural styles. Though it has as long an evangelical history as any structure in the country, the Church has been largely repurposed since the sixties as a kind of cultural staging-ground, where poetry readings, film festivals, even pushchart food competitions are held for the idiosyncratic East Village "parishioners."