St Mark’s Church In-The-Bowery is a late-Georgian Episcopal parish church at the intersection of 10th Street, Stuyvesant Street, and Second Avenue in Manhattan. The present building was completed and consecrated in 1799. But it stands on the site of an older church.
Peter Stuyvesant, the last Dutch governor of New Netherland colony, built his family chapel there in 1660 when the property was part of his land. Stuyvesant had purchased a farm (or bowery) comprising the present-day East Village from the Dutch West India Company in 1651.
Stuyvesant’s grandson sold the chapel to the Episcopal Church in 1793, for the honorary sum of a dollar, to serve the residents of Stuyvesant Village. St Mark’s was incorporated as the first Episcopal parish independent of Trinity Church in the United States.
Along with the land the parish became the custodian of Stuyvesant himself. He is buried in the churchyard. A stone in the wall above his grave reads:
In this Vault lies buried
PETRUS STUYVESANT
Late Captain General and Governor in Chief of Amsterdam
in New Netherland now called New-York
and the Dutch West-India Islands died Feb’y A.D. 1672
aged 80 years.
Nearby is a bust of Governor Stuyvesant given to the people of New York by Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands in 1915.
Nick Louras 