Lark Street, Albany's Left Bank

One block east of Washington Park, Lark Street runs north to south through a neighborhood of nineteenth-century brownstones and century-old apartment buildings, and it has been doing something different from the rest of Albany for as long as anyone can remember. The street built its identity on independence. Independent bookshops, independent coffee houses, independent galleries and restaurants serving Thai and Greek and Indian and Japanese food in a city where such variety was not always a given.

The Upstate Artists Guild has helped turn historic apartment buildings along the street into gallery and studio space, anchoring a creative community that runs first-Friday gallery walks and fills the sidewalks with people who came for the art. In June the street hosts Art on Lark, which draws roughly twenty thousand people. In September it throws LarkFEST, billed as the largest single-day street festival in New York State, with up to eighty thousand attendees and about a hundred and fifty vendors, regional and national music acts filling the closed-off blocks from morning through evening.

Lark Street also serves as Albany's gay village, with community spaces, bars, and the annual Pride parade moving through in June. The street was also central to Albany's punk and new wave scene from nineteen seventy-nine to nineteen eighty-four, running at full volume out of the clubs and small venues here. It is one of those streets that a city needs: slightly worn, reliably interesting, resistant to the logic of chains and franchises, and full of people who have decided to stay.