Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* New York's St. Mark's Place, in the East Village along Tompkins Square Park and named after the Episcopal church built on the site of Peter Stuyvesant's 1660 family chapel, has long been a hotbed for radicals, from anarchists to union organizers to artists; home turf for feral children, hustlers, junkies, the homeless, and gangsters; and the scene of crimes, experimental theater, protests, rampant drug use, and all-out riots. As Calhoun tells the wild and woolly story of this infamous hot spot, she profiles street eccentrics, including Mr. Zero of the 1920s, and each era's prevailing visionaries, such as Emma Goldman, the Beats, W. H. Auden, Dorothy Day, Abbie Hoffman, and Keith Haring. A paradise for drag queens, St. Mark's was also rock central, igniting the Velvet Underground, the New York Dolls, and the Ramones. Hardcore skinheads appeared just in time for nasty confrontations with yuppies as gentrification began shutting down St. Mark's dark carnival. Calhoun knows the rollicking enclave inside-out as both a native who grew up there during the frenzied late-1970s and 1980s and a passionate researcher who conducted more than 200 interviews with St. Mark's denizens, famous and not. Calhoun writes with zest, fluidity, and insight, combining facts and memories in a kaleidoscopic saga of an electric, ever-morphing place of squalor, violence, progressivism, camaraderie, fiery dissent, and intense creativity.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2015 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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. (Nov.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
In her debut work, journalist Calhoun (New York Post, New York Times Magazine, The New Republic) focuses on immense societal and historical change, looking at the history of one particular place that experienced, what seems like, every revolution possible. St. Marks Place, located in New York City's East Village, hosted a wide variety of people and businesses as well as artistic and political movements. Calhoun covers the area from ancient times to the present, peeling into the lives of major players such as poet W.H. Auden, artist Andy Warhol, and musicians such as the Beastie Boys, while also showcasing interviews and images from everyday visitors, including shop owners and terrified residents. VERDICT Keeping track of this book's wide cast of characters can be challenging, but it is riveting to get an up-close and personal look at the broad range of changes in such a small area. Observing the city evolve through the narratives of people that were actually there makes for an absorbing read. Those interested in NYC history and its many revolutions will enjoy. [See Prepub Alert, 5/11/15.]-Rebecca Kluberdanz, GB65 Lib., New York © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
An illuminating stroll through the decades of one of the most culturally significant streets in America. The first book by journalist Calhoun vividly details the long legacy of artistic upheaval, political foment, demographic transformation, and resistance to gentrification along the street on New York's Lower East Side where she grew up. St. Marks Place doesn't submit to the easy stereotyping of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury, perhaps because "hippies" and "Summer of Love" represented such a comparatively brief blip in American culture. The hippies of St. Marks preferred to be called "freaks," with less of an emphasis on love and more on the liberation of anarchy. But as the author traces the legacy of St. Marks back four centuries, she shows how the street has long served as a magnet for radical visionaries, crackpot artists, self-proclaimed prophets, and runaways with nowhere else to go. "Disillusioned St. Marks Place bohemiansthose who were Beats in the fifties, hippies in the sixties, punks in the seventies, or anarchists in the eightiesoften say the street is dead now, with only the time of death a matter of debate," she writes, and then counters, "but this book will show that every cohort's arrival, the flowering of its utopia, killed someone else's." In quickly paced, anecdotal fashion, Calhoun connects the dots between Emma Goldman and Abbie Hoffman, Charlie Parker and the Velvet Underground, those who occupied the neighborhood during different decades but sustained its character as kindred spirits. While readers looking for a more thorough documentation of the Beats or CBGB might consider the narrative a little hit-and-run, the breezy approach underscores the radical, significant transformations experienced by St. Marks and leads to her engagingly personal reflection on how a child raised there might not feel much nostalgia for blocks of discarded needles, used condoms, and threats of pedophilia: "though St. Marks Place will probably always elude true respectability, the street today is safer and more pleasant than at any point in the last fifty years." Rather than a nostalgic lament, this revelatory book celebrates an indelible cultural imprint. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
