St. Marks Is Dead: The Many Lives of America’s Hippest Street

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. [em](Nov.) [/em]