Saint Mark’s in the Bowery 131 E. 10th Street at Second Avenue, Manhattan, New York. In 1651, Petrus Stuyvesant, Director General of New Netherland, purchased land for a bowery or farm from the Dutch West India Company and by 1660 built a family chapel at the present day site of St. Mark’s Church. Stuyvesant died in 1672 and was interred in a vault under the chapel. This is why the church building faces true South, even though that makes it skewed from the City’s grid: it originally stood on a rural lane, before the city grew north to meet it.
in 1793, the Stuyvesant family sold the chapel to the Episcopal Church for $1. In 1795 the cornerstone of the present fieldstone Georgian style church was laid, built by John McComb Jr. who also built New York City Hall; it was consecrated on May 9, 1799.
Alexander Hamilton helped incorporate St. Mark’s as the first Episcopal parish independent of Trinity Church in the United States. By 1807, the church was flourishing.
St. Mark’s continued to grow in stature and prominence throughout the 1800s. In 1828 the church steeple, designed by Martin Euclid Thompson and Ithiel Town, was erected; in 1835, the Parish Hall was built; and in 1836 the Sanctuary was renovated, replacing its square pillars with slender Egyptian Revival pillars. The cast- and wrought-iron fence was added in 1838; in 1856, the Italianate cast-iron portico was added; and in 1861 the building gained a brick addition.
In 1903, beautiful stained-glass windows were installed (you can still see some of them in the Sanctuary’s first floor) and in 1913, St. Mark’s was given the altarpiece of the annunciation in the Parish Hall—a reproduction of an original created c.1475 by Andrea della Robbia.
On July 12, 1978 a fire started—apparently caused by a restoration worker’s acetylene torch. It turned into a three-alarm blaze. The iron fences around the church prevented fire companies from using normal equipment, and there was fear that the steeple would collapse. Fortunately, no one was injured, and the steeple stood the blaze—but a back section of the roof did fall in, and 9 of the 23 stained-glass windows in the church were destroyed. The 1836 church bell was cracked beyond repair. The bell and the steeple’s original clock still sit in the East and West churchyards today.
Saint Mark’s is New York’s oldest site of continuous religious practice, and the church itself second-oldest church building on Manhattan.