MYSTERY ON ST. MARK’S

NYC’s King of Lampposts, Bob Mulero, has become even better at noticing NYC structural anomalies than me, and that’s saying something. He has uncovered one at the corner of 1st Avenue and St. Mark’s Place, 87 St. Mark’s/134 1st Avenue. the ground floor is home to cafe/bar Goodnight Sonny. It’s a handsome Italianate with an elaborate cornice…

 

…complete with the date of construction, 1871, and the letters LS, which probably are the initials of the original owner or developer. The windows have heavy lintels, and there are corner quoins, or large stone bricks. On one of the quoins, you will find…

 

…as you find on many older buildings, the cross streets. But here the cross streets are clearly wrong, reading 6th Avenue (or is it 3rd) and 8th Street. That intersection is either 2 or 7 blocks to the west, and shouldn’t be noted here!

 

8th Street, both East and West, has always attracted different names. Between Broadway and 6th Avenue, it was once called Clinton Place, as seen on this 1867 Dripps atlas. Clinton Place became East and West 8th Street only in the early 20th Century.

However, the stretch between 3rd Avenue  and Avenue A at Tompkins Square has been known as St. Mark’s Place, in honor of the nearby 1799 St. Mark’s Church at 2nd Avenue and East 10th, just about since the street was built in the early 19th Century. The two-block stretch between Avenues B and D has always been East 8th Street.

 

However, even that is a bit wonky, as the 1867 map shows the stretch of St. Mark’s between 1st Avenue and Avenue A marked “Eighth Street.” In this early era, the two names may have been interchangeable for many residents.

This does not explain how a quoin marked “3rd/6th Ave,” wound up on 1st Avenue. Perhaps a building west of here at 3rd or 6th Avenue and West 8th, since demolished, had the same builder and, faced with a materials shortage, placed the misnumbered quoin here. In any case, those builders and developers have left the scene long ago, and the secret remains with them.

Photographer Robert Mulero is the webmaster of Street Lights of New York City and the co-author of The History and Design of New York City Streetlights, Past and Present  (2016, Dorrance)

11/12/18