The Lower East Side

History of St. Mark’s and the Lower East Side

New Amsterdam was an outpost that the Dutch established to defend their economic and political interests in the New World. Run by the Dutch West Inddia Company, it was part of a military as well as political strategy. Stuyvesant had proved his mettle first in Brazil and then as governor of the island of Curacao in the West Indies, where he showed an energy and initiative that had not been shown by any of the company’s men in the New Netherlands.

The Dutch Reformed Chapel that Stuyvesant would build – out of which St. Mark’s grew – was part of a church that was very much centered in the elders, who were all senior members of the congregation and who elected their spiritual master to guide them, with the emphasis on the word of God as the revealed truth. A liturgical church, it was focused on God’s word and open proclamation through prayer, sermon and discussion.

The cemetery of St. Mark’s in the Bowery antedates the erection of the present structure by more than 12 decades. Its history begins with the death of the former Governor-General of New Amsterdam in 1672,and includes an almost unparalleled gathering of “important” New Yorkers and New York families.

It might also be said that in this beginning period, St. Mark’s made no pretense about being a church of the people. It was a church where pew rent was taken, and a church that served the spiritual needs of those who were an emerging aristocracy based on money, trade and property. Still basking in the light of the American revolution, it was easy for the early congregants here to think of themselves as egalitarians, but their egalitarianism was based principally on the defense both of their property and their rights to expand their economic base.

As the growth of the city neared their property, the Stuyvesants were determined tha the land they owned be developed in a way that would be profitable for them and good for New York. As early as 1789, Petrus Stuyvesant, the Duth Governor’s great-grandson, to whom almost all of the governor’s property was ultimately bequeathed, mapped a complete street plan through the estate, squaring the points of the compass as opposed to the present Manhattan grid pattern that follows the axis of the Island.

As the city opened streets according to its plan, allt he country lanes and streets at variance with is grid were closed, the houses demolished or moved, and the owners compensated for their losses in land or houses. The Stuyvesant family, however, was influential enough that the steet where they had built their houses remained open, “both for the public convenience and for the accommodation of a large and respectable congregation attending St. Mark’s church as well as the owners and occupants of several large and commodious dwelling houses…” (Minutes, Common Council, 1830).

Just about everybody who came to St. Mark’s in its first 25 years were slave owners, or came from families who were. Slavery was abolished in the New York State in 1827, but some vestry members like senior warden Hamilton Fish continued to express distaste for efforts to help former slaves acquire property and work. Fish, named Senior Warden in the same year that the American Civil War began, didn’t want a portion of America governed by landowners with whom he would be uncomfortable dining.

In the 1840’s, under the guidance of the Stuyvesant family, the Second Avenue became one of the most desirable addresses in the city, with houses costing as much as $40,000. But the use of the area as an enclave for the middle class never fully developed. By the late 1840’s, the systematic construction of tenement housing for laborers and their families had begun. New York was being transformed into an industrial city of specialized land use and geographically segregated social life.

In the Northeast quadrant of the Stuyvesant family’s property stood Gramercy, so called because of the stream that ran through the area that the Dutch called the CRommessie. Gramercy’s so-called gas house district, running roughly from 10th street uptown to the mid-20’s, east of 1st Avenue to the East River’s low-water line, was essentially built on a salt marsh. The Stuyvesant’s deemed it unsuitable for development. In the 1840’s, with development downtown bringing pressure on the cit to rid the vicinity of Canal Street of the smelly gas works, the district was dealt to spectators who convinced the city of its usefulness as a site for industrial storage. Industrial storage included housing for a local work force. Thus New York’s first industrialized ghetto: a tenement district for industrializd workers amid the paraphernalia of tanks and bins, and stench and noise. Rows of tenements, uniformly designed, in circumstances right out of Dickens.

On January 13, 1874, between 4,000 and 6,000 people had gathered in Tompkins Square to protest national economic policies after city officials refused to meet with the worker’s committee. In the face of a vast economic slump, the worker’s committee was seeking government intervention and enlarged programs of public works. The Tompkins Square “riot” resulted in 46 workmen jailed, 24 of whom were Germans. Prominent German immigrant leaders launched a vigorous campaign against the Police Board. Leaders of such unions as the United Cabinetmakers Union, the United Cigarmakers Union, and the Journeymen Tailor’s Protective Union joined with the socialists, officials of the German Free Thinkers Association, and the Turverein to urge impeachment. They failed to remove the Police Board.

One of the Nabors originally interred at St. Mark’s cemetery was the great New York merchant, A.T. Stewart. Stewarts store, later Wanamakers at 10th and Broadway, was the department store in the city in the middle of the 19th century. Stewart died in 1876 and an elaborate funeral was held for him at St. Mark’s Church where he was buried. Three weeks later, his body was stolen, removed to an upstate New York farm, and held for ransom. The body was never returned to St. Mark’s and Stewart was eventually reburied in Garden City.

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