Abroad in New York
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Of the six squares – Washington Square, Tompkins Square, Union Square, Stuyvesant Square, Gramercy Park, and Madison Square – that appear as green splotches on maps of Manhattan between 4th and 26th Streets, the one that seems to register least to most New Yorkers is Stuyvesant Square. That is not to say it is less interesting than any of the others.
Stuyvesant Square is bounded by 15th and 17th Streets and Rutherford and Perlman Places. Rutherford Place is a two-block north-south street between Second and Third Avenues; Perlman Place is two blocks between First and Second Avenues. Stuyvesant differs from the other squares in that a north-south thoroughfare – Second Avenue – bisects it. It is like having two separate squares on either side of Second Avenue.
The two halves are differentiated by the buildings on Rutherford and Perlman Places. The latter includes unprepossessing modern buildings like the Beth Israel Hospital Building, built in 1950 between 15th and 16th Streets. In Saul Bellow’s “Mr. Sammler’s Planet” (1970), Sammler, an aged Holocaust survivor and an intellectual, pauses outside Beth Israel and surveys a New York that seems to degenerate before his eyes:
Sammler saw through large black circles in a fence daffodils and tulips, the mouths of these flowers open and glowing, but on the pure yellow the fallout of soot already was sprinkled. … Red brick, the Friends Seminary, and ruddy coarse warm stone, broad, clumsy, solid, the Episcopal church, St. George’s. Sammler had heard that the original J. Pierpont Morgan had been an usher there. … Sundays, the god of stockbrokers could breathe easy awhile in the riotous city. In thought, Mr. Sammler was testy with White Protestant America for not keeping better order.
The Friends Meeting House, between 15th and 16th Streets, and St. George’s Church, between 16th and 17th, line the square’s west side. The former was built in 1860, plain in the Quaker tradition. The latter was built in 1846-56, plain in an evangelical Protestant way. The brownstone church was one of the earliest in the city in the Romanesque style, the simplicity of which relative to the Gothic commended the style to evangelical groups, including “low church” Episcopalians like those who built St. George’s.
This was indeed J.P. Morgan’s church, though it had become unfashionable by his time. In 1883, when Morgan recruited the progressive pioneer of the “settlement church” concept, the Reverend William Rainsford, to remake St. George’s mission, the neighborhood had fallen on hard times. Morgan held fast to his church, however, ensuring it the funds to serve its neighborhood’s less well-off residents.
Yet 1883 was also the year that one of the neighborhood’s finest houses was built. At 245 E. 17th Street, between Second and Third Avenues, stands the house Richard Morris Hunt designed for Sidney Webster, son-in-law of Hamilton Fish and owner of the Newport house that had belonged to Edith Wharton’s parents.
An 1880s Sammler may have thought similar thoughts to those of the 1960s Sammler, and failed to realize that complex cities rise and decline simultaneously.
