The downtown literary pilgrim does not begin with the Strand. The Strand is for the visitor who has not yet learned how to read the city. The real Saturday route begins where W.H. Auden wrote his late poems at a window above St. Mark’s Place and ends where Joseph Mitchell first walked the abandoned upper floors of Schermerhorn Row. Between those two anchors — one a poet’s railroad apartment, the other a row of 1811 counting houses — runs a four-stop downtown bookstore pilgrimage that no guide will assemble for you, because three of the four stops are smaller than your living room and the fourth occupies a building that predates the Erie Canal.

This is the East Village and Lower East Side Saturday route. It runs roughly two miles and takes about five hours if you read in each store the way bookstores are meant to be read in — slowly, with a coffee somewhere in the middle, and with the understanding that the addresses around you are not background. They are the text.

Stop One: East Village Books, 99 St. Marks Place

Begin at East Village Books because it opens at one o’clock, which gives you a literary excuse to start the day with the longest walk and a coffee before the doors unlock. The store sits at 99 St. Marks Place, between First Avenue and Avenue A, with hours that themselves read like a poem: Monday through Saturday, one in the afternoon until ten at night; Sunday, one until nine. The phone number — (212) 477-8647 — is published on the storefront’s own website, alongside an email address that still ends in “aol.com.” That is not a charming detail. It is the truth-telling of a used bookstore that has never needed to update itself.

What East Village Books does well, it does in the manner of a buyer rather than a curator. The store’s secondary identity — its public-facing name as a wholesale operation — is New York City Book Buyer, and the proprietors have built a reputation for handling estate libraries and scholarly collections. The browsing implication is this: the shelves are stocked by the dispersal of serious reading lives. You are walking through the residue of other people’s bibliographies. If you have any tolerance at all for the metaphysics of a used bookstore, that fact alone will make a stack of books on St. Marks Place feel different from the same stack a few blocks west.

And then there is the address itself. You are standing on the same block — across the street and twenty-two doors east — where W.H. Auden lived for nineteen years. Auden settled into a second-floor railroad apartment at 77 St. Marks Place in 1953 with his partner Chester Kallman, and remained there until 1972, the year before his death. The Village Preservation society has documented the address carefully; the building is part of its East Village Building Blocks archive, and the poet’s tenure there is preserved in the organization’s 2024 retrospective by Lannyl Stephens. By 1965, the Holiday Cocktail Lounge had opened next door at number 75. Auden became a regular. He drank cognac. He chain-smoked. He wrote in pencil and erased. He walked to St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery on Sunday mornings, reportedly in slippers, because he was a devoted parishioner and because he was W.H. Auden and the city tolerated him.

When Auden left New York in 1972, he wrote a farewell that the East Village pilgrim should carry the way Catholics carry a saint’s medal:

“New York… is not simply a metropolis: It is also a city of neighborhoods, and I consider myself extremely fortunate in the one where I have lived for the past twenty years. (To me it will always be the Lower East Side, never The East Village.)”

— W.H. Auden, 1972 (cited by Village Preservation)

Stand on the sidewalk outside East Village Books with that sentence in mind, then walk west on St. Marks toward Second Avenue. Auden’s old apartment will be on your right, just before the cocktail lounge. Number 77 is a tenement-era building like its neighbors. There is no plaque visible from across the street. That is the East Village convention. You are expected to know.

Detour: The Poetry Project, 131 E. 10th Street

Before you continue to bookstore number two, walk three blocks south and one block west to 131 East 10th Street. This is St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery, founded as a parish in 1799 on the site of Peter Stuyvesant’s family chapel. It is also the home of the Poetry Project, which has rented its office and performance space from the church continuously since the summer of 1966. The Library of Congress’s St. Mark’s Poetry Project Audio Archive — a permanent digital collection — documents the venue’s role in postwar American poetry: Joel Oppenheimer was its first director, Anne Waldman succeeded him in 1968, and memorial readings have been held there for Allen Ginsberg, Auden himself, Frank O’Hara, Paul Blackburn, Ted Berrigan, and Bernadette Mayer.

You do not need to enter the church for this stop to register. Walk past the iron fence, look at the building, and understand that the room behind those walls has hosted more than half a century of readings continuously, including the New Year’s Day Marathon — a tradition that began in 1974 and continues. The pilgrim is permitted to keep moving. The pilgrim is also permitted, on a Saturday afternoon when the gate is open, to walk into the churchyard and look at the rails where Village Preservation’s VILLAGE VOICES public-art exhibition honored Auden in 2021. The shadowbox is no longer there; the rails are.

Stop Two: Codex Books, 1 Bleecker Street

From St. Mark’s Church, walk southwest about ten minutes to 1 Bleecker Street, where Bleecker meets Bowery. This is Codex Books, and the address itself is part of the experience: you are standing at one of the great hinges of the downtown geography, where the East Village turns into NoHo and the Bowery turns into something the city has not yet quite named.

Codex’s own website is direct about what it is: “Codex sells used and new books of all kinds, with an emphasis on literary fiction and art books.” It buys gently used books at book@codexbooks.info. Its hours are 12 to 7, seven days a week. The closest subway stops are 2nd Avenue (F/M), Broadway-Lafayette (B/D/F/M/6), and Bleecker Street (6). The site links its own press coverage with a confidence that is itself a literary virtue — including the 2018 New York Times piece by T Magazine that placed Codex in the company of New York’s best small art-and-fiction bookshops in its first year of operation, and the Time Out New York announcement that introduced the store to the East Village in January 2018.

What you will find on the shelves is the inventory of an art-book buyer with literary taste. Codex’s strength is the overlap: the monograph that doubles as a critical biography, the small-press fiction debut, the reissued mid-century novel, the photography book that you cannot find at a chain. The store is small enough that you will see the whole inventory in twenty minutes if you move quickly, and small enough that you will not move quickly. Bring cash for the impulse purchase. The pilgrim does not negotiate with a used-book buyer over four dollars.

Stop Three: Sweet Pickle Books, 47 Orchard Street

Walk south from Codex through the Bowery and east into the Lower East Side proper. Forty-seven Orchard Street is a fifteen-minute walk if you take Houston, longer if you let yourself drift through the side streets, which you should. Sweet Pickle Books occupies a storefront whose own self-description is the most accurate thing any New York bookstore has ever said about itself: “The pickle bookstore in New York City’s lower east side.” The official hours, per the store’s own About page, are Monday through Friday 10 to 9pm, Saturday 10am to 9pm, Sunday 10am to 8pm. Donations of books and records are accepted on Tuesdays and Wednesdays only.

The pickles are not a gimmick. They are a covenant. The store’s logo runs a peace sign turning into a pickle turning into a heart turning into a book, captioned “One Thing Leads to Another.” Donations of books are accepted in exchange for pickles, in-store only. This is not whimsy. This is the Lower East Side keeping faith with itself.

The neighborhood you are now standing in is, of course, the literal Lower East Side that W.H. Auden insisted on naming. It is also, historically, the great immigrant Jewish neighborhood that produced — or first welcomed — Henry Roth, Anzia Yezierska, Abraham Cahan, Bernard Malamud (who set parts of The Assistant nearby), and a great deal of the early twentieth-century American literary imagination. The pickle is a small joke that means a serious thing. Bring the joke home.

The Sweet Pickle inventory is used and curated, weighted toward literary fiction, philosophy, and a strong section of poetry. The store is small, the lighting is warm, the staff knows the inventory by hand. If you arrive on a Saturday afternoon you will share the room with three or four other readers and probably one of them will be talking quietly to the clerk about a book you have not yet heard of. Listen.

Stop Four: McNally Jackson Seaport, 4 Fulton Street

The route ends at the water. Walk south through the Lower East Side toward Chinatown, then west and south again until you reach the South Street Seaport. McNally Jackson’s Seaport store sits at 4 Fulton Street, with hours Sunday through Saturday 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. The phone number is (646) 964-4232. This is one of five McNally Jackson locations in New York City — the others are SoHo, Williamsburg, Downtown Brooklyn, and Rockefeller Center — and the Seaport store is the only one of the five housed inside a federally landmarked counting house from 1811.

This is Schermerhorn Row. The block was built in 1810 to 1812 as a real estate investment by Peter Schermerhorn (1749–1826), a captain, ship chandler, and merchant who designed it for the East River waterfront trade. Each address in the block contained a storefront, an office, and warehouse floors above. The South Street Seaport Museum, which now owns and interprets the buildings, calls Schermerhorn Row “New York’s first world trade center,” a label earned by the years between 1815 and 1825 when New York consolidated its position as the country’s principal port. The individual buildings of the Row were landmarked in 1976. Between 1977 and 1984, the firm Jan Hird Pokorny Associates stabilized the block and reconstructed missing historic elements; between the late 1990s and 2003, Beyer Blinder Belle renovated the museum interiors. The work received the Bard Award from the Municipal Arts Society.

The literary anchor here is Joseph Mitchell. In 1952, Mitchell — the New Yorker writer whose patient, exact prose did more for the city than most novels — published the title story of what would become Up in the Old Hotel. He wrote about climbing the abandoned upper floors of Schermerhorn Row with the proprietor Louie Marino, whose restaurant occupied the ground floor at 92 South Street. The story rediscovered the residential hotel rooms that had filled the building’s upper stories since the 1850s, when the seaport’s commercial trade had begun to give way to the lodging trade. The Seaport Museum still preserves the remains of those hotels as part of its accessioned permanent collection, along with the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century graffiti uncovered during the restoration.

You can stand inside McNally Jackson Seaport, look up at the ceiling, and know that two floors above your head is a room that Joseph Mitchell walked into in the late 1940s with a flashlight. That is the kind of fact the literary pilgrim is owed.

The store itself is McNally Jackson’s largest book selection downtown after SoHo, with a café and a strong events calendar. The signed-copies inventory at McNally Jackson is one of the best in the city — the company maintains a dedicated Signed Copies section across its locations — and the Seaport store is particularly good for fiction-in-translation and small-press editions, which the chain stocks more aggressively than its competitors. Buy something here. End the day with a book whose first page you read in a building that was finishing construction the year James Madison was inaugurated for his second term.

The Route at a Glance

• East Village Books — 99 St. Marks Place, New York, NY 10009. Mon–Sat 1pm–10pm, Sun 1pm–9pm. (212) 477-8647. Used bookstore; estate libraries. Nearest subway: 2nd Ave (F), Astor Place (6).
• The Poetry Project (walk-by) — 131 E. 10th Street at St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery. Continuous operation since 1966.
• Codex Books — 1 Bleecker Street, New York, NY 10012. 12pm–7pm daily. book@codexbooks.info. Used and new; literary fiction and art books. Nearest subway: 2nd Ave (F/M), Broadway-Lafayette (B/D/F/M/6), Bleecker St (6).
• Sweet Pickle Books — 47 Orchard Street, New York, NY 10002. Mon–Fri 10am–9pm, Sat 10am–9pm, Sun 10am–8pm. Donations of books and records accepted in exchange for pickles, in-store only, Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Nearest subway: Grand St (B/D), East Broadway (F), Delancey/Essex (F/J/M/Z).
• McNally Jackson Seaport — 4 Fulton Street, New York, NY 10038. Sun–Sat 10am–9pm. (646) 964-4232. New books, café, signed copies. Housed in 1811 Schermerhorn Row, a National Register and individually landmarked block. Nearest subway: Fulton St (A/C/J/Z/2/3/4/5).

How to Read the Day

The Saturday East Village–Lower East Side route is not a checklist. It is a sequence designed around the rhythm of opening hours and the geography of the downtown literary imagination. East Village Books opens at one o’clock because used bookstores keep the schedules of buyers, not browsers, and the buyers arrive in the morning to the wholesale entrance, not the storefront. Sweet Pickle and McNally Jackson and Codex are open by noon. The pilgrim leaves enough time for the detour to St. Mark’s-in-the-Bowery and enough time for the slow walk south from Orchard Street to Fulton Street, which crosses Chinatown and the eastern edge of the Civic Center and arrives at the water.

If you finish at the Seaport before sunset, walk the additional three blocks south to the river. The Brooklyn Bridge rises to the north; the Statue of Liberty is visible to the southwest. The seaport that Schermerhorn built no longer ships freight, but the buildings he commissioned are still there. So is the bookstore inside one of them. That is the East Village–Lower East Side proposition. The buildings outlast the trade. The poets outlast the buildings. The bookstores carry the poems forward, one signed copy and one used paperback and one jar of pickles at a time.

Auden, in 1972, called this neighborhood the Lower East Side and refused the new name. He was right. The pilgrim follows him.

Sources

• East Village Books NYC, Contact / Visit page. newyorkcitybookbuyer.com/contact
• Codex Books, Visit and About pages. codexbooks.info/visit · codexbooks.info/about
• Sweet Pickle Books, About page. sweetpicklebooks.com/about
• McNally Jackson Books, Seaport store page. mcnallyjackson.com/store/3
• South Street Seaport Museum, “About the 1810–1812 Schermerhorn Row.” southstreetseaportmuseum.org/about-schermerhorn-row
• Village Preservation, “W.H. Auden: Immigrant Poet Turned East Villager” by Lannyl Stephens. villagepreservation.org
• Library of Congress, St. Mark’s Poetry Project Audio Archive, About this Collection. loc.gov

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