Youths gathered on St. Marks Place in August, 1966. Photograph by Fred W. McDarrah/Getty

“You grew up on St. Marks Place?” people sometimes ask me, as if they didn’t know children could. Or, “You grew up on St. Marks Place?” implying that I seem too normal to come from a place known for Mohawks and tattoo parlors. Then, invariably, these strangers pity me for having missed the street’s golden era. St. Marks bohemians—those who were Beats in the fifties, hippies in the sixties, punks in the seventies, or anarchists in the eighties—often say that the East Village is dead now, with only the time of death a matter of debate. New Yorkers are street-proud, and every neighborhood invites its share of good-old-days lamenting. But just as St. Marks Place has long been an amplified corner of the city—louder, drunker, more garish than its neighbors—today it seems to evoke a more intense nostalgia.

Of course, the sentimentalists are right: I did miss a lot. My parents have lived in their top-floor walk-up on St. Marks Place since 1973. By the time I was born, in 1976, many of the street’s most defining eras had passed. Gone were the days of Thelonious Monk playing the Five Spot jazz club, Andy Warhol hosting the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, and the New York Dolls ambling down the street in hot pants. The poet W. H. Auden, who once lived at No. 77 and promenaded to St. Mark’s Church each Sunday wearing his slippers, died in Vienna the same week my parents moved onto his old block.

But the history of St. Marks Place is more complex than even many of its cheerleaders realize. The area has undergone constant, and surprising, evolution in the past four hundred years. In the sixteen-hundreds, the land was a farm owned by the Dutch director-general, Peter Stuyvesant, who stumped through the fruit orchards on his silver-and-wooden peg leg. In the eighteen-thirties, judges and statesmen lived here, including the Hamilton family. In 1904, it was devastated by the General Slocum disaster, a pleasure-ship fire that killed more than a thousand German picnickers from the St. Mark’s Lutheran church on Sixth Street—New York’s deadliest tragedy before the terrorist attacks of 2001. In the early twentieth century, gangsters and bootleggers thrived. In the nineteen-forties, it was a working-class immigrant neighborhood; a man who grew up on St. Marks around the time of the Second World War told me that, as a kid, he chose his route home from school based on whether he preferred to be beaten up by Polish or Italian toughs.

Though I didn’t come of age until well after the street’s most iconic eras, I am as familiar as a deacon’s daughter with the religion of St. Marks Place. The street has provided generation after generation with a mystical flash of belonging. As a child, what I remember more than anything else was the noise: dozens of parties happening on any given night, just beyond my bedroom window. I’d be annoyed by the shouts and screams and trashcans being overturned, especially in the summers before my parents bought an air-conditioner, when the windows were wide open and it felt like I was sleeping in the middle of the street.

But when I became a teen-ager, the noise changed for me: it became the roar of promise. The street seemed suddenly like a grand bazaar of bars and beds and futures. My friends and I would walk river to river, along St. Marks Place and Eighth Street, passing drag queens in front of No. 15, skaters catcalling us at the Astor Place Cube, drug dealers everywhere hissing, “Smoke, smoke,” and the grimy, pierced runaways known as “crusty punks” sitting on the corners with their bandanna-collared dogs. We felt like we owned the city. We had that feeling of being the right age, at the right time, in the exact right place.

St. Marks Place in the nineties was so many things at once. After the Tompkins Square Park riots, in the late eighties and early nineties, the police more or less succeeded in evicting the anarchists who had for years colonized the park. In their wake, St. Marks Place saw the most diverse social scene in its history. It was as if the apex predator had been eradicated, turning the region into a playground for a wide array of beta species. St. Marks in the nineties was a place where you could geek out any way you wanted. You could join forces with the nerds of St. Mark’s Comics, the skaters doing kickflips at the Cube, or the indie kids leaving secret messages for each other in Xeroxed zines at St. Mark’s Bookshop. By that point, the sixties bohemians, once the block’s stars, had become colorful extras in our play. Irving Stettner patrolled the neighborhood selling watercolors and his zine, Stroker, made up largely of letters to and from his friend Henry Miller; Adam Purple, a.k.a. Les Ego, biked around the neighborhood dressed in shades of violet; Jim Power, a.k.a. Mosaic Man, decorated the street’s lampposts with broken tiles. A white-bearded man known as East Village Santa walked the neighborhood in all seasons wearing red clothes; faced with a curious child wondering if he were really Santa, he might pull a bouquet of flowers out of his jacket.

Stores like Sounds, Venus, and Kim’s, the one-stop mini-mall for music and movies, allowed every clique to realize its fullest self. If you were a Riot Grrrl, you could find Bikini Kill albums. If you loved indie music, you could stock up on Dinosaur Jr., Belly, and Guided by Voices. And if you couldn’t find enough of your kind walking up and down St. Marks Place, you could find your tribe online. The same year that Tompkins Square Park closed for renovation, the World Wide Web made its début. By 1993, St. Marks Place had its first Internet café, @ Café at No. 12.

In the years that followed, the street kept getting richer. Under Mayor Giuliani, cops cracked down on “quality-of-life violations,” causing clubs to close and nightlife to suffer. Under Mayor Bloomberg, real-estate development boomed, and people with actual jobs moved into the neighborhood. The same address that once housed the Dom and Electric Circus and then the All-Craft rehab center now hosts shops like Beyond Vape and Chipotle. Along St. Marks, Korean and Japanese restaurants and karaoke bars today bring new waves of young people to the area for delicious bao and ramen, and for soju-soaked renditions of “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” I shake my head sometimes at these youngsters, who feel so secure on the block that they leave their laptops on the tables at the Astor Place Starbucks when they go to the bathroom. But maybe I’m a little jealous, too. They may be missing out on the street we knew—the Gringo mural, the soy-burger sandwiches at Dojo, the old-movie double-features at Theatre 80—but they also enjoy a degree of physical and emotional comfort that was totally unknown to us. I was never able to play in Tompkins Square Park as a kid; my son can.

The religion of the block, meanwhile—the belief that the street is a space for people who are different—endures, and so do plenty of longtime residents. Old St. Marks today remains tucked in between Chase banks and e-cigarette stores. Three eighteen-thirties row houses still stand, at Nos. 4, 20, and 25. The barbers at Royal Hair give men haircuts just as they have for decades. People continue to order egg creams with their newspapers at Gem Spa. Anthony Scifo and his family sell shoes at Foot Gear Plus, on the corner of St. Marks Place and First Avenue, as they have for thirty-five years. Bartenders at Grassroots still encourage drinkers’ thirst by providing dollar bowls of salty popcorn. And the Little Missionary Day Nursery, founded by Sara Curry, in 1896, prospers in its original spot, at No. 93. Curry’s portrait looks down, mirror-like, on Eileen Johnson, the current head of the school, a warm, thoughtful woman so alike Curry in features that they might be twins, were they not separated by a century. “I always ask,” Johnson says, “What would Sara Curry do?”