Stuyvesant Town

Stuyvesant Town is a district of the Borough of Manhattan, with New York which forms with the Peter Cooper Village an immense residential complex. It is located in the East Side , to the south of the island, and extends between the First Avenue and the Avenue C, and from north in the south between the 14 {{E}} street and the 20erue.

Today, Stuyvesant Town constitutes an immense regrouping of buildings of red color brick, built in a typical style of the social housing of the city. The entire surface of the complex is of 32,4 hecatres, for 8 757 apartment. But the unit Stuyvesant Town-Peter Cooper Village gathers 110 buildings, 11 250 apartments, for more 25 000 inhabitants. The complex is bordered in the east by the East River, the district of Gramercy in the west, the East Village in the south, and Kips Bay in north. It is moreover one about the examples most representative and most successful of private complexes of dwellings of after war. Indeed, the plans of Stuyvesant Town were imagined in 1943, and its first tenants, two veterans of the Second world war and their families, moved in on August 1st 1947 there. The complex him even takes as a starting point Parkchester in the Bronx which was completed in 1942. The same company carried out also the Riverton Houses of Harlem, based on the same model, at the same time.

The district, whose buildings are drawn with the middle-classes holds its name of the last governor of New Amsterdam, Peter Stuyvesant whose farm occupied the site where the complex was built with the XVIIe century. At the end of the XIXe century, the district took the name of Gashouse District because of the many cisterns with gasoline which occupied the landscape of the zone. The cisterns, which fled sometimes, made the district unpleasant, just as of the criminal organizations as the Gas House Gang who operated in the district. However, the situation improved with construction of FDR. In the Years 1930, only four cisterns were maintained in the zone, which, already miteuse, was not struck than of other districts of the city during the Grande Depression.

Before the construction of Styuvesant Town, the district comprised eighteen typical blocks , with public schools, church S, factories, apartments, small shops, and even certain buildings of modern inspiration. On the whole, 600 buildings, sheltering 3100 families, 500 stores and small factories, three churches, three school S, and two Cinéma S were destroyed. As that was going to be specified in several projects of Urban renewal, some eleven thousand people were forced to leave the zone. In 1945, the NewYork Times mentioned “the most significant removal of families in the history of New York”. The last inhabitants of the Gashouse District , the Delman family moved in May 1946, allowing the demolition to be completed.

In spite of its architectural style of social housing, and its history which lent to polemic, the district is today very pleasant to live, as it was it in 1846 when the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company started to deal with it. As of the first day, the insurance company received 7 000 candidatures. In 1947, the rents of spread out between 50 and 91 dollars. In 2006, the whole of the complex Stuyvesant Town-Peter Cooper Village was sold with Tishman Speyer Properties for the sum record of 5,4 billion dollars.

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