St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery

Peter Stuyvesant is buried under the east wall. The last Dutch governor of New Amsterdam bought the bouwerie — the farm — in 1651, built his chapel on it in 1660, and was interred in the family vault beneath it when he died in 1672. The chapel fell apart; his great-grandson sold the site to the Episcopal Church for a dollar in 1793 on the condition that a new church be built; and John McComb Jr. — the architect of City Hall — built the fieldstone Georgian church that stands on the corner of Second Avenue and East Tenth Street, skewed off the Manhattan grid because it still faces the lane Stuyvesant's farm was on.

St. Mark's is the oldest site of continuous worship in New York — the second-oldest church building in Manhattan and the vaults' contents are a roll of the city's first families: the Stuyvesants for three hundred years, until the last descendant was sealed in in 1953; Nicholas Fish; Daniel Tompkins; the poet Clement Clarke Moore, who gave the land for the General Theological Seminary; and, in the darker register, John C. Colt — the convicted murderer, brother of the revolver's inventor, who died in his cell hours before his scheduled execution and was buried here by the family in an unmarked plot.

The church that kept the city's first dead also became its most democratic one — the Episcopal congregation that in the twentieth century opened its doors to the avant-garde: the Poetry Project since 1966, Danspace, the Beats reading in the sanctuary under Stuyvesant's vaults. The churchyard holds the dead of the Bowery the neighborhood is named for; the vaults hold the colony's.

St. Mark's is the rare file where the haunting and the history are the same material — a church built over the vault of the man who surrendered New Amsterdam, on the lane that predates the grid, holding three hundred years of the city's dead in the walls while the poets read upstairs.