Stuyvesant Square

Stuyvesant Square is a park in the New York City borough of Manhattan, located between 15th Street, 17th Street, Rutherford Place, and Nathan D. Perlman Place (formerly Livingston Place). Second Avenue divides the park into two halves, east and west, and each half is surrounded by the original cast-iron fence. The name is also used for the neighborhood around the park, roughly bounded by 14th and 18th Streets and First and Third Avenues.HistoryIn 1836, Peter Gerard Stuyvesant – the great-great-grandson of Peter Stuyvesant – and his wife Hellen Rutherfurd reserved four acres of the Stuyvesant farm and sold it for a token five dollars to the City of New York as a public park, originally to be called Holland Square, with the proviso that the City of New York build a fence around it. As time passed, however, no fence was constructed, and in 1839, Stuyvesant's family sued the City to cause it to enclose the land. Not until 1847 did the City begin to improve the park by erecting the magnificent cast-iron fence, which still stands as the second oldest in New York City. In 1850 two fountains completed the landscaping, and the park was formally opened to the public. The public space joined St. John's Square, the recently formed Washington Square and the private Gramercy Park as residential squares around which it was expected New York's better neighborhoods would be built.