8th Street (Manhattan)

8th Street / St. Mark's Place

St. Mark's Place in 2010
Other name(s)	St. Mark's Place
Maintained by	New York City Department of Transportation
Length	1.3 mi (2.1 km)
Location	Manhattan, New York City
Postal code	10011, 10003, 10009
West end	Sixth / Greenwich Avenues in West / Greenwich Villages
East end	Avenue D in East Village
North	9th Street
South	Waverly Place (6th Avenue to Broadway) 7th Street (Bowery to Avenue D)
Construction
Commissioned	March 1811

Route map: Bing / Google

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, the St. Mark's Hotel, Trash and Vaudeville, and St. Mark's Comics. There are several open front markets that sell sunglasses, clothing and jewelry. In her 400-year history of St. Mark's Place (St. Marks Is Dead), 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."