Stuyvesant Town–Peter Cooper Village
Stuyvesant Town–Peter Cooper Village, colloquially known as StuyTown, is a large post-World War II private residential development on the east side of the New York City borough of Manhattan. The complex consists of 110 red brick apartment buildings on an tract stretching from First Avenue to Avenue C, between 14th and 23rd Streets. Stuyvesant Town–Peter Cooper Village is split up into two parts: Stuyvesant Town, south of 20th Street, and Peter Cooper Village, north of 20th Street. Together, the two developments contain 11,250 apartments.
Stuyvesant Town–Peter Cooper Village was planned, beginning in 1942, and opened its first building in 1947. It replaced a neighborhood known as the Gas House district. The complex has been sold multiple times, most recently in 2015 when it was sold to Ivanhoé Cambridge and Blackstone for $5.45 billion.
Stuyvesant Town–Peter Cooper Village is part of Manhattan Community District 6, and its primary ZIP Codes are 10009 and 10010. It is patrolled by the 13th Precinct of the New York City Police Department.
Geography
Stuyvesant Town–Peter Cooper Village is bounded by First Avenue on the west, 23rd Street on the north, Avenue C on the east, and 14th Street on the south. The complex covers about of land in total, including parkland. Stuyvesant Town–Peter Cooper Village contains 11,250 apartments in 55 buildings, which have 110 separate street addresses.The buildings south of 20th Street are known as Stuyvesant Town, or "Stuy Town". They were named after Peter Stuyvesant, the last director-general of the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam, whose farm occupied the site in the 17th century. The buildings north of 20th Street are called Peter Cooper Village, named after the 19th-century industrialist, inventor and philanthropist Peter Cooper, who founded Cooper Union.
Stuyvesant Town–Peter Cooper Village abuts the Stuyvesant Square and Gramercy Park neighborhoods on the west, the East Village and Alphabet City to the south, and Kips Bay to the north. The surrounding area to the west is notable for a historic two-block park surrounded by the old Stuyvesant High School called Stuyvesant Square, Saint George's Church, and the Beth Israel Medical Center, which closed in 2025.
History
Gas House District
In 1842, one gas storage tank was erected at East 23rd Street and the river, quickly followed by the construction of other gas tanks. By the late 19th century, the site of the complex had become known as the "Gas House District" because of the many gas storage tanks owned by Consolidated Gas Company that dominated the streetscapes. The tanks, which sometimes leaked, made the area undesirable to live in, as did the Gas House Gang and other predators who operated in the area.The population was predominantly poor, at first largely Irish, and then German and Jewish American. Later, Slovaks and other Eastern Europeans were the dominant ethnic groups, including a large population of Armenians who lived in the upper Twenties between First and Lexington avenues.
Crime in the district was endemic. When Alexander S. Williams was promoted to police captain on May 31, 1872, and assigned to the area, he met the gangs' violence with equal force of his own, putting together a brute squad that beat up gangsters with clubs. He commented: "There is more law at the end of a policeman's nightstick than in a decision of the Supreme Court."
With the construction of the FDR Drive, the area began to improve. By the 1930s, all but four tanks were gone, and, while shabby, the area was no more blighted than many parts of the city after the years of the Great Depression.
Before the construction of Stuyvesant Town, the neighborhood contained 18 city blocks, with public schools, churches, factories, private homes, apartments, small businesses and even relatively new modern-style apartment buildings. In all, 600 buildings, containing 3,100 families, 500 stores and small factories, three churches, three schools, and two theaters, were razed. As would be repeated in later urban renewal projects, some 11,000 persons were forced to move from the neighborhood. In 1945, The New York Times called the move from the site "the greatest and most significant mass movement of families in New York's history." The last residents of the Gas House district, the Delman family, moved out in May 1946, allowing demolition to be completed shortly thereafter.
Planning
Due to a New York City housing shortage that had been growing since the Depression, Stuyvesant Town was already being planned as a post-war housing project in 1942–43, some years before the end of World War II. A provision was made that the rental applications of veterans would have selection priority. The complex was developed by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, and was based on its earlier development in the Parkchester neighborhood of the Bronx, which was completed in 1942. The same companies and developers also built Riverton, which was completed around the same time.In January 1945, Metropolitan Life mapped out its post-war plans for 6,000 residents of Peter Cooper Village, which would stretch east of First Avenue, between 20th and 22nd streets, while efforts were made to acquire land north of 22nd Street. The project would be an extension of the previously announced Stuyvesant Town.
Metropolitan Life president Frederick H. Ecker said of Stuyvesant Town in its initial offering that it would make it possible for generations of New Yorkers "to live in a park – to live in the country in the heart of New York." On the first day the company received 7,000 applications; it would receive 100,000 applicants by the time of first occupancy. The complex's first tenants, two World War II veterans and their families, moved into the first completed building on August 1, 1947. At the time, rents ranged from $50 to $91 per month.
Controversy
Stuyvesant Town was controversial from the beginning. In 1943, the National Association of Housing Officials described the fight as "a battle up to now lacking only in beer bottles and murder." Although nominally a private development, it was championed by Parks Commissioner Robert Moses, who has been called the "dominant force in creation" of both Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village. At the behest of Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, Moses sought "to induce insurance companies and savings banks to enter the field of large-scale slum clearance." It was enabled by various state laws and amendments which permitted private companies to enter what was previously a public field of action.The new public-private partnership, and the contract entered between the city and the developer, the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, were the source of much debate. Among the issues at stake were use of the power of eminent domain for private purposes; the reversion of public streets and land, such as public school property, to private ownership; the 25-year tax exemption granted by the contract; and the lack of any restrictions on the company prohibiting discrimination in selecting tenants.
When the $50 million Stuyvesant Town plan was approved by the City Planning Commission on May 20, 1943, by a five to one vote, discrimination against African-Americans was already a significant topic of debate. Councilmen Stanley M. Isaacs and Benjamin J. Davis Jr. sought to introduce a provision into the contract that would prevent racial or religious discrimination in tenant selection. This provision was not accepted; those who rejected it, including Robert Moses, argued that the company's profitability would be harmed, and that opponents were "obviously looking for a political issue and not for results in the form of actual slum clearance."
In the years after it opened, Black people were barred from living in the complex. Metropolitan Life's president, Frederick H. Ecker, stated that "negroes and whites do not mix". He also believed that integrating Stuyvesant Town would depress demand for, and hence valuation of, other real estate in the area.
Lee Lorch, a City College of New York professor, petitioned to allow African Americans into the development, and was fired from his teaching position as a result of pressure from Metropolitan Life. Upon accepting a position at Pennsylvania State University, Lorch allowed a Black family to occupy his apartment, thus circumventing the "no Negroes" rule. As a result of pressure from Metropolitan Life, he was dismissed from his new position as well.Lawsuits were filed on the basis that the project was public or semi-public, and thus violated anti-discrimination laws for New York City public housing. In July 1947, a New York Supreme Court judge ruled that the development was private and that, in the absence of laws to the contrary, the company could discriminate as it saw fit. The judge wrote, "It is well settled that the landlord of a private apartment or dwelling house may, without violating any provision of the Federal or State Constitutions, select tenants of its own choice because of race, color, creed or religion... Clearly, housing accommodation is not a recognized civil right."
By this date, Metropolitan Life was building the Riverton Houses, a separate-but-equal housing project in Harlem with residents who were mainly Black. Some years later, the company admitted a few Black families to Stuyvesant Town and a few white families to Riverton. Both projects, however, remain largely segregated.
The fight to end the segregation of Stuyvesant Town continued after. The white residents formed the Village Tenants Committee to End Discrimination in Stuyvesant Town, and started subletting their apartments to Black Americans. Metlife attempted to evict the leaders of this committee in retaliation. 1,800 tenants were a part of the committee and, the groups survey found that 2/3rds of all tenant residents opposed the segregation policy. Lorch, one of the tenants subletting their place to a black family said of it, "Tenants here... will fight Jim Crow no matter what the Metropolitan tries to do."' Eventually with public pressure, and the passage of the NY state Brown-Isaacs law, banning discrimination in publicly subsidized private housing in 1958, Metlife eventually marginally complied with the regulation. However it would be decades before the Brown-Issacs law was enforced with any teeth and as such still remained largely segregated.'
A host of other issues and controversies surrounded Stuyvesant Town's planning and design. From the outset, objections were made to the haste with which the project was approved and lack of public participation in the process; the project's population density; the absence of any public facilities such as schools, community centers, or shops in the development; the gated-community, private property character of the complex, and the denial of city residents of the right to walk through a part of the city that was once public; and violations of the city's master plan. Lawsuits were brought by property owners of the land, but in February 1944 the Supreme Court of the United States refused to review the constitutionality of the New York State law that enabled the development, despite the taking of public property for private profit, the granting of tax exemptions, and the public benefits advanced by the developers and their advocates.
The complex contained original plaques honoring Frederick H. Ecker and marking the complexes as housing for moderate-income families, which were dedicated during the complexes' opening day in 1947. In 2002, when the property went luxury market rate, the plaques were removed.