St Marks Is Dead

St Marks Is Dead: The Many Lives of America's Hippest Street by Ada Calhoun, 2015.

I finished reading this book last night in bed. Took me 12 days to get through it and I enjoyed every moment.

I became aware of this book after reading a couple of Victoria Thompson crime novels that place in the St Marks Place neighborhood in the late 19th century. I had also explored the area as a teenager in the late 60's and also again with Becky in the mid to late 1970's.

The book is an amazing cultural history of a street and a neighborhood. It focuses on a three block stretch of that street in NY's East Village. It was a very interesting history of the neighborhood going back to the pre-colonial Dutch times in lower Manhattan and the Stuyvesant family. Then continues through to the twentieth century and beyond.

I really liked the oral history aspect of the book. Very entertaining and socially relevant.