Take a Walk on the Wild Side: An East Village Self Guided Tour

The East Village has reinvented itself so many times that residents have been complaining it’s gone downhill since the 1600s.

On this walking tour along St Mark’s Place, you’ll follow radicals, artists, and outcasts who, for three centuries, made this three-block stretch one of the most rebellious streets in America.

The tour starts at St Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery, built on the former farm of Peter Stuyvesant, the peg-legged Dutch governor whose ghost still haunts the sanctuary. You’ll head into the heart of St Mark’s Place where wave after wave of immigrants, bohemians, and provocateurs left their mark – from the German shooting societies and Yiddish theater of the 1800s, to the jazz clubs, punk boutiques, and anarchist schools of the 1900s.