The surrounding neighborhoods
The Stuyvesant Town area had some notable neighbors. Willard Parker Hospital on the river to the east was where patients, many of them children and most of them poor, with contagious diseases like whooping cough, pneumonia, polio, diphtheria and measles, were confined. One online account of life in the children’s ward in the 1930s, before the advent of antibiotics when a stay at Willard Parker often amounted to a death sentence, is chilling. A happier location to the west was the prestigious all-boys Stuyvesant High School at 345 East 15th Street built in 1907 to replace an earlier building on East 23rd. It had been founded to prepare the most promising sons of immigrants for a scientific career. Since the 1930s, prospective students had to pass an admission test and were considered among the city’s academic elite.
To the west of the demolition zone were the Stuyvesant Square and Gramercy Park neighborhoods, which had been among the city’s most fashionable addresses for a couple of decades before the Civil War. The blocks surrounding Stuyvesant Square held a mix of tenements, brownstones and Italianate townhouses from the 1840s and 50s, some of which were still single-family homes while others had been converted into two-family houses, apartments or boarding houses. In the late 19th century, a number of Tammany bigwigs lived in the neighborhood as did more prosperous members of the German community. Gramercy Park and to a lesser extent the Stuyvesant Square area became the home to a number of writers and artists in the early 20th century as a less Bohemian alternative to the Village. Since then the neighborhoods had been undergoing gentrification. Even some people worthy of inclusion in The New York Times society pages were living in the blocks just west of Stuyvesant Square, in the 1940s and Gramercy Park was quite fashionable again. Some modern apartment houses with middle-income tenants had been built in both neighborhoods before the war.
The Quakers had a historic meeting house and school facing Stuyvesant Square. St. George’s, a Romanesque Revival Episcopal church on the square, was celebrating its centennial in 1946. J.P.Morgan had been a longtime vestryman at St. George’s, one of three Episcopal churches in the area. The congregation was resolutely Low Church at a time when many other fashionable Episcopal churches in the city flirted with High Church ritual and practices and it remained committed to the neighborhood when other Protestant churches moved uptown with their parishioners. It was a leader in the Institutional Church movement of the late 19th century with a strong social outreach to its immigrant neighbors including health and dental clinics, fresh-air camps, and the first trade school in the city. The church ran a soup kitchen and provided fresh water to tenement dwellers before the city provided it. Not all the parishioners were rich. According to the church’s rector, about 100 families in his flock were among those who had received eviction notices to make way for Stuyvesant Town. The church joined other civic groups to lobby for an extension of the eviction dates as well as for relocation assistance.
The developer of Stuyvesant Square had presented the land in the center of the square to the city for a public park. The city had been slow to create the proposed park and squatters and pig herders took advantage of the vacant space in the 1840s to the dismay of the Square’s affluent residents. Later in the century the park, bisected by Second Avenue, became a popular hangout for the tenement dwellers of the Gashouse, as well as for the homeless, and in the late 19th century was frequented by prostitutes, some of them transvestites. As the fashionable moved out, charitable institutions moved in. The Hamilton Fish mansion, for instance, became home to the Lying-In Hospital which provided maternity services to the Lower East Side. The hospital built a new building on the site in 1902 which Manhattan General Hospital took over in 1932. The most prominent institution on the Square in 1946 was Beth Israel Medical Center, founded in 1891 as a charity hospital for the Orthodox Jewish community of the Lower East Side. It had a Yiddish-speaking staff and served kosher meals. By 1946 the hospital was noted for the quality of its medical care and no longer was patronized exclusively by the poor. Beth Israel announced a planned expansion that year, billing itself as the only general hospital in the New York area that was “conducted along Orthodox religious principles.” On the other hand, The New York Infirmary, staffed entirely by women doctors, announced in April that it would be leaving Stuyvesant Square after nearly 75 years. The Salvation Army’s Booth Memorial Hospital was also on the Square and physicians occupied many of the neighboring brownstones. Other hospitals in the neighborhood, as listed in The WPA Guide to New York City in 1939, included Columbus Hospital, which catered largely to the Italian community and would later be renamed Mother Cabrini, on 19th Street; New York Post Graduate Medical School and Hospital on 20th; St. Andrew’s Convalescent Hospital on 17th; and New York Skin and Cancer Unit on 19th. The Convent of the Little Sisters of the Assumption, a nursing order, was on 15th.
Fourteenth Street, to the west of the Stuyvesant Town blocks, was a Mecca of bargain shopping and included a number of large department stores such as Kleins, Ohrbach's, Hearns and Hechts. The Union Square area was home to numerous political and cultural institutions as well as publishing firms and literary agents. While past its heyday, Second Avenue below 14th Street still was the “Jewish Rialto” with coffee houses, bookstores, restaurants and theaters that catered to the aging Yiddish-speaking population. To the north of the Gashouse, the tenements along the East River in Kips Bay and Turtle Bay gradually had been coming down during the twenties and thirties to make way for high-rise apartments as an affluent neighborhood spread southward from fashionable Sutton and Beekman Places. To enhance property values, the First Avenue Association, a group of developers and merchants, had successfully lobbied for the destruction of the Second Avenue El, over the objections of commuters in Queens who were losing a direct connection to the East Side and midtown. The subway that was supposed to replace it never got off the drawing boards.