Peter Stuyvesant’s last descendant died in 1953

Streets, schools, apartment complexes, statues—you can’t escape the Stuyvesant name in New York City.

These and other memorials pay homage to Peter Stuyvesant (at right), the director-general of New Amsterdam from 1647 to 1664, as well as other Stuyvesants who made a mark in the city over three centuries.

But there’s one Stuyvesant family member who made headlines for a different achievement: He was the last one, the final direct descendant of peg-legged Peter, dying at age 83 in 1953.

His name was Augustus Van Horne Stuyvesant Jr. Born in 1870 in his family’s mansion on Fifth Avenue and 20th Street, he grew up in an “imposing” house on East 57th Street off Fifth Avenue.

Wealthy and a resident of Manhattan’s most exclusive neighborhood at the time, Augustus lived the same life as the children from other old-money families did in the Gilded Age.

“Educated privately by tutors at home, Mr. Stuyvesant never went to school or college,” stated a New York Times article announcing his death. “In his youth, he and his two sisters led the normal social life of their class, spending summers at Newport, Southampton, or Tuxedo.”

Not only did Augustus not go to school, he never pursued a profession. And neither he nor his sisters married. As adults, the three of them lived together in their East 57th Street mansion.

The three siblings weren’t housemates for long. In 1924, the oldest, Catherine, died; youngest sister Anne’s death followed a decade later.

Augustus spent the next two decades in seclusion. He and Anne had sold the 57th Street mansion in the 1920s and purchased a spectacular French chateau (above) on Fifth Avenue and 79th Street.

The reclusive bachelor’s “only recreation seems to have been an hour’s stroll each day through the streets near his home,” wrote the Times. “He had no family or social life.”

His one regular haunt, however, was St. Mark’s Church at Tenth Street and Second Avenue, where eight generations of Stuyvesants had been buried in a family crypt.

“Once or twice monthly, also, a uniformed chauffeur would drive the tall, white-haired, black-clothed gentleman in an old Rolls Royce to visit the Stuyvesant tomb beneath St.-Mark’s-in-the-Bouwerie,” stated the Times.

“Frequently, in the last ten years, the [St. Mark’s Church] staff would see the quiet, elderly man in black wandering the churchyard, reading the inscriptions on the tombs or sitting in the Stuyvesant family pew in the silent church.”

After Augustus died—he was overcome by heat on an August day while on a stroll—he joined those 80 or so relatives in the family vault.

At his funeral at St. Mark’s Church three days after his death were some cousins, his lawyer, and his “ruddy-faced” butler, who “dressed in black, sat alone, weeping into his handkerchief” along with six elderly house servants, according to a second Times article.

Augustus was the last Stuyvesant to go into the crypt, which runs under the east wall of the church, after which it was sealed forever.

[Top image: Peter Stuyvesant in 1660; second image: Peter Stuyvesant Vault at St. Mark’s Church, wikipedia; third image: New York Times 1953; fourth image: Peter Stuyvesant statue at Stuyvesant Square, Alamy; fifth image: St. Mark’s Churchyard, 1979, MCNY X2010.11.4182; six image: New York Time 1953]

The green lanterns outside city police precincts

Whether the precinct house is old or new, all New York police stations should have two green lights flanking their entrance.

There’s a story explaining why, and it has to do with the first men who patrolled New Amsterdam in the 1650s.

Peter Stuyvesant established an eight-member “rattle watch” who were “paid a small sum to keep an eye on the growing, bustling town,” and look out for pirates, vagabonds, and robbers, according to one source.

The rattle watchmen carried green lanterns over their shoulders on a pole, like a hobo stick, so residents could identify them in the dark, unlit streets.

“When the watchmen returned to the watch house after patrol, they hung their lantern on a hook by the front door to show people seeking the watchman that he was in the watch house,” states this NYPD recruiting website.

“Today, green lights are hung outside the entrances of police precincts as a symbol that the ‘watch’ is present and vigilant,” explains the NYPD site.

The top two photos show the relatively modern green lights of a Chelsea police house, on West 20th Street, and the Ninth Precinct on East Fifth Street in the East Village.

The loveliest old police lantern I’ve ever seen has to be the one outside the 108th Precinct in Hunters Point, Queens.

The facade of the station house is currently undergoing construction, so my photo (left) of the cast-iron, crica-1903 lantern doesn’t do it justice. Luckily Forgotten New York has a much better shot here. It’s a beauty!

The Peters of Second Avenue’s Peter’s Field

There’s a city park between First and Second Avenue and East 20th and 21st Streets that isn’t remarkable in any way—except for its curious name of Peter’s Field.

So who was Peter? Petrus Stuyvesant (right), the Dutch director-general of New Netherlands who ruled the city until 1664.

The park name is a play on the name of Stuyvesant’s sprawling farm, or Bouwerie, which once encompassed this location: Petersfield.

Of course, Stuyvesant graces a ton of other landmarks in the area: Stuyvesant Town, Stuyvesant High School (the original building), and Stuyvesant Square.

Peter’s Field also commemorates another famous Peter who lived in the neighborhood: Peter Cooper. He’s the Kips Bay glue manufacturer, founder of Cooper Union in 1859, and namesake of Peter Cooper Village.

Ah, but the little park pays homage to more Peters. Cast concrete plaques put up in the 1990s on the Second Avenue side honor Peter Rabbit, Peter Pan, Peter Piper, Peter Parker, and other fictional characters who share Stuyvesant and Cooper’s name.

When New York was officially named New Orange

How New York got its name can be summed up like this: In 1624, a Dutch ship arrived at the foot of lower Manhattan, where colonists set up a town they named after Holland’s largest city, New Amsterdam.

By 1664, New Amsterdam fell into the hands of the British (Peter Stuyvesant signed over the colony, now a city, without a fight), who renamed it New York in honor of the Duke of York.

[The city skyline, 1653]

Case closed? Not exactly. In 1673, the Dutch regained control of New York, sailing triumphantly into the harbor with a fleet of 21 ships.

Dutch leader Anthony Colve rechristened the colony New Orange, its official name for about a year—at which point it was permanently ceded to the British under the Treaty of Westminster.

As The New York Times’ Sam Roberts put it in a 2009 podcast, New York “was the Big Orange before it was the Big Apple.”

Subway mosaics that supply a little history

I’ve always loved the colorful mosaics that decorate certain subway stations. They give you a local history lesson while you’re waiting for your train—when the mosaics aren’t too grimy, that is.

The Borough Hall stop on the 2 and 3 line features this colonial-looking borough hall building (left).

At Christopher Street, the platform is lined with mosaics of Newgate prison (right), which jutted out into the Hudson around Christopher and West Streets until the 1820s.

Images of Peter Stuyvesant’s Bouwerie (left) adorn Union Square, close to where the original Bouwerie was in the early 19th century.

And of course, there are the train mosaics (right) at Grand Central Terminal, a tribute to railway titan Cornelius Vanderbilt, who opened Grand Central Depot in 1871.

A public execution in the East Village, 1824

In the early 19th century, the East Village of today had a country feel. The city had just adopted the street grid, and large portions of Peter Stuyvesant’s Bouwerie (in the sketch below) had yet to be parceled out and developed.

 Which made it the perfect site for a public execution in April 1824. Second Avenue and 13th Street is considered the actual corner where a man was hanged in front of 50,000 spectators.

The story is simple: John Johnson ran a boarding house at 65 Front Street. In 1823, he invited a sailor named James Murray to stay at his home. 

Murray had money on him—which Johnson wanted. So in the middle of the night, he bludgeoned Murray in his bed and tossed his body in a nearby alley.

Eventually Johnson confessed to the murder. After a quick trial, he was sentenced to die. On April 2nd, he was brought to an open field near where the New York Eye and Ear Infirmary is today and hanged.

Old phone exchanges: East Side edition

This one was spotted on an apartment building in Manhattan’s East teens. ST is for Stuyvesant; Peter Stuyvesant’s bouwerie occupied today’s East Village and Gramercy Park neighborhoods.

Hidden behind a contemporary banner is this swinging 1960s sign, for Frenchman, an air conditioner business on First Avenue and 19th Street.

OR for Orchard? Oregon? Both Manhattan exchanges spanned the East Side below midtown.

“View at New Amsterdam,” 1665

If you were sailing up the East River in the mid-1660s and catching your first glimpse of New Amsterdam, this is what you could expect to see. 

Painter Johannes Vingboon depicts the colony as a tidy little Dutch hamlet, complete with row houses, a windmill, and, eerily enough, a gallows right on the shoreline. 

 
In the 1660s, Peter Stuyvesant was Director-General of New Amsterdam. Life wasn’t easy for the 1,500 souls living here: There were just a handful of muddy main streets and constant skirmishes with the Lenape Indians. But the City Tavern, built in the 1640s, probably made things bearable.

This painting is part of the National Archives of the Netherlands. It’ll be on display—along with other New Amsterdam artwork, maps, and plans—at the South Street Seaport Museum starting September 12.

It’s all part of NY400, a celebration of the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s voyage along the river that now bears his name.

The original Stuyvesant Town

Before the 9,000-apartment, red-brick housing development across Fourteenth Street opened in 1947, a small walk-up tenement at 219 Avenue B had the Stuyvesant name on its far more humble facade.

“Stuyvesant Apartments” is serious faded and covered in grime, but it was constructed in 1910, predating Stuy Town by 37 years.

There’s a lot of Stuyvesant in the vicinity: Stuyvesant Street near St. Mark’s Church, the old Stuyvesant High School building on East 15th Street, and Stuyvesant Square off Second Avenue in the teens.

No wonder: Petrus Stuyvesant, the Dutch-born director-general of New Netherland, had his farm—or bouwerie—here in the 1600s.

Old St. Marks-in-the-Bouwerie

St. Mark’s Church has stood at Second Avenue and 10th Street since 1799. Before that, in 1660, a much smaller family chapel was put up by Peter Stuyvesant, governor of New Amsterdam who owned the farm—or “Bouwerie”—on that site.

This 1853 illustration, from Valentine’s City of New York Guide Book, shows the current church building with its Greek Revival steeple, just before a portico was added in 1854. Hmm, was the East Side still so bucolic back in the middle of the 19th century? This depiction seems like a bit of an exaggeration.

Here is St. Mark’s 80 years later, in 1936. The church looks kind of spooky and barren, the facade missing the stone and brick we’re used to seeing today. 

St. Mark’s circa 2008, a lovely landmark open to the public and a reminder of New York’s Dutch colonial past. There are few other places in the city where can you walk along tombstones that mark the burial sites of prominent New York citizens of the 18th and 19th centuries.