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    St. Marks Is Dead: The Many Lives of America's Hippest Street
    St. Marks Is Dead: The Many Lives of America's Hippest Street
    St. Marks Is Dead: The Many Lives of America's Hippest Street
    Audiobook10 hours

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

    Written by Ada Calhoun

    Narrated by Carla Mercer-Meyer

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    St. Marks Place in New York City has spawned countless artistic and political movements. Here Frank O'Hara caroused, Emma Goldman plotted, and the Velvet Underground wailed. But every generation of miscreant denizens believes that their era, and no other, marked the street's apex. This idiosyncratic work of reportage tells the many layered history of the street-from its beginnings as Colonial Dutch Director-General Peter Stuyvesant's pear orchard to today's hipster playground-organized around those pivotal moments when critics declared "St. Marks is dead."

    In a narrative enriched by hundreds of interviews, St. Marks native Ada Calhoun profiles iconic characters, from W. H. Auden to Abbie Hoffman, from Keith Haring to the Beastie Boys, among many others. She argues that St. Marks has variously been an elite address, an immigrants' haven, a mafia war zone, and a hippie paradise, but it has always been a place that outsiders call home.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateNov 2, 2015
    ISBN9781494588144
    St. Marks Is Dead: The Many Lives of America's Hippest Street

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    Reviews for St. Marks Is Dead

    4/5

    21 ratings3 reviews

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    • 3/5
      This book is interesting but the reading is awful. Words and place names are mispronounced. I it’s a shame.
    • 4/5
      I enjoyed this a lot. The NYC history went beyond the usual, and I enjoyed the way she framed it through the street's cyclical cycle of hipsterdom (and the inevitable disappointment when its nature shifts). Full disclosure: I was a St. Marks hanger-outer in the first half of the '80s, one of those annoying little punks with a homemade haircut sitting on stoops drinking quarts of Ballantine's Ale out of paper bags with my friends... we were the reason all the stoops have gates now. (Sorry!) But it was a fun and exciting time in my life, and I have a certain amount of distanced nostalgia for it now that I'm an old fart. So aside from the general biography of a place, it was neat to hear reports from people I haven't seen in years, acquaintances and store owners and local legends. The place is damn near unrecognizable to me now, but I like Calhoun's concept of it as an identity-shifting locale. Definitely a good read for NY history buffs and ex–East Villagers (of which I'm both).
    • 4/5
      A light history about a short street with a big life. The author covers the Stuyvestants to the chain stores, and the comings and goings of various ethnic groups and retail stores. Music coverage is particularly vivid, with lots of valuable nuggets on the punk and No Wave eras. Entertaining photos abound."During lulls, she read books about the black experience, like Malcolm X's autobiography, as if studying for a test that the whole neighborhood was about to take."