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St. Mark's Place Research Paper

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Summer Lin On any Friday night, St. Mark’s Place is a mecca for East Village twenty-somethings and NYU co-eds. Teens gather outside a dimly lit frozen yogurt shop called Yogurt Station, dribbling pistachio ice cream from their plastic spoons. Mannequins hang suspended by ropes and Chucky-esque dolls and skulls line the storefront of the consignment shop, Search and Destroy. Every other building on the block is a head shop or tattoo parlor or a bar. On weekends, St. Mark’s smells like cheap Chinese food and tobacco smoke. It’s where tourists and locals flock for a tattoo or piercing or a rare vintage find. During peak daytime hours, vendors hock multi-colored bongs, straw hats and plastic sunglasses out on the sidewalk for $30 or less. In all its garish storefronts and blinking neon signs, St. Mark’s Place is surprisingly tame compared to the street in its heyday. The once-grungy three-block stretch of the East Village was the temporary home for Leon Trotsky and W.H. Auden and Jeff Buckley. It was where Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman plotted for the “Tragic Week” anarchist riots. It was …show more content…

Mark’s seedy history. The miscreant denizens that made up the epicenter of American counterculture have since long vacated the premises, leaving behind tourists and teenagers and leading critics to repeatedly proclaim that, “St. Mark’s is dead.” There are vestiges of its former squalid glory, of course: Trash and Vaudeville, a punk rock and goth clothing store from the 1970s, St. Mark’s Comics, St. Mark’s Bookstore and Limbo, a boutique that once clothed rock legends like Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison. But it’s not quite the same. A revolving door of luxury apartments and big-name retailer stores popped up in the place of historic night clubs and galleries, leaving St. Marks with a slew of vegan ice cream shops (DF Maven’s,) dessert bars (Spot) and yoga studios (Yoga to the

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