Stuyvesant Square
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The Stuyvesant Square is a park in New York district Gramercy Park of the district Manhattan . The park is maintained and administered by the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation .
location
Stuyvesant Square is between 15th Street and 17th Street, and Rutherford Place and Nathan D. Perlman Place . The Second Avenue divides the park into an eastern and a western half.
Surroundings
On the east side of the park is the Beth Israel Medical Center , which was built on the site where the composer Antonín Dvořák previously lived in 1893. A statue of Antonín Dvořák by Ivan Meštrović was placed here in his honor. In addition, Stuyvesant Square is home to the Friends Meeting House and Seminary , St. George's Episcopal Church , where JP Morgan once attended the service. Nearby is the old Stuyvesant High School building on 15th Street .
history
In 1836 Peter Gerard Stuyvesant (1778-1847), the great-great-grandson of Petrus Stuyvesant (now commonly referred to as Peter Stuyvesant), with his wife Helen Rutherford left an area of almost 1.6 hectares of the Stuyvesant Farm for a symbolic five US dollars in the city of New York for a public park that was originally supposed to be called Holland Square.
A lawsuit by Stuyvesant in 1839 promoted the construction of the public park, which was to function as a green space in an area of which, along with St. John's Square (defunct), the recently created Washington Square Park, and the private Gramercy Park it was assumed that an upscale neighborhood would emerge here. But it wasn't until 1847 that the city began to create the park by erecting a magnificent cast iron fence that still stands today and is the second oldest cast iron fence in New York City. In 1850, two fountains completed the design of the park and the park was formally opened to the public.
In the first years of the 20th century, Stuyvesant Park was one of the most posh addresses in the city. In the Stuyvesant Building (17 Livingston Place ) at the east end of the square lived eminent personalities such as the publisher George Haven Putnam , the editor of Harper's Bazaar Elizabeth Jordan and Elizabeth Custer , the widow of General George Armstrong Custer .
The dedication of St. George's Church on the corner of Rutherford Place and 16th Street and the opening of the Friends Meeting House and Seminary on the southwestern part of the park added value to the area.
The first house in this quarter was built in 1842–1843. In 1858, the New York Infirmary for Women and Children (now: New York Downtown Hospital ), founded by Elizabeth Blackwell and previously located on 7th Street near what is now Tompkins Square Park , moved to Stuyvesant Square ( 321 East 15th Street). Today there are apartments in this building after the hospital had to move again. Stuyvesant Square retained its elegant prestige through the late 19th century, largely due to the doctors who worked in the hospitals that lined Stuyvesant Square.
Like many other urban parks, Stuyvesant Square has since undergone extensive renovation work. In the 1930s, the park was modified by Parks Commissioner Robert Moses' landscape architect - Gilmore D. Clarke - with the addition of toilets, playgrounds, and other amenities. The park reopened in 1937. In the 1980s, the two fountains and the cast iron fence were renovated. In addition, the bluestone cobblestone was relocated in two ellipses. The lawns, flower beds and bushes were renewed at the same time. Some old trees, English elms and stone linden trees, continue to do well.
Other additions to the park are the sculpture of Petrus Stuyvesant by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (1941) and the statue of Antonín Dvořák by Ivan Meštrović from 1963, which was moved to the park in 1997.
The park and its immediate surroundings were declared a Historic District in 1975 and thus placed under monument protection.
See also
Web links
Coordinates: 40 ° 44 '2.2 " N , 73 ° 59' 2.8" W.