How to Spend 3 Hours in New York: St Marks Place and Tompkins Square
Updated October 3, 2026
Three hours in New York covers a classic East Village loop: Peter Stuyvesant's old church, an egg cream at B&H Dairy, a slow walk down St. Marks Place and a bench in Tompkins Square Park.
St. Marks Place gets the postcards, but the blocks around it tell more of the story. There's a Dutch governor's churchyard and a kosher counter where the staff know regulars by their usual order. Then come tenement stoops famous from album covers and a park where half the neighborhood seems to end up by late afternoon. The loop is short enough to walk at an easy pace with a long, cheap lunch in the middle. Plan it for Tuesday through Sunday, because B&H Dairy shuts on Mondays. If you're carrying a suitcase, book a shop near Astor Place in the Bounce app first. As of October 2026, you'll pay from $2.90 a day.
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The 3 hour plan, stop by stop
Stops and travel: 1 hr 47 min to 2 hr 42 min of 3 hours
Peter Stuyvesant, the last Dutch director-general of New Netherland, built a family chapel on his farm here and was buried beneath it, and his vault still lies under the present church. The fieldstone building by John McComb Jr., who also designed City Hall, was consecrated in 1799. It is often cited as the second oldest church building in Manhattan, and it sits at an angle to the grid because it followed a country lane older than the streets. The steeple arrived in 1828 and the cast iron portico in 1856. Since the 1960s the Poetry Project and Danspace have made it a home for poets and dancers.
Tip: Approach along Stuyvesant Street, one of the few Manhattan streets that ignores the grid, and look for the old cracked church bell resting in the churchyard.
- Time here
- 15 to 25 min
- Website
- stmarksbowery.org
NaviTime to head out from St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery for B&H Dairy. It's a 4 minute walk if you leave now. Here's the link
This stretch of Second Avenue was once called Yiddish Broadway for its theaters, and B&H is one of the last kosher dairy lunch counters left from that era. Abe Bergson and Jack Heller opened it in 1938, and the narrow room with its long counter, a few stools and the Better Health sign has barely changed. Fawzy Abdelwahed bought it in 2003 and runs it with his wife Ola, and orders get called out behind the counter in Arabic, Spanish, Polish and English. The food is meatless comfort cooking: thick slices of house challah, borscht, soups, cheese blintzes, pierogi and matzo brei.
Tip: Take a counter stool instead of waiting for a table, and order the challah toasted with butter next to a chocolate egg cream stirred by hand.
- Time here
- 30 to 45 min
- Website
- bandhdairykosher.com
NaviTime to head out from B&H Dairy for St. Marks Place. It's a 3 minute walk if you leave now. Here's the link
Between Second Avenue and Avenue A, St. Marks Place is the East Village's main street of misfits, where Beat poets, hippies, punks and generations of students each left a layer. Tenement stoops double as benches, tattoo parlors and record shops hide a few steps up or down from the sidewalk, and the dive bars keep their windows dark. A plaque marks the building where the poet W. H. Auden lived for almost two decades. Between First Avenue and Avenue A stand the twin tenements on the cover of Led Zeppelin's Physical Graffiti, the same stoop where the Rolling Stones filmed their Waiting on a Friend video.
Tip: Walk east on the north side and come back on the south side, looking up at the fire escapes and cornices, which are older than anything at street level.
- Time here
- 25 to 40 min
NaviTime to head out from St. Marks Place for Tompkins Square Park. It's a 5 minute walk if you leave now. Here's the link
Laid out on a drained salt marsh and named for Governor Daniel D. Tompkins, this ten and a half acre square has a long record of protest. It hosted hunger marches, a rally during the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 and the 1988 clash between police and residents over a park curfew. The elms planted along its curving paths in 1879 still shade the benches, and under one of them, the Hare Krishna Tree, a swami chanted in 1966 and started the movement in America. Find the Grecian Temperance Fountain and the small memorial to the General Slocum disaster, which emptied the old Little Germany around the park.
Tip: Grab a bench by the dog run and watch the regulars; it's the busiest corner of the park and the friendliest.
- Time here
- 25 to 40 min
- Website
- nycgovparks.org
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