Seeking a gritty St. Marks at Search and Destroy

When Kyota Umeki was just a boy in the early 2000s, his mother would walk with him on St. Marks Place, instructing him to keep his head down as they made their way to the family business, warning of a man with a bulldog who might aggressively ask them for money.

The man wasn’t anyone specific, but rather a type of person who flooded the notoriously shabby East Village street.

Umeki and his mother were on their way down St. Marks to see his father Yuji, who was the founder and owner of Search and Destroy: a punk and vintage clothing spot on the block famous for its blaring music and endless racks of music memorabilia. Yuji also owned Kenka, a Japanese izakaya downstairs from the shop whose name translates to “fight.” Kenka is known for its cheap beer, dishes ranging from classics like donburi and more far-fetched meals like bull penis, and a row of pachinko machines by the bathrooms.

Yuji immigrated from Japan to New York as a teen and eventually opened the store in 1998. Search and Destroy emerged on St. Marks Place when the street was still known for its counterculture crowd, strung out dive bars, walk-in tattoo parlors, and punk record and clothing stores. Before Yuji signed the lease, the storefront was vacant for years and next door to a community center for recovering addicts.

“A lot of people feel lost [on St. Marks] but there’s a special energy in that building, where it’s more of a healing,” Umeki said, sitting in an office inside Search where his dad spent most of his nights working.

A few years after Search and Destroy opened, Yuji opened Kenka downstairs, so the punks and outcasts who lounged on the shop’s wide stoop could eat and drink into the early hours of the morning.

“That stoop has always been, way before Search, the best stoop on the block,” Kyota added.

In the decades since, boba stores, small-plate restaurants and luxe makeup brands slowly encroached on the East Village, and Search and Destroy became one of the neighborhood’s last punk safe-havens. Yuji’s tenacity kept the business going.

But in September of last year, he died suddenly after a brain aneurysm. He was 52 years old. Umeki, recalling his loss, said his father never would have forced him to take over the shop, but once his uncle flew in from Japan to support the family, his succession clicked into place.

“My uncle told me around the funeral, ‘Your father is gone now. That was the only person with that kind of personality and mind in that generation,’” Kyota said. “And he told me that my father’s Search and Destroy ended, and from now on it’s my Search and Destroy.”

At just 23 years old, Umeki said he’s ready to get his hands dirty.

“ I took over the clothing store, and my brother took over the restaurant within the month, and I've been working on Search every single day since,” he said.

The rest of the building at 25 St. Marks Place, where both businesses are located, has not been immune to the East Village’s gentrification. According to the building’s StreetEasy rental history, the apartments upstairs range from $6,900 to $9,200 a month for a four-bedroom unit. The building’s sky-high rents align closely with the rest of Manhattan, with median rent growing to new heights. (The Umeki family didn’t disclose how much they pay in rent a month to keep both the store and restaurant open, but shared that Kenka is quite popular.)

But some believe the energy of the strip will never die.

“No matter how expensive the rents get, the sidewalks are free to hang out on, and that is where I see the young people, and they're really still here,” said Ada Calhoun, a St. Marks native and author of “St. Marks Is Dead,” which chronicles the East Village’s 400-year history.

Umeki, who grew up in the East Village skating with friends and making clothes, said he envisions the next step for Search as not capitulating to the marketplace and instead inviting in a bigger swath of people with an affordable product. As big businesses and private-equity-backed ventures continue to make St. Marks theirs, Umeki and his brother Yuta say it’s their turn to fight back.

Keep prices low ($1.50 Sapporo draft and $18 store T-shirts), keep the punks on the stoop, and turn the music up.

“ We can make it more affordable,” Kyota said. “We just have to do punk shows and make the streets dirty again.”

Calhoun, who was born in 1976 and raised on St. Marks, agreed that giving the streets a certain edge could prevent rent from getting even worse.

This summer, Umeki plans to “give back” to the punk community, hosting a punk show inside Kenka starting at midnight on June 27 with a slate of five bands.

Punk music inherently channels anti-establishment and anti-corporate values, with shorter, quick-paced, angry head-banging songs. What better place to keep that tradition alive than St. Marks?

“I want all people who look down and think that everyone sitting down the steps are just bums and wack people, I want them to hear the noise they make,” he said. “It really used to be like that on St. Marks and now it’s time for it to come back.”

The show will feature bands considered OGs on the block and local performers who hang out outside the store, like Blu Anxxiety and Hated. It’ll also include store employees who make their own music, like 22-year-old Simon Castellanos from Colombia, a drummer for the band Arson. He moved to New York three years ago with Search in his sights.

“Since I was in Colombia, people were talking about this place,” Castellanos said, recalling how the punks in his community longed to join the New York scene. “I’m basically living my life, paying my bills with punk … [and it’s] giving me the opportunity to be someone.”

Before the punks of the 90s came to St. Marks — where Yuji’s story with Search began — there were the original punks of the 70s, the hippies the decade before and the Beatnicks before them.

According to Calhoun, every one of those generations felt that the street they once knew was no longer the same.

Today, Calhoun said, the streets are still riddled with young people getting drunk and making a mess, but it might not be the same “hotbed” for art.

“It’s still really grimy. I think there is a scuzziness to St. Marks Place that nothing has done away with yet,” she said.

So the street will always change, the storefronts will look different and the people too. But the spirit, Calhoun believes, is always there.

As he sat outside on the building’s iconic stoop and smoked a cigarette, Umeki appeared at peace with what could come, and recognized that the future was unclear anyway.

“The thing is, if H&M knocks on the door tomorrow, buys the building out, we can’t do s—. We can’t win,” he said, almost with certainty. “But what we can do while we last is prove that we are trying.”