On paper, it’s absurd that anyone would be sad about a Dallas BBQ closing. And yet here we were, my colleagues and I reminiscing about the ribs-and-Daiquiris chain that had once lived on the corner of St. Marks Place and Second Avenue in Manhattan’s East Village. How dare it be gone, we roared, and then sighed: St. Marks isn’t what it used to be.
The Dallas BBQ has been replaced recently by Café Maud, a perfectly lovely all-day café painted in desaturated oranges and greens, where I recently enjoyed a bowl of fries and a $16 glass of wine with some friends after a show down the block. But as I sat in the semicircular booth, I caught scenes of myself in the corner’s past life. Eating bacon cheeseburgers and drinking illicit Piña Coladas as a 17-year-old, giggling in wonder that the server never asked to see my ID. Bringing friends who had escaped New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina so we could drink something close to the frozen Daiquiris we wouldn’t have again for months. It was shitty, but that was the point of it, and everything on the block—a little weird, a little haggard, but always ready for a party. Was that who was attracted to St. Marks, or did the block make it so?
In Ada Calhoun’s seminal book St. Marks is Dead, she traces the strange and slippery history of the street as a center for misfit nightlife, with each successive generation claiming that their time drinking and sleazing on the street was the time, that anyone who came after just doesn’t understand what it was like. And yet, walk down the street today and there’s no shortage of people having a good time. Now it’s packed with dumpling houses and izakayas, serene wine bars like Café Maud and the rowdy Barcade. There are bars and restaurants and places to soak up the booze, just as there always have been.
Here, we speak to people who, over the generations, have made St. Marks what it is, and who know it’s not dead—even if their favorite parts of it are.
Everyone seems to be drawn to St. Marks Place for a reason, even if that reason isn’t drinking.
“I’d been going to the East Village since about probably ’69, to Fillmore, East Side Books, all those places. It was, you know, the hippies, the drugs, the bookstores, the record stores, the concert venues, and eventually the used clothing stores too. There were a lot of those.” —Lucy Sante, critic and author, most recently of I Heard Her Call My Name
“I got really into punk pretty early on, and I remember very specifically I had inherited the Replacements album with ‘Alex Chilton’ on it, and he talks about checking out the trash on St. Marks Place. And I remember just being like, What is that? Going to high school in the Midwest, I was so New York–obsessed. I kept seeing ‘St. Marks Place,’ and the way it sounded was like this open-air bazaar for punks or something.” —Jason Diamond, co-author of New York Nico’s Guide to NYC and the forthcoming novel Kaplan’s Plot (Flatiron, 2025)
“My dad was a devoted bookstore crawler and Allen Ginsberg fan. During the mid-1970s, my dad took my family on a day trip to Manhattan—our first time in the city. I trailed him along St. Marks Place as he hit every bookstore on the strip. It was summer, I was overheated, bored and—at least on the street—a little scared. In my defense, I was just a kid. And to me, it seemed like everyone we passed looked like the photos of Allen Ginsberg I had seen on my dad’s books.” —East Village blogger EV Grieve
“I grew up on Ninth and B, so it was kind of just home.” —Danny Orlin, second-generation owner of Cafe Mogador
Bars have dotted St. Marks’ storefronts for generations, but the thoroughfare itself has often been a place to see and be seen.
“I was born in 1976, and so nightlife for the first 10 years was listening to very loud people on the street. When I became a teenager, we mostly just walked around… I think St. Marks Place is so much about the street traffic and the sidewalks and the stoops that the actual places matter, but they also don’t, right? Because people back in the day had 40s in paper bags. I don’t even know what the equivalent is now, but that doesn’t change. The sidewalks are the same.” —Ada Calhoun, author of St. Marks is Dead
“You had these businesses that were actively trying to get the weirdo kids. Like Search & Destroy—the rumor was they used to pay crust punks to hang out on the steps, $10 to sit here and harass people.” —Diamond
“I just struggled to remember a single club on St. Marks Place. It was never about that… People would just strut for the benefit of everybody else. It was a natural catwalk. When I first started seeing trans people, or at least drag queens, it was on St. Marks Place, you know, Beauregard Houston-Montgomery strutting down the street in the black mini dress. It was a cultural marketplace and display space.” —Sante
But there were plenty of bars and clubs on the block itself, many of which are now long gone. They differed in style, but there was a focus on live music and performance, artistic experimentation and just having a wild time.
“There was the Electric Circus [a nightclub between Second and Third avenues]. We weren’t old enough, though I guess we put on enough makeup to look old enough to get into the Electric Circus. And I think we went in ’69 or ’70 to see Iggy Pop and the Stooges. I remember the first time we went, or one of the first times I remember, that there were murals all over the wall of naked people, like almost orgy-looking. And they had some rotating thing in the middle that you could sit on, and it would just rotate you around the room. And there was a dom downstairs.” —Tish Bellomo, co-founder of Manic Panic
“Five Spot was a very famous jazz club in the ’50s and early ’60s. In my time, I remember that being a vacant lot where it had been, but somebody reopened the Five Spot again on St. Marks. I used to keep a tally in my head, starting in the late ’60s, of: This place is gone, this place is new.” —Sante
“There was the 57 Club. We performed there, and were part of the Ladies’ Auxiliary of the Lower East Side [a women-only group producing feminist art within the club]. I remember so many different people from all walks of life would go to Boy Bar. Some gay bars didn’t want outsiders—I mean, we weren’t really outsiders because we performed there and supplied everybody with their makeup—[but Boy Bar wasn’t] so snooty about letting people in. I remember drinking there with Angie Bowie one night, getting really drunk. I usually drank vodka. I think they sometimes made fancy drinks, but most people couldn’t afford fancy drinks.” —Bellomo
“[Boy Bar] became the Green Door. Jesse Malin took over that space and that was another great fun place. I remember one night they had this above-ground pool in the backyard. You could do stuff like that back then. Maybe they do it in Brooklyn. Who knows?” —Bellomo
“When I was like 15, in 1996, I was staying with a friend, and we had convinced his older sister who had a place in the East Village to let us stay there. He knew a skinhead who was selling acid, and we had to go to [Malin’s venue] Coney Island High to get it. I’m like, Yo, I’ve always wanted to go there! I think Bim Skala Bim was playing. We took it and it wound up being fake, but it felt kind of cool, being hoodwinked by a skinhead on St. Marks. Coney Island High really represented just that ’80s, ’90s, DIY punk. You go look back at some of the bands they had play. It’s like, Wow, that was, like, legit.” —Diamond
“There was Grassroots, which was an NYU student post-hippie bar. And it was a kind of bar where, when you first get to college—because I am old enough that the drinking age was still 18—Grassroots would be the kind of bar that you’d go to in your first year of college, but then you’d find a better place the second year. It had an air of sodden desperation about it, and it stank; it smelled. And especially in the punk era, we scorned the hippies. And they weren’t even real hippies. They were like aspirational hippies.” —Sante
“We visited the Grassroots in 1990 during the CMJ New Music Festival. I didn’t live here yet. We had a few beers on a Friday afternoon. The older bartender, who I’d learn later was John Leeper, bought our third round of pints for us. Being broke, I was pretty psyched… The Grassroots was the first NYC place where I felt like a regular, and I made friends with the assorted cast of characters who hung out there during John’s 4 to 9 p.m. shifts on Fridays and Saturdays. It was one of those rare, unpretentious spots where the city felt a little smaller, and conversations came a little easier with an eclectic group of regulars.” —EV Grieve
As we know, St. Marks is not dead. Other great spots remain on the multiblock strip.
“I would go to [the bar] Bua after work. Bua has been around for a little while at this point. St. Dymphna’s used to be on St. Marks Place before it went around the corner to Avenue A, so I used to go there, presenting them with fake IDs. But they didn’t know that, or maybe they did, and just didn’t say anything.” —Orlin
“I have such a deep love for Mamoun’s Falafel, because I’ve been drunk so many times, and it’s just somehow like a beacon. And I love Crif Dogs. I’m glad it’s still there; it should be respected far more than it is.” —Diamond
“I’m not someone who believes St. Marks is dead. (I loved Ada Calhoun’s book, by the way.) Just maybe different. Search & Destroy, East Village Books, Fun City Tattoo, Mamoun’s Falafel and the Sock Man are still around, as are Cafe Mogador and the Holiday Cocktail Lounge… I remain optimistic and appreciate what we still have rather than dwell on what we’ve lost.” —EV Grieve
Of all the bars, old and new, none was more embraced than the Holiday Cocktail Lounge, which has been on St. Marks in one form or another for nearly 100 years.
“Holiday used to be Ann’s Beauty [Shop]. And I was looking at the rent rolls, and you see, all of a sudden, in the middle of this beauty salon, they put in two bathrooms. That’s one of the signifiers of a speakeasy. We took the paneling down—there’s like six different doors out. There’s also a tunnel that goes from this bar to the bar in Theater 80 across the street. And then there was a tunnel from that bar to First Avenue.” —Barbara Sibley, manager of Holiday Cocktail Lounge
“If I were to go down today, tonight, I would go to the Holiday… I think we should go tonight. I think we should do it.” —Snooky Bellomo, co-founder of Manic Panic
“The Holiday Cocktail Lounge was a place where people would really get hammered. As opposed to the other bars in the neighborhood, people got more hammered at the Holiday. It was run by this short Hungarian man who immigrated to the U.S. in the late ’40s right after the war, and went to Hollywood, where he was hired as Alan Ladd’s body double.” —Sante
“It’s the revamped Holiday now, but it’s so similar. Like, yes, it’s cleaner, and there’s no duct tape on the seats, and there’s not that guy sleeping on the step, and it’s slightly more expensive [now that] they have fancier drinks, and they put little plastic dinosaurs in them. But those guys are great, and it feels very, very similar to me. I spend quite a bit of time there.” —Calhoun
“It was just so grimy before they redid it. I like what they did to it, but you would go in there, and it was just like, Oh, these are some real lifers in this place.” —Diamond
“I actually asked Arlene, who bartended in the ’60s, what was the price of whiskey? And we figured out that it was actually the same relative price. Everything was $2.50, basically it cost five subway tokens. And I was like, well, that’s kind of like what we’re charging right now.” —Sibley
Everyone remembers when it felt like the end for them.
“The Gap moved in.” —Tish Bellomo
“I remember at some point I was visiting family in Long Island when I was in town, and they were talking about how they’re opening a Gap on St. Marks Place. My aunt and uncle, they used to hang out in the East Village in the ’50s and ’70s, so I figured if they’re opening on St. Marks, there must be some connection there, because I hate The Gap, because I’m punk.” —Diamond
“The St. Marks Bar & Grill. We would go every once in a while, in the late ’70s. It was an old man bar. At any given moment, a third of them are singing, a third of them are fighting, and a third of them are sleeping. That was the vibe. And then The Rolling Stones shot a video there for ‘Waiting on a Friend.’ And that had a terrible effect on the neighborhood. That bar got fancied up. That sucked. I remember that in combination with when they opened the first McDonald’s on First Avenue.” —Sante
“When I was working on the book, from like 2011 to 2014 or so, somebody was like, Oh, St. Marks is dead. It’s like a young guy. And I said, ‘Well, what’s the evidence?’ And he said, ‘The Starbucks closed. We used to go get Starbucks cups and fill them with strawberry Champagne and walk around and feel very glamorous. And you can’t do that now.’” —Calhoun
But everyone also appreciates the new, or at least the new-to-them. Because no matter what specific businesses are or aren’t on the block, St. Marks Place remains a catwalk, a place to experience nightlife, or maybe just pass through and see what else is going on on your way to another party.
“We had a gig at La Palapa recently. We sang for our supper and actually got paid a little bit. So much fun.” —Tish Bellomo
“There are more Asian restaurants, and so a lot more ramen and that place, Kenka, I feel like there’s always a huge line out in front of that. I also stopped by Village Works to do some book shopping late at night. I think it’s open till midnight or 1 a.m., and it is so much like these bookstores I went to in the ’90s and in high school, some of which were, like, in people’s apartments. You could stay there forever, and it was all cash, and there were kind of grimy couches you could sit on. It feels like 1991 to me in that store.” —Calhoun
“History and name recognition help keep St. Marks Place a destination. And it has an enduring energy and character that keeps drawing people in. Its long history of counterculture, music and artistic expression creates a vibe that’s hard to replicate. Even as individual businesses change, the street’s reputation for spontaneity remains strong.” —EV Grieve
“I feel like ‘the culture’ can get a little compromised at times, because people will just come and trash the place. You have young professionals, or people who come from a lot of money, that come to live in the East Village to kind of experience their 20s. They experience the neighborhood as a playground. But to me, it’s always been just people coming from everywhere, all different cultures, and kind of making a home here, investing in the community in their own way.” —Orlin
“People have said to me, ‘You can’t gentrify St. Marks Place.’ I think that’s true. There’s a scariness that even if they build new buildings, or even if they take over Dallas BBQ and turn it into Café Maud or whatever, it’s still going to have that busyness, and there’re still going to be drunk teenagers. I can’t imagine what they could do to not have it be that way, to not do that.” —Calhoun
“Time will create connections. Nobody would associate St. Marks Place with Dallas BBQ if it wasn’t there for decades. I didn’t have some real sentimental connection with it, but when it closed, it was like, Oh, St. Marks feels different in so many ways. Everyone’s mourning and protecting their core experiences with the place. And those core experiences change depending on the person and when they arrived and where they happen to go.” —Orlin
“I loved Dallas BBQ. That was just a nightmare of a place. I had not been back down that street in a few months, but when I saw that it closed, I thought, This is gonna take a lot to excavate. There’s all the talk about redoing the Port Authority, but the only thing as disgusting as Port Authority was Dallas BBQ. There are things that feel so inherently not New York—then New Yorkers sort of take them and make them our own. That’s what it felt like there.” —Diamond
