St. Mark's Playhouse

Gem Spa was a newspaper stand and candy store located on the corner of St. Mark's Place and Second Avenue in the East Village neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City. It opened under another name in the 1920s, and was renamed in 1957. It was open 24 hours a day, and was known for being commonly considered to be the birthplace of the authentic New York City-style egg cream, which its awning described as "New York's Best."Often referred to as a bodega, in the 1950s, Gem Spa was a gathering place for beats, and in the 1960s it was a hippie hangout, known for selling a wide selection of underground newspapers. New York Magazine named it the best newsstand in the East Village in 2001.On May 7, 2020, owner Parul Patel announced that the physical store would not re-open due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and rent increases, despite community efforts and a social media campaign to keep it open.The building in which Gem Spa was located, 131 Second Avenue, or 36 St. Marks Place, was built in 1898-1900 and was designed by Louis F. Heinecke in the Renaissance Revival style. It is located within the East Village/Lower East Side Historic District, which was created in October 2012.

B&H Dairy is a kosher restaurant or luncheonette in the East Village of Manhattan in New York City. The original owners, Abie Bergson and Jack Heller, later Sol Hausman, opened it in 1938 when the area was known for the Yiddish Theatre District. Bergson was an aspiring actor, and Molly Picon and Maurice Schwartz were patrons. Bergson sold the luncheonette in the 1970s and it went bankrupt in 1978. Bob Sherman, a partner in a construction firm, bought it. A 1940s style lunch counter B&H serves cheese blintzes with sour cream, borscht, matzo brei, and other kosher dairy Jewish cuisine. It is owned and operated by an Egyptian Muslim and Catholic Polish couple, Fawzy and Alexandra Abdelwahed. It was closed for a time due to a gas explosion and a fire but reopened. It was noted in an interview by Lily Tomlin. Chloë Sevigny is also a patron of the establishment.

The Orpheum Theatre, formerly Player's Theatre, is a 299-seat off-Broadway theatre on Second Avenue near the corner of St. Marks Place in the East Village neighborhood of lower Manhattan, New York City. It has been the home of the New York production of Stomp since it opened in 1994, with over 10,000 performances of the show having taken place there. There may have been a concert garden on the site as early as the 1880s, but there was a theatre there by 1904. During the heyday of Yiddish theatre in the Yiddish Theater District in Manhattan, the venue was the Player's Theatre, and was part of the "Jewish Rialto" along Second Avenue. By the 1920s, the theatre was exhibiting films, but was converted back to dramatic use in 1958, with the first production, Little Mary Sunshine, opening in November 1959.Significant productions include the revival and revamping of Cole Porter's musical Anything Goes in 1962, Your Own Thing in 1968, The Me Nobody Knows in 1970, The Cocktail Party in 1980, Key Exchange in 1981, Broken Toys! in 1981, Little Shop of Horrors in 1982, Sandra Bernhard's Without You I'm Nothing in 1988, The Lady in Question in 1989, Eric Bogosian's Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll in 1990, John Leguizamo's Mambo Mouth in 1991, and David Mamet's Oleanna in 1992.The theatre is owned by Liberty Theatres, who also own Minetta Lane Theatre.

The Ukrainian National Home, is located at 140-142 Second Avenue (between Ninth St. and St. Mark's Place) in Manhattan's East Village. The building, which currently operates as a restaurant known as the Ukrainian East Village Restaurant, dates back as far as 1830, and has served as a private home, YMCA location, and the Stuyvesant Casino. UK rock band New Order played one of their first shows there on November 18, 1981.

Veselka is a Ukrainian restaurant at 144 Second Avenue in the East Village neighborhood of Manhattan in New York City. It was established in 1954 by Wolodymyr Darmochwal (Ukr. Володимир Дармохвал) and his wife, Olha Darmochwal (Ukr. Ольга Дармохвал), post–World War II Ukrainian refugees. Veselka is one of the last of many Slavic restaurants that once proliferated the neighborhood. A cookbook, published in October 2009 by St. Martin’s Press, highlights more than 120 of the restaurant’s Eastern European recipes.A sister restaurant, Veselka Essex, opened in Essex Crossing in 2019. Another restaurant, on East 1st Street and Bowery, opened in November 2011 and closed in 2013.

A gas explosion occurred in the afternoon of March 26, 2015, in a building located at 121 Second Avenue, in the East Village neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City. The explosion was caused by an illegal tap into a gas main. The explosion caused two deaths, injured at least nineteen people, four critically, and the resulting fire completely destroyed three adjacent buildings at 119, 121, and 123 Second Avenue between East 7th Street and St. Marks Place.

The Ottendorfer Public Library and Stuyvesant Polyclinic Hospital are a pair of historic buildings at 135 and 137 Second Avenue in the East Village neighborhood of Manhattan in New York City. The buildings house the Ottendorfer Branch of the New York Public Library, as well as the women's workspace The Wing within the former Stuyvesant Polyclinic hospital. The buildings were jointly designed by German-born architect William Schickel in the neo-Italian Renaissance style. Both structures are three stories tall with a facade of Philadelphia pressed brick facades ornamented in terracotta. The hospital building features terracotta busts of several notable medical professionals. The structures were erected in 1883–84 following a donation by philanthropists Oswald Ottendorfer and Anna Ottendorfer. The library was the second branch of the New York Free Circulating Library, while the hospital was affiliated with the German Hospital uptown, now Lenox Hill Hospital. Both structures served the Little Germany enclave of Lower Manhattan. The hospital was sold in 1906 to another medical charity, the German Polyklinik; the name was changed to Stuyvesant Polyclinic in the 1910s. The buildings were restored numerous times in their history. The structures received three separate New York City landmark designations in 1976, 1977, and 1981, and were added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1979.

Hebrew Technical Institute was a vocational High School in New York City. The school was founded on January 7, 1884 and closed in 1939.After completing two years at the school, students could specialize in wood-working, pattern making, metal working, instrument making, mechanical drawing, architectural drawing, wood carving, free-hand drawing or applied electricity. The school was founded after three Hebrew charity organizations formed a committee to promote technical education for the many Jewish immigrants arriving in New York at the time. The school originally opened at 206 East Broadway. After a number of relocations, the school moved into 34 and 36 Stuyvesant Street.

The Electric Circus was a nightclub located at 19-25 St. Marks Place between Second and Third Avenues in the East Village neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City, from 1967 to August 1971. The club was created by Jerry Brandt, Stanton J. Freeman and their partners and designed by Chermayeff & Geismar. With its invitation (from one of its press releases) to "play games, dress as you like, dance, sit, think, tune in and turn on," and its mix of light shows, music, circus performers and experimental theater, the Electric Circus embodied the wild and creative side of 1960s club culture. Flame throwing jugglers and trapeze artists performed between musical sets, strobe lights flashed over a huge dance floor, and multiple projectors flashed images and footage from home movies. Seating was varied, with sofas provided. The Electric Circus became "New York's ultimate mixed-media pleasure dome, and its hallucinogenic light baths enthralled every sector of New York society." Its hedonistic atmosphere also influenced the later rise of disco culture and discotheques. Experimental bands such as The Velvet Underground, jam bands such as The Grateful Dead, soul acts such as Ike & Tina Turner, and avant-garde composers such as minimalist Terry Riley and electronic music pioneer Morton Subotnick played at the club. Other bands played there before they were famous, such as Raven, the Allman Brothers Band, Sly & the Family Stone, and The Chambers Brothers.

Burp Castle is a beer bar located in the East Village neighborhood of Manhattan in New York City. It is ostensibly "monastery-themed". Bartenders occasionally wear monastic robes, play Gregorian chants, and patrons are shushed if they speak above a whisper. The bar is located near the site of the 2015 East Village gas explosion, and it was forced to close for several weeks before occupancy was proved to once again be safe.SoundPrint, an app that measures noise produced in restaurants and bars, lists Burp Castle as a particularly quiet location.

CheLi is a Chinese restaurant in New York City.

The Kiev Restaurant (also known as the Kiev Diner or simply The Kiev) was a Ukrainian restaurant located in the East Village section of New York City. Founded in 1978 by Soviet emigrant to the United States Michael Hrynenko (1954–2004), the site was the former location of Louis Auster's Candy Shop, who was one of the original creators of the egg cream.Kiev for most of its existence was open for business 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It was located at 117 Second Avenue, on the southwest corner of the intersection of Second Avenue and Seventh Street. At one time, the area was known as the "Pierogi Belt" because of the large number of Ukrainian restaurants; by 2007, only a few remained, such as Veselka. Kiev was popular for Ukrainians who attended St. George's Church down the street, who would go out for brunch after service at Kiev. In its original form, Kiev was closed in 2000 by its owner. It then went through several abortive remodelings and reopenings, closing for good in 2006. The cuisine was largely Eastern European, including pierogi, challah, matzah brei, kasha varnishkis (kasha over bow-tie pasta), blintzes, fruit compote and so on, though typically American items such as french fries were also available.The restaurant was a local cultural institution, famed not only for its cuisine and perpetual availability but also for the eclectic and colorful variety of patrons. It is mentioned in the song "Detachable Penis" by the band King Missile. Poets Allen Ginsberg and Ted Berrigan included the Kiev in poems. The restaurant had many other notable regulars during its tenure.