Marks and Third Avenue is the de facto gateway to the East Village, and this stretch of the street is thronged with a pageant of pedestrians at any hour of the day and is one of the best places for people-watching in the city.
The entrance to the 6 train on the north side of the square in the Beaux-Arts style dates to 1904, inspired by Budapest subway kiosks. The art and engineering college’s reddish brown original building on the southeast side of the square is famously the site of an 1860 address by Abraham Lincoln, and nowadays students can be found smoking weed in the back courtyard - join them if you feel the urge. Generations of Cooper Union students have grabbed and rotated the eight-foot sculpture, but now it has been braced so movement is impossible. At that point, the beatniks, hippies, and then punks flooded in as the decades rolled by, each group - along with an enduring immigrant population, including German Jews and gentiles, Ukrainians and Poles, Italians, Puerto Ricans, and Japanese - have given the place the character it has today.īut our tour of the street begins right at Cooper Square, where a cryptic black cube by sculptor Bernard Rosenthal appeared in 1967. Marks Place was conferred on this stretch of what would otherwise be East Eighth Street by real estate developers to give it cachet for the wealthy around 1830, and the neighborhood was renamed the East Village in the late 1950s to make it seem like a part of the more desirable Greenwich Village to the west (it was originally considered part of the Lower East Side). “Alamo” by Bernard Rosenthal is a Cooper Square landmark.
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