Back in 2007, I wrote what was soon to be a somewhat typically (for me) nostalgia-fueled post about how the westerly-facing façade on the northeasterly side of St. Marks Place near Third Avenue that previously hosted the massive portrait of “Gringo” (i.e. the somewhat notorious local punky junkie named John Spacely) now just sported a plain, white field with the word “Muerte” on it. I interpreted that cryptic Spanish as emblematic of the direction the neighborhood’s character was headed. In ensuing years, no further artwork graced that wall, beyond another morbid legend that read “RIPSTMARKS.” Beyond that, it just got grimmer.
By most accounts (including not one, but two independent feature films -- one of which inspiring director Lech Kowalski to commission that massive mural), the actual subject, John Spacely, was not really that admirable a character. Essentially a colorful-albeit-troubled, substance-abusing actor, scenester, hustler and heroin dealer, John Spacely may have looked cool, but he arguably exemplified the very least salubrious aspects of the East Village, and many understandably resented that grand, artfully inescapable glorification. By the turn of the millennium, that resentment finally convinced the building’s landlord to paint over it. Meanwhile, Michael Jackson’s equally massive mural on nearby East 11th remains undisturbed, despite multiple allegations of child molestation, but I suppose that’s a post for another day.
In any case, when I first spied the “Gringo” mural in the early `80s, I had no idea who John Spacely was. To my impressionable mind, it was just a striking bit of artwork that completely captured the tenor of the times and vibe of the neighborhood. Contrary to my laboriously pedantic nature, I wasn’t particularly bothered by the unseemly specifics of its origins. It just seemed like the gateway to coolsville.
Years passed and the neighborhood kept changing. Around 1993, they erected Cooper Union’s first dormitory on the same strip, just north of where the Continental, St. Marks Pizza and the corner Optimo used to stand. As discussed here, commissioned as a freelance reporter by a colleague from LIFE Magazine, I wrote an article profiling the new dorm for Cooper Union’s alumni magazine and remember walking around the neighborhood interviewing locals about it. I vividly remember chatting with a Mohican kid in a vintage Germs t-shirt who ominously foretold the dull future of St. Marks Place. “I’m sure that’s just the beginning of the end,” he predicted. He wasn’t wrong. Seven years later, “Gringo” was whitewashed.
In 2019, meanwhile, news broke that an eight-story, mixed-use office building was to be built on the corner of St. Marks at Third Avenue, displacing all the businesses between the Cooper Union dorm and the corner, including the sites listed above and a particularly tragic McDonalds. Presumably, the pandemic slowed the process down, and the construction site sat in a state of eroding dormancy for a very long time.
To this day, even though the “Gringo” mural has been gone for about 23 years, my eyes still kind of expect to see it when I look to the east from Astor Place. Not to get too histrionic, but it’s much like how my eyes used to search for the two towers of the World Trade Center in the years after the events of September 11th. These were things that made a lasting impression that one didn’t expect to just vanish.
This week, however, I spotted something new that kind of took me by surprise (although it shouldn’t have). Taking an easterly route to my office, on Monday, I swung toward the Bowery and looked to my left and did sort of a double take. Not only was “Gringo” no longer there (duh!), but in the lot slated for the new office building, there now grew tall, infrastructural spires.
Dormant no longer, that building is definitely coming, and St. Marks will change even further.
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