Early on a mild September morning, an elderly man on a black bicycle meanders along the paths of Tompkins Square Park, in New York's East Village. A cassette tape player balanced on the bicycle's crossbar plays tinny Asian music that grows louder as he approaches and then fainter as he pedals away. The only other sound is birdsong.
I stop to sniff some drooping, blowsy roses. I crouch to read the inscriptions on the cobblestones: "Blake Schaefer _ One helluva guy." "Steven Vincent _ He loved this park." "In loving memory of Demko (the dog)."
I watch a group of women doing tai chi on the grass, the early sun lighting their faces, making them glow.
Outside the park fence, on the sidewalk, folks are setting up tables for a farmers market. I buy a guava pie and eat it as I walk back to my hotel on St. Marks Place.
What a lovely place, I think. So peaceful. So hidden. So unknown.
Clearly, I do not know what I am talking about. Clearly, I do not know a thing.
St. Marks Place, as it turned out, might be the most famous street in all of New York City _ outside of Broadway, I guess, and maybe Fifth Avenue. It is very short. It starts at Astor Place and ends three blocks later at Tompkins Square Park. But just about everyone has lived along those three blocks, or has loved, fought, joined a band, planned a revolution, written a poem, danced all night, dropped acid, eaten tacos, gotten drunk, sold something on the sidewalk or crashed on somebody's couch here.
You want names? Emma Goldman, Andy Warhol, Charlie Parker, Al Capone, W.H. Auden, Patti Smith, Norman Mailer, Jack London, Leon Trotsky, Debbie Harry, James Fenimore Cooper, Thelonious Monk, Jackie Kennedy, Leonard Bernstein, Allen Ginsberg, the Ramones. There are more. Abbie Hoffman used to invite the neighbors over to watch TV here.
The street has been immortalized on album covers and in music, movies, videos, TV shows, poems and novels. Lou Reed wrote a song about it. Ada Calhoun wrote a book about it. Lena Dunham set an entire episode of "Girls" here.
How can it be that I had never heard of it?
I had not been to New York in nearly 20 years when, suddenly, work brought me there three times last year, and three times again this year. My meetings were all in the East Village, at New York University and the New School. I wasn't sure where they were, could not remember how to use the subway, had no idea where to stay.
A friend suggested an inexpensive hotel right around the corner from NYU: St. Marks Hotel.
"It's very basic," she warned. "No refrigerator. No elevator. No doorman! Though the really nice person at the desk has been there for years."
It was only $110 a night _ cash only.
My room in St. Marks Hotel was up four steep flights and so tiny that it held only two things: a bed, and a straight-back chair. But the window opened onto the exciting noise of honking cabs and shouting pedestrians, the room was scrupulously clean, and I had free Wi-Fi.
My first night there, I walked down the many stairs, out the hotel's front door, turned right, and, bam! I was in Funkytown.
