So Long to St. Mark’s Comics

Nice job Jeffo!

In the late 90s/early 2000s whenever I would visit NYC I would love to shop along St. Mark's --- St. Mark's Comics was one of my stops as was Mondo Kim's Video and Music store across the way, among others. Both are gone and as more and more shops disappear I find myself in other parts of the city. I love discovering new places, but I found comfort in visiting my favorite spots. I hope that whatever shop comes after can bring as many pleasant memories to another generation.

I know that asking New York City to stand still is like asking a shark to stop swimming, but in the past few years we have been losing not unsuccessful stores and restaurants because of exhorbanant rent increases: St Mark's Comics, The Coffee Shop, St Mark's Bookshop, Sunshine Cinema (I am still bitter about this one), Sidewalk Cafe. I get that after a certain number of years in New York the city gets haunted by the spots you used to hang at that closed shop, that every Duane Reade and every Chase bank downtown was once a far more interesting place. But can't something be done to protect these small businesses from rent increases that are designed to push them out?

The places that made NYC special are quickly disappearing due to crazy high rent and buying over the Internet. What's the point of living in, or even visiting, Manhattan if it's just a bunch of Duane Reades and Citibanks? None. That's why I left NYC, and the country, years ago. There was very little character left in Manhattan, or the country, anymore. It's like a Flintstone's cartoon where the background just repeats itself as a Bronto Burger place and a couple other stores ad infinitum. At least the Compleat Strategist still stands on 33rd St., but for how much longer? NYC and the US are incredibly dull, normative, surveilled and restrictive spaces devoid of character. Thankfully I got to see it before 2000 when it was still fun and free.

As someone who grew up in New York, and as someone who is now growing old in New York, I find myself joining the often-looked-down-upon group who remembers "the way it was." But I also think about why it seems harder to grow old in New York City. Why shouldn't I have as joyful and an interesting mature age in this city as I did a teenager and young adult? Why should old age in NYC be happy about favorite shops and restaurants becoming empty storefronts or chain stores or banks? Why should youth be happy about that either? Our memories of browsing a bookstore or finding interesting one-of-a-kind objects for sale or seeing an off-off-off-off broadway show or music, or eating at a well-loved restaurant that we have visited for decades provide a link across time to younger generations and the hope that they can continue to enjoy these same unique urban pleasures. I'm tired of the "change for change's sake" pro-development age-shaming narrative shoved down our throats so that we lose all sense of how intergenerational community and vibrant neighborhoods sustained by local businesses make a great city last through the ages.

What a wonderful stroll down memory lane. But this article is more than just that. NYC is changing and rapidly so. Familiar staples of NYC's culture are quickly vanishing as demonstrated by this piece. Fueled by technological advances, greedy landlords and a change in basic leisure culture (think the Internet) our world is slowly becoming more and more wired-- but perhaps to the wrong things. I can only hope today's children will have comparable memories of stimulating hobbies (beyond the computer) one day as this author clearly does. But given the current state of affairs, this, like many older stores, might be in danger.

The two words that jumped out at me in these comments are interesting and character. I lived in the city starting in 1970-2005, plus sneaky visits to “the village, ground zero was St. Marks”, as a teenager in the 60s. The evolution from how exotic it seemed back then to the homogenized blandness of today is heartbreaking It was authentic and real and each different area had its own character. Was it the 90s that things started to change? Maybe it was already happening when Times Sqare was cleaned up and Disneyfied. I worked in an office building at 44th and 7th Ave in the 80’s and walked among the characters, (not wearing Superman suits), who were real and never threatening. When the flower district disappeared and the meat packing area turned into a hip place for dinner hit me the hardest. I feel the writers pain for loosing what represented his love for the real NYC. I know nothing remains the same, I get it. I live in Florida now where the bland, repetitive and boring is the norm. Unfortunately, it wasn’t that hard to get used to.

It's so tough when the places that made this city unique from others disappear. Many factors contribute but it doesn't make the situation any easier to bear. I also mourn the loss several years ago of Footlights Records, long a staple of 3rd Ave and then on 12th Street, where I spent countless hours. And the garment district, one a home to the most incredible fabric and notions retailers, is vanishing daily. Changing culture and shopping habits all have had an effect. As we get older stuff changes, it's inevitable. But it doesn't make me happy!

Time stands still in book stores and comic book shops.

First time I came in the East Village and St Marks Place was 1969 and I was 21. I can assure you it has ceased to be the East Village a very loooong time ago ! …

Still mourning "All in color for a dime days".

There are better things to mourne....

I live near St. Mark's Comics and have been shopping there nearly every week for many, many years (sometimes multiple times per week). It was like a home away from home for me. I consider myself to be friends or to be at least very friendly with most of the people who work or have worked there. I've talked to Mitch about old comics and comic history on many occasions when I was hunting for comic back issues. I've learned and gained a lot from these conversations and friendships (with people like Chris, Aynsley, Sasha, Stasia, Rachel, Liz, Claire, and others). The loss of St. Mark's Comics is a real tragedy. It was one of the last bastions of counterculture in the East Village, and it employed interesting and non-traditional people. It provided a haven for individuals who wanted to discuss and explore their unique passions with other similarly passionate individuals. Where do we go now to just hang out and nerd out together? I don't know if there is a place like that anymore. The economics of running a small shop in a world increasingly dominated by online sales behemoths is no longer favorable. This means that New York City is losing the unique soul that made it great in the past. The East Village is now full of empty storefronts where there were once local businesses. It is getting emptier by the month. This should be concerning to anyone who came to this part of NYC to experience bohemian culture and artistry. Spend locally and enjoy these special places while you can.

Sorry to see St Mark's Comics and Sidewalk Cafe, two East Village standards, going away. With any luck, they'll be replaced by a Starbucks and a Seven Eleven. NYC... slowing disappearing.

Welcome to the new normal. Soon Manhattan will be nothing but expensive condos set shoulder to shoulder, full of rich urbanites, while the Super, super rich build their homes in the sky, massive towers jutting skyward long and slender like long middle fingers. The idea of a neighborhood full of people you casually know enough to nod to in the street will be replaced by a big emptiness. Every neighborhood store will soon be priced out of existence, and it will be up to the Bezo's of the world to fix the problem with 24 hour, round-the-clock deliveries of even the slightest want and need, need a bottle of water their will be an app for that, it will be driven in from the outer boroughs. Soon people will not even leave their homes at all, and in this way a once vibrant city, a city in which the rest of the world dreamed about, as the ultimate place to live and work because it was so cool and exciting, that city will evaporate like all the rainbows of yesteryear. What makes a city great is not buildings or statues, its people and the little sweet things that make life worth living.

So what happens when everything is gone, what kind of people does a city produce in a vacuum.

Sigh... articles like this are the worst kind of reminder that I am growing old... that and my stupid knees...

Comic books are for 7 year olds. By the time you are ten, you should have outgrown them. Adults should not have the interests of children.

I live in Maine. I have not been to St Mark's Comics (and I guess I will never have the pleasure). No matter, I absolutely enjoyed reading this editorial by Mr. Lewis. He captured the spirit of a small (book) store and the life surrounding and in it. I hope Jeffrey Lewis decides to write more for the Times and others but just not about the sad fate of small shop owners and business folk driven out of neighborhoods and communities not only in NYC but throughout the world.

A lovely article. The comments are less so; people complaining their New York (which they seem to assume was the original NY) has been lost, or the city is on its way to terminal decline. Take it from this resident of over 80 years: It was ever thus. That is what makes New York what it is. In the 1880's, my great grandfather had a store in the East 80's in Yorkville, when middle class German Americans started leaving the Tomkins Square area and coming uptown. The rents went through the roof and he closed it. There was another store where St. Marks Comics was. I didn't go there, but before that, in the 1960's, there was a Sandal Shop, where you could buy hand made, personally fitted, sandals for under $10. I believe the building went up in the latter part of the 19th Century, so the story probably repeated itself a half dozen times before that. If we are lucky, it will do so for another half dozen. And if you can't stand what's happening here in Manhattan, go explore the wilds of Brooklyn and Queens. My kids did and they tell me it's exciting (or was until all those New People came in.)

The wonderful, musty smell of pulp, jam packed into rows of cardboard boxes. The pleasure of rifling through stacks and stacks of goodies, looking for that obscure gem. The joyous, supercilious arguments over the superiority of various titles and characters. The gal or guy behind the counter, who was a few years older than you and introduced you to "higher echelons" of taste. All staples of the local comic shop. In contrast, shopping at stores like Fantastic Planet is like shopping for jeans at the mall. The crime is that eccentric, small businesses like St. Mark's Comics can no longer survive. Oddball spaces with an abundance of character are being slowly sucked out of our daily physical environment and being replaced by target market, well designed, short term, expensive white noise. I know there are a lot of great things being produced and available via the internet, but I grew-up with physical spaces of social interaction. The communal, digital forums are all troughs of hostility, impatience and snark. No fun.

What this article describes is what future historians will no doubt call the "Age of Homogenization." It's partly the result of economics, but it replaces individual character with a mind-numbing sameness. For example in Ithaca, for decades there was a strong anti-Wal-mart bias, no way were we going to let them ruin our locale! Until they said they were coming anyway and did we want a cut of the tax revenue their store would generate, or let it go to a nearby community? Now one can drive down the Elmira Road and see the same big box stores and chain restaurants as you would anywhere else. Amazon looks the same on my computer as it does on anyone else's computer. Culturally we've chosen common mediocrity, and we may well need to drown in it before the pendulum swings back the other way in the direction of unique individuality as St. Mark's Comics had. Or not.

I remember that issue of Power Man and Iron Fist. I believe that was his first appearance.

The cover price on mainstream comic books, the monthly issue that you think of when you think "comic book" = $4.00. You can devour it in about 20 minutes. ComiXology, a division of Amazon, costs $6.00 per month. It's like Netflix or Amazon Prime -- all you can eat. In this case, they have 10's of 1,000's of back issues available to you, from a wide range of publishers. All beamed to the electronic device of your choice. Even the library can't compete. Not even close. And then you don't have to try to find a place to store them when you're done. So - where is the smart consumer going to shop? Unless you're a physical collector, it's a no brainer. The sticker price on the comics has to come down, and be sold where you buy other stuff too so that they don't have to support an entire store on their own.

NYC comic book shops like St. Marks, Big Apple Comics on the Upper West Side and Jeff's Comics downtown were revelations in the mid 80's. Comic books were usually found placed on two or three racks or a few shelves in a stationery store. More comics meant more worlds to explore. Now there are so many digital portals in which one can lose him or herself, but the comic book shops from that era were true treasure islands.

The whole city is vanishing. Those of us who actually grew up here can't begin to list all that's been lost. Just a few years back, (I think it was 2015), I went to go with my wife to our favorite Indian restaurant in Little India, just two blocks away from St. Mark’s Comics. As we turned the corner onto 6th street, the restaurant, Ghandi, was gone. My wife said: "We somehow got lost, this isn't the right place," but it was. Not only was my favorite Indian Restaurant gone, so was my second, Mitali, and my third, and... We'd been in Little India just a few months earlier and it was unchanged, then suddenly the entire neighborhood was gone, as if it never existed. We found one restaurant still open between Starbucks, Starbucks clones, and mall restaurants. The waiter, who had worked in Mitali for 40 years, explained, "It was the rents. Restaurants made a profit here forever, but in the last few months all of the rents went up at least 300 percent. It was impossible, we couldn't raise our prices 300 percent, so we all closed. This restaurant is only here because the lease expires next year, then it'll be gone too." Soon, I'll walk into Little Italy and my wife will say: "We somehow got lost." I grew up in Flatbush and have lived my life on these city streets. New Yorkers didn't get lost, the entire fabric, the true richness, of New York City have been purposefully destroyed, first by Bloomberg and then by de Blasio, who live for greed and care only for huge corporations.

Most of the Manhattan art supply stores have closed now. Only a few left in a city of artists.

Someone should send all these comments to Mayor DeB in Iowa. It's just too sad what this city continues to do to itself.

Is St.Marks Pizza still around? Still the best slice I ever had.

Our city, which once was awash with great places, is losing its charm and its most cherished spaces. Ziegfeld called it curtains and Tekserve blew a fuse, Astroland Amusement park can no longer amuse. Pearl Paint has faded. Bowlmor is no more. Love Saves the Day couldn't save their own store. Lenox Lounge closed to make way for Sephora. The candles burned out in Ben Ari’s menorah. With Carnegie Deli no longer around, you can’t find a good piece of Kishka in town. And no superhero who dons a disguise, could rescue St. Marks from its tragic demise. Much more than locations to shop and to eat, they hosted our moments both bitter and sweet. Hundreds and hundreds of great little stores, that somehow got by through depressions and wars. Even post 9/11 they kept hope alive, but then came a mayor they couldn't survive. Rents all went skyward while profits stayed flat, The Bottom Line's bottom line couldn't standup to that. Now we have condos upon every street, priced only in reach of the super-elite. Unless you're a Buffet, a Baldwin or Beiber, you can't buy a place and you can't rent one either. Banks no one visits now pepper our blocks, lousy with chain stores and Citi Bike docks. Storefronts sit vacant as victims of greed. How many Starbucks does one borough need? The soul of our city’s being stolen away, we’re losing our past and we don’t have a say. Titanic was felled by an iceberg, you know, for New York, ’twas a Bloomberg what sank us below.

I've grown accustomed to hearing about my favorite New York establishments closing their doors, but this one hits particularly close to home: I used to live almost directly across the street from St. Mark's Comics, in the building that housed Trash & Vaudeville on its first two floors. Mondo Kim's, next door to me, shuttered for good while I still lived there -- which wasn't a huge surprise, given the obsolescence of video stores, but still -- and Trash & Vaudeville closed in 2015. Grassroots Tavern, located a few doors down, exited the scene at the end of 2017 after 40+ years, as did Cafe Orlin a block east. While I realize nearly all of the area's closures stem from downtown's evolution into an enclave for the wealthy, the somewhat bizarre part is that this is all happening at a time when Manhattan retail on whole is in severe decline. Rich people may be moving into the area, but they're mostly doing their shopping online, resulting in scores of empty storefronts on less-trafficked streets. On the opposite side of Astor Place, before E. 8th transitions into St. Marks, the retail spaces are largely dormant, thanks to landlords stubbornly refusing to lower their rent levels -- in effect denying the reality that brick-and-mortar shops are a dying breed. And yet they keep forcing long-established businesses away with farcically huge rent increases, instead of doing everything they can to keep them in place -- in the process killing much of what makes New York "New York."

i was never a comic collector but i loved the shop and would stop in to look around every time i was on st. marks place, which was frequently, as my best friend lived on st. marks, right above The Sock Man (sadly, also gone, along wih a lot of other wonderful, unique, funky places). my friend moved away, and the city is always changing, which one has to accept, but i will probably never again have reason or desire to ramble down st. marks place and the east village.

Anyone reading Jeffrey's editorial who is unfamiliar with his work and musical writing and performing talent owes it to themselves (and to him) to change that ASAP. We've been following him for years, first on YouTube and then by getting to any nearby performance we could. Congrats, Jeffrey, on being published in the NYTs editorial section. And farewell to changing St. Marks Place.....

Could it be that no one lives there, so no one shops there? When is NYC going to decide that allowing people buy expensive real estate to hide the money from the countries from which they stole it is not actually a good civic practice?

Thanks for sharing this piece about one of the few places I could get World War Three Illustrated. And yeah, Sidewalk Cafe was pretty awesome too.

I credit comics for fixing my eyes on the printed word during my dreary elementary school noneducation. If I was reading at all, I was reading the exploits of Superman and Lex Luthor, Mr. Mxzptlck (whose name I pronounced correctly, I learned in adulthood), and all those superheroes thwarting all those villains plotting feverishly against truth, justice, and the American Way. Much later, my teenage son and I discovered our local comic store, Cyborg, much like St. Mark's, complete with overstocked shelves and a knowledgeable owner name of Darren. Favoring the DC characters of my youth we spent a small fortune weekly delving into the adventures of Green Lantern, Batman, Aquaman, Birds of Prey, and, of course, Superman. Just as comics preserved me from illiteracy in my youth, they then enhanced a father-son bond greatly in need of succor. Long, heavy boxes full of those erstwhile fantasmagoric adventures lie tucked away in my attic. My son will not allow me to dispose of them. He has three little children he plans to expose to their tender mercies as soon as they can read a thought bubble.

really sad, so with the way things are going what's next Forbidden Planet, Search & Destroy, The Strand? Even Midtown comics will eventually not be spared, tsk tsk, New York becomes less unique and interesting every year.

I lived in the East Village for 11 years and spent hours and a lot of cash at Mitch's store. It was a pleasant stop on the way home from work. I left New York in 1999 when Manhattan was over. Before I left I sold my collection to Mitch, inventory for the store, much I had bought from him. That stores like his hung in there another 20 years amazes me. That Russ & Daughters and Jonah Schimmel still exist amazes but my New York is gone.

Cool article thanks. I love it how your own social media pages are filled with the influences you sourced from St. Marks. You've inspired me to read Fuff.

ComiXology and other digital formats are replacing print comic books

The last sentence was a shock, especially considering who wrote this article. I hope the Times publishes another piece by Jeffrey Lewis on the closing of Sidewalk Cafe. There aren't that many venues as central to a single genre as the Sidewalk Cafe. And there aren't that any musicians as central to that same genre as Jeffrey Lewis.

Sweet. Poignant.

I have no words anymore. Not even a word balloon.

Rest In Power

Thank you for this love letter to the special shops like this that were so magical when we were kids. There are a few left like The Compleat Strategist on 33rd street, tucked away and still intact 35 years later, but every time I go there to buy strategy games for my godson I find him on his tablet playing the latest online game. Bittersweet and full of longing for a time long past, I find myself at once in my youth and strange present...

A comic book store doesn't feel like a comic book store without the exploding cacophony of semi-organized chaos. Forbidden Planet always seemed too well merchandised for me. St. Mark's had character. The place reminds me of my favorite comic haunts growing up. We always avoided the places with too much polish. Better to dig through old cardboard boxes stacked in the back looking for that one missing title. The experience was more fun and cheaper too.

Really sad to see this. One of my sons enjoyed this shop a lot. The East Village is changing more than I like to realize.

I remember the Richie Rich comics, Donald Duck and Garfield. There was also The Family circle, Calvin and Hobbs, and a few others. I never think of them as being at a comic book store. Just the Superman types. So sad, it would have been neat to go get a copy of Richie Rich.

Comic book shops always felt like a haven to me — I’m grateful I learned the patience and discipline of searching and collecting from them, and not from a smartphone. Along with Chinatown, record stores, and a good coffee shop, comic book shops were among the first places I’d look for in a new city in order to find my footing. I went to St. Mark’s the first week I moved to New York in 2000, still nearly a decade before there was much content online and before the iPhone and mobile apps made getting to know a city easier. I was looking for comic book imagery of NYC, and Mitch introduced me to Will Eisner’s Life in the Big City. Thank you.

St. Marks Comics was always on my weekend to do list when I lived in New York, and was a must see place every time I would return to visit. I will miss it.

The original St. Mark, author of the oldest of the gospels, has had plenty of time by now to get used to a playing-out in history quite different than the solemn, frightful eschatological events he seemed to have in mind, back then. I like to think he's loosened up a bit, even as he has grown deeper. Who knows, if he were going to write a gospel today, he might prefer the graphic novel as his form. Probably not true "comics," though; for one thing, superheroes would not be of much interest to him. Oh well. I hope his (hidden?) patronage of Mitch Cutler, and Mitch's appreciative customers, has been a blessing for them over the years.