page_title: 8th Street and St. Mark's Place
section_title: 19th century
hierarchical_section_title: 8th Street and St. Mark's Place / History / 19th century
caption_attribution_description: Twenty years after dry-goods merchant A.T. Stewart died, the John Wanamaker Company purchased his gigantic emporium on 9th Street between Broadway and Lafayette Street in lower Manhattan, Mew York City, near Astor Place. In 1902, the built an annex, almost equally gigantic, and connected the two buildings with a skyway. The original building burned down, and is now an apartment buiding, but the Wanamaker Annex building still stands, used as an office building, with a Kmart on the ground floor and basements. The address of the east end of the full-block building (seen here) is 499 Lafayette Street, while the west end is 770 Broadway The view here is from Astor Place near the Cooper Union Foundation Building. (source: Museum of the City of New York)
context_page_description: 8th Street is a street in the New York City borough of Manhattan that runs from Sixth Avenue to Third Avenue, and also from Avenue B to Avenue D; its addresses switch from West to East as it crosses Fifth Avenue. Between Third Avenue and Avenue A, it is named St. Mark's Place, after the nearby St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery on 10th Street at Second Avenue.
  St. Mark's Place is considered a main cultural street for the East Village. Vehicular traffic runs east along both one-way streets. St. Mark's Place features a wide variety of retailers. Venerable institutions lining St. Mark's Place include Gem Spa and the St. Mark's Hotel. There are several open front markets that sell sunglasses, clothing and jewelry. In her 400-year history of St. Mark's Place, Ada Calhoun called the street "like superglue for fragmented identities" and wrote that "the street is not for people who have chosen their lives ... [it] is for the wanderer, the undecided, the lonely, and the promiscuous."
context_section_description: After the Commissioners' Plan was laid out, property along the street's right of way quickly developed. By 1835, the New York University opened its first building, the Silver Center, along Eighth Street near the Washington Square Park. Row houses were also built on Eighth Street. The street ran between the Jefferson Market, built in 1832 at the west end, and the Tompkins Market, built in 1836, at the east end. These were factors in the street's commercialization in later years.
  Eighth Street was supposed to extend to a market place at Avenue C, but since that idea never came to fruition. Capitalizing on the high-class status of Bond, Bleecker, Great Jones, and Lafayette Streets in NoHo, developer Thomas E. Davis developed the east end of the street and renamed it "St. Mark's Place". Davis built up St. Mark's Place between Third and Second Avenues between 1831 and 1832. Although the original plan was for Federal homes, only three such houses remained in 2014.
  Meanwhile, Eighth Street became home to a literary scene. At Astor Place and Eighth Street, the Astor Opera House was built by wealthy men and opened in 1847. Publisher Evert Augustus Duyckinck founded a private library at his 50 East Eighth Street home. Ann Lynch started a famous literary salon at 116 Waverly Place and relocated to 37 West Eighth Street in 1848. Around this time and up until the 1890s, Eighth Street was co-named Clinton Place in memory of politician DeWitt Clinton, whose widow lived along nearby University Place.
  In the 1850s, Eighth Street housed an educational scene as well. The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, a then-free institution for art, architecture and engineering education, was opened in 1858. The Century Club, an arts and letters association, relocated to 46 East Eighth Street around that time; the Bible House of the American Bible Society, was nearby. In addition, the Brevoort Hotel, as well as a marble mansion built by John Taylor Johnston, were erected at Fifth Avenue and Eighth Street.
  At the same time, German immigrants moved into the area around Tompkins Square Park. The area around St. Mark's Place was nicknamed Kleindeutschland, or "Little Germany", because of a huge influx of German immigrants in the 1840s and 1850s. Many of the homes turned into boarding houses, as the area had 50,000 residents but not a lot of real estate. Tenement housing was also built on St. Mark's Place.
  By the 1870s, apartments replaced stables and houses along the stretch of Eighth Street west of MacDougal Street. The elevated Third and Sixth Avenue Lines were also built during that time, with stops along the former at Ninth Street and along the latter at Eighth Street.
  At the southwest corner of Broadway and Eighth Street, the street's first commercial building was built. By the 1890s, buildings on the stretch from Bowery to Fifth Avenue were used for trade. In 1904, the Wanamaker's Department Store opened at the former A.T. Stewart store along Broadway between 9th and 10th Streets, with an annex built at Eighth Street.
caption: Wanamaker Annex
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