Stuyvesant Square Park
9, Rutherford Pl, New York, NY 10003
Stuyvesant Square is the name of both a Manhattan borough park and its adjacent area. The park is located between Rutherford House, 15th Street, 17th Street and Nathan D. Perlman House (formerly Livingston Place). Second Avenue splits the park into two parts, east and west, and the original cast-iron fence encircles each half.
The neighborhood is roughly bounded to the south by 14th Street, the north by 18th or 19th Street, the east by First Avenue and the west by Third Avenue. It is part of board 6 of Manhattan Community.
Stuyvesant Square Park, like many other city parks, was thoroughly rehabilitated in a more utilitarian way during the 1930s, when Parks Commissioner Robert Moses’ landscape architect Gilmore D. Clarke updated the 19th-century plan with the inclusion of comfort stations, playgrounds and other designed facilities. The park reopened in 1937; in the 1980s the two 1884 fountains were restored, the cast iron fence was retained, and the original bluestone sidewalks were translated into two ellipses, with renovated lawns, shrubs and flower beds. A few old trees, English elm and Little-leaf linden, are thriving now. Some contributions to the park included Peter Stuyvesant (1941) by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, and Antonín Dvořák (1963, relocated here in 1997) by Ivan Mestorvic.
The New York City Department of Parks and Recreation operates and maintains the park. The Stuyvesant Park Neighborhood Association works to preserve the historic beauty of the park on behalf of park patrons in the surrounding neighbourhoods.
Surrounding area
The Friends Meeting House and Seminary and St. George’s Episcopal Church are located directly around the square, in the eponymous neighborhood – once attended by J.P. Morgan-Rutherford Place both. On the eastern side is Beth Israel Medical Center – part of which was built on the site of the 1893 home of the Bohemian composer Antonín Dvořák at 327 East 17th Street, the Robert Mapplethorpe Residential Treatment Facility for AIDS patients. The former Stuyvesant High School building, now in educational use as the “Old Stuyvesant Campus,” is nearby, within the neighbourhood. The Stuyvesant Park Neighborhood Association serves residents “from East 14th Street north to East 23rd Street and from Stuyvesant Town west toward Irving Place and Gramercy Park.”
In 1975, the square was named the Stuyvesant Square Historic District, and its immediate surroundings. The Friends Meeting House, St. George’s and Stuyvesant High School are all New York City landmarks, designated respectively in 1967, 1969, and 1997, as are the three Italian brick row houses with deep front yards and cast iron verandas at 326, 328, and 330 East 18th Street, built at Cornelia Stuyvesant Ten Broeck’s instigation in 1852–53.
