Why are certain neighborhoods magnets for the avant-garde?

In her new book "St. Marks is Dead: The Many Lives of America’s Hippest Street" journalist Ada Calhoun chronicles the history of a few blocks in New York’s East Village from the 1650s, when Peter Stuyvesant settled the area, though waves of immigration, social movements, musicians, artists, and political rabble-rousers to today.

Calhoun, whose parents have lived on St. Marks since 1973, grew up there and watched the Tompkins Square Park Riots of 1988 from her window. She’s used to people claiming that she missed the street’s golden era — though everyone has a different idea when that was.

“St Marks is like superglue for fragmented identities,” Calhoun writes, “The street is not for people who have chosen their lives — the married, the employed, the secure, the settled. The street is for the wanderer, the undecided, the lonely, and the promiscuous.”

This is a supremely readable, fascinating book — and it led me to see some familiar landmarks with a new appreciation for the history that was made there.

Daniel Alarcón’s short story "City of Clowns" first appeared in the New Yorker in 2003. Last month, Riverhead Books published a graphic treatment with illustrations by Sheila Alvarado, which are perfectly suited to the text.

"City of Clowns" tells the story of Oscar "Chino" Uribe, a young journalist who recalls his childhood move from the countryside to Lima, Peru’s capital, when he learns of his father’s death. As he ponders the nation’s political crisis and falls in with a few of the clowns who wander the city begging, he comes to understand his own marginalization. It’s subtle and profound and surprisingly moving.

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