Stuyvesant Square

Stuyvesant Square
The central fountain in the western portion of the park; the park is bisected by Second Avenue. In the background is St. George's Episcopal Church
Location	Between 15th Street, 17th Street, Rutherford Place, and Nathan D. Perlman Place, Manhattan, New York City

Coordinates: 40°44′01″N 73°59′02.4″W / 40.73361°N 73.984000°W / 40.73361; -73.984000

Stuyvesant Square is the name of both a park and its surrounding neighborhood in the New York City borough of Manhattan. The park is 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 neighborhood is roughly bounded by 14th Street to the south, 18th or 19th Street to the north, First Avenue to the east, and Third Avenue to the west.

In 1836, Peter Gerard Stuyvesant (1778–1847) – the great-great-grandson of Peter Stuyvesant – and his wife Helen (or Helena) 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, 2800 foot long cast-iron fence, which still stands as the oldest cast-iron fence in New York City. (The oldest fence in New York is that around Bowling Green.) In 1850 two fountains completed the landscaping, and the park was formally opened to the public. The public space joined St. John's Square (no longer extant), 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.