The corner of Second Avenue and St. Mark’s Place in 1968.

“St. Marks Place—the three blocks of East Eighth Street that run from Astor Place to Tompkins Square Park—has become a symbol of the East Village. Head shops serve as a reminder of the street’s hippie heyday, while stalwart Federal mansions remain a link to the area’s more distant—and upscale—past. If something has happened in the East Village in the last two centuries, there’s a good chance St. Marks Place has played a role. Yet the street has never been a perfect microcosm of the East Village; those mansions were an anomaly, and the hippies were, too. St. Marks is the most famous street in the East Village, but is it a part of the ‘real’ neighborhood at all? The farmland that today comprises St. Marks Place was originally owned by Dutch Director General Peter Stuyvesant, who bought the bouwerij