Primary Historic Resources: Residential

1. Stuyvesant Town

• Location: First Avenue to Avenue C and 14th Street to 20th Street
• Architect: Richmond H. Shreve and team (including Andrew J. Eken, George Gove, Gilmore D. Clarke, Robert Dowling, and Irwin Clavan, apparently the primary designer)
• Date: 1943-1947

Stuyvesant Town is New York City’s largest moderate-income housing project, and was begun in 1943 and completed in 1947 as a joint venture of the city and the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. In 1922, New York City passed a law allowing life insurance companies to invest in housing projects; this law was later amended in 1942 under the Hampton-Mitchell Redevelopment Companies Law to allow for life insurance companies’ involvement in urban renewal.

Stuyvesant Town embodies the phenomenon of urban renewal, the radical “bulldozer” approach to urban planning championed by New York City Parks Commissioner Robert Moses, who, with the backing of the city, sought to reverse perceived conditions of urban “blight” by clearing great swaths of “slums” across the city, making way for new, planned “communities.” The Stuyvesant Town site is bounded by 20th Street to the north, 14th Street to the south, First Avenue to the west, and Avenue C to the east: the city’s largest “superblock” to date.

Stuyvesant Town was one of many public-private urban renewal projects of the 1940s that attempted to address New York City’s serious housing shortage, a problem made more acute by the return of World War veterans. Similar housing developments of the era that have been designated as New York City landmarks include City and Suburban (located on Manhattan’s Upper East Side), United Workers Cooperatives, also known as Allerton Coops (located in the Bronx), and Harlem River Houses (located in Harlem).

Stuyvesant Town was, and continues to be, the most successful and emulated of post-World War II largescale housing experiments that sought to provide an alternative—some claimed better—urban living environment for the middle class. Stuyvesant Town, in its architecture and landscape, expresses a distinctly suburban solution to the urban problem of sustainable density; it is essentially a suburb in the heart of the city. Stuyvesant Town’s architecture and landscape were largely informed by a combination of LeCorbusier’s “Tower in the Park” model, introduced in America by modernist architects like Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer, and Ebenezer Howard’s “Garden City” model. A plaque outside one of the buildings commemorates the vision of MetLife’s chairman Frederick Ecker; it reads “...that families of moderate means might live in health, comfort and dignity in parklike communities, and that a pattern might be set of private enterprise productively devoted to public service.” Stuyvesant Town’s 8,755 apartments were designed to accommodate around 24,000 people, and the average two-bedroom apartment rented for $75 a month.

Stuyvesant Town’s architectural identity is defined by a modernist sensibility for clean lines and materials, and an efficiency of building mass and volume. Another important contributor to its visual identity is the inwardfocused layout and the high ratio of open, landscaped space to built fabric. The orderly dispersal of ninety nine- to thirteen-story unadorned red brick buildings across the seventy two acres of green space constituting the site was an attempt to solve the problems of overcrowding and unsanitary conditions traditionally associated with city living. Correspondingly, the cross-shaped plan of each building was a deliberate attempt to provide more light and better ventilation than was typically available in a row house or tenement.

The provision for a large central green space, the Oval, and the strategic location of playgrounds between buildings are particularly expressive manifestations of a more abstract planning goal embodied by Stuyvesant Town: to foster a sense of community within a safe and stable context. The inverse of this goal—keeping the greater urban community at a proscribed distance—is articulated by the specific orientation of buildings. The inward-facing, self-contained nature of Stuyvesant Town begins with the twenty buildings arranged radially around the Oval, and culminates in the peripheral buildings, which present their monumental rear facades to the surrounding streets in a defensive, fortress-like gesture. Finally, Stuyvesant Town can only be accessed through eight formal entrance points (for both cars and pedestrians); this relative inaccessibility distances Stuyvesant Town from the greater urban community, confirming its identity as a community set apart from the rest.

Stuyvesant Town was a closed community in more than just the physical sense: from its beginnings in 1947, it was MetLife’s official policy to deny consideration of housing applications submitted by African-Americans. This policy found many critics among Stuyvesant Town tenants, a majority of whom were war veterans. In 1948, when three African-American veterans sued MetLife with the backing of several civic organizations, approximately 1,800 residents, many of them Communists, banded together in support to form the Tenants Committee to End Discrimination in Stuyvesant Town. The committee actively opposed the discrimination by circulating pamphlets, collecting opinion polls from residents, and marching in protest. They also invited an African-American family to live in one family’s vacant apartment, thus radically breaking the color barrier. MetLife’s response was to challenge the resident activists with the threat of eviction. On the eve of the eviction date, with moving crews poised outside Stuyvesant Town, protestors gathered in Stuyvesant Town and also in front of City Hall and MetLife’s headquarters on Madison Avenue, and succeeded in embarrassing MetLife into abandoning the eviction proceedings and dropping the discriminatory policy. In 1952, the city passed the Brown-Isaacs bill to end racial discrimination in publicly funded housing. This was a direct result of the activism and ideals demonstrated by Stuyvesant Town residents.

Although Stuyvesant Town did not integrate significantly in the years following the controversy, the site does indeed contain the legacy and living memory of an early civil rights movement, significant to the history of New York City and to the history of the United States. Also contributing to its meaning is the fact that Stuyvesant Town is a still-viable model of the progressive principles characterizing an important phase in the evolution of urban housing development in New York City.

2. 628-640 East 14th Street

• Architect: George Pelham
• Date: 1890

Designed in 1890 by George F. Pelham, one of New York City’s most prolific housing developers of the latenineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, the series of nine connected “dumbbell” tenements at 628-640 East 14th Street are significant as one of the earliest experiments in large-scale housing development for immigrants. The architecture of the Pelham tenement row is a distinctive combination of Italianate, Romanesque Revival, and Queen Anne elements, whose arrangement in a repetitive, “piston-like” pattern running across all nine façades suggests an aesthetic derived from the structural repetition of modules represented in the row, but also perhaps derived from the industrial aesthetic represented in technological advances of the period, such as the steam turbine engine. While the façade of the Pelham row (still largely intact) exhibits attention to detail in the use of popular architectural styles and durable materials, the interior layout of each tenement reflects the quality of light, ventilation and sanitary facilities required under the 1879 Tenements Law.

Pelham built his tenements well into the period of post-Civil War urban growth, and his choice of the “dumbbell” plan reflects an attempt to address the urgent social issue of time: the plight of the urban working class, who were relegated to slum-grade housing by a combination of social, political, and economic forces.

The Pelham tenement row, which is now freestanding (the buildings on either side having been demolished), is a distinct entity contributing to the identity of East 14th Street by virtue of its juxtaposition with Stuyvesant Town, arguably its mid-twentieth-century counterpart in housing development, the Con Edison power plant, a reminder of the area’s historically industrial economy and association with immigrant workers, and the sprinkling of late-twentieth-century tenement apartment buildings, representing the alternative to the “dumbbell” housing type.

3. 325 East 14th Street (James McCreery's House)

• Builder: Unknown
• Date: 1851

This largely intact mid-nineteenth-century rowhouse, with its Greek Revival doorfront and its Italianate cornice, was originally the home of James McCreery, a New York business icon and founder of the James McCreery & Co. Dry Goods House. The house was built in 1851 by McCreery, who lived there with his wife and seven children until 1869. He owned the property until his death in 1903.

James McCreery was born in Ireland on 1826, in a family of Scottish Presbyterians. Twenty years later, he came to the United States and settled in Baltimore, where he worked for the dry goods house of Hamilton Easter & Company. In 1851, he moved with his family to New York. In 1858, he became the company’s European representative, a position he held until 1862, when he began to work for the dry goods house of Upson, Pierson & Lake. He soon became one of the leading men in the trade, and at some point in time, bought the remaining shares of the company to start the firm of Lake & McCreery. When Mr. Lake retired in 1867, he founded the firm of James McCreery & Company, a dry goods house that specialized in silk neckwear. In 1870, McCreery opened a magnificent new store on Broadway at the northwest corner of 11th Street, opposite the St. Denis Hotel and facing Grace Church. Originally known as a specialist in silks, McCreery began to introduce other departments, and gradually created on of the finest and biggest businesses in the city. 1901, the company became part of the Associated Merchants’ Corporation, one that also included the H.B. Claflin Company and the Adams Dry Goods Company. Later that same year, Mr. McCreery founded the James McCreery Realty Company, which controlled his extensive holdings of real estate in New York City. Until his death on February 26, 1903, he was known as “The Grand Old Man of Business.”

4. 200 West 14th Street (Jeanne d' Arc)

• Architect: James W. Cole
• Date: 1888-89

In the mid-nineteenth century, a number of singlefamily residences were constructed along West 14th Street, establishing the section between Union Square and Ninth Avenue as an emerging residential enclave for upper- and middle-class New Yorkers. By the middle of the 1860s, however, New York City’s population had skyrocketed, and soaring property costs and exorbitant rents were already pushing private home ownership out of reach for most middle-class families. Many felt forced to move into boardinghouses or leave New York City altogether in search of independent houses in the suburbs, much to the detriment of the city, as the New York Times proclaimed in 1866. Over the next few decades, a new building type, the “French flat,” would develop as a means to solve this housing problem while satisfying the expectations of the middle class. Although a great number of the city’s early, more modest “French flats” were built on the Upper East Side, a fine example was constructed on the southwest corner of 14th Street and Seventh Avenue.

200 West 14th Street, also known as the Jeanne d’ Arc, was designed by architect James W. Cole and built for owner Henry Meinken between 1888 and 1889. Cole designed more than fifty buildings in New York City throughout his career, and is perhaps best know known for his Charles A. Vissani House, a designated New York City landmark on the Upper West Side. 200 West 14th Street originally housed eight families above ground-level commercial spaces, and is listed in the 1889 docket books under “French flat,” a category then used for buildings that fell between single-family dwellings and boardinghouses. Cole’s intention to present the building as a middle-class dwelling remains evident in the sophisticated facades of this corner building. They are composed of American-bond brick; carved brownstone sills, lintels, stringcourses, and pilasters; and a projecting pressed-metal cornice. Cole’s rhythmic and lively north elevation directs a viewer’s eye to a central entrance surrounded by carved figures, and above it, a stone statue of Joan of Arc. Aside from its architectural merit, 200 West 14th Street is significant as the earliest existing “French flat” along 14th Street, and as a remnant of the street’s brief period as an upper- and middle-class residential enclave.