This elegant home is the oldest in the East Village

The neighborhood surrounding St. Mark’s Church on Second Avenue and 10th Street owes its charm to the descendants of the Stuyvesant family.

These were the great-great grandsons and granddaughters of Petrus Stuyvesant, the director-general of New Netherland from 1647-1664.

In the late 1700s and early 1800s, these Stuyvesants lived in stately houses on land that was once part of the director-general’s vast estate, which spanned Fifth Street to 17th Street east of Fourth Avenue.

A few of these elegant houses still stand—like the modest, understated Federal-style home at 44 Stuyvesant Street (above).

Not only is it believed to be the oldest house in the East Village, but it’s one of the oldest buildings in Manhattan to continually be used as a residence, and thus was spared excessive remodeling and renovations.

“This early Federal house was erected in 1795 for Nicholas William Stuyvesant on Stuyvesant Street,” according to the Landmarks Historic Commission report on the St. Mark’s Historic District from 1969.

That was the same year Stuyvesant married a member of another old New York family, Catherine Livingston Reade. It stands to reason that the house may have been a family wedding gift for the young society couple.

The stately yet unassuming facade gives the date away, the report states. (Above, the area in the 1840s; Number 44 would be the third house from the corner on Stuyvesant Street.)

“The almost square windows, splayed lintels and bricks laid in Flemish bond are characteristics of that period. The doorway has retained its original proportions, indicating the grand style of the door, which has been replaced.”

Other lovely features include interior hand-hewn beams, a “dog-leg staircase,” and basement wall made of stone blocks, the report states.

Nicholas and Catherine spent 23 years living in this house, and they raised their nine children here. In 181 they decamped to another Stuyvesant family house and rented out Number 44.

“It is impossible to over-emphasize the importance of this building—historically and architecturally,” the HPC report asserts. “It is one of only two remaining houses of the early generations of the Stuyvesant family, and it is that family name, above all others, that represents Dutch New York.”

Another Stuyvesant survivor is down the block at 21 Stuyvesant Street. This pretty home with dormer windows served as a wedding present for a Stuyvesant descendent who married Nicholas Fish (parents of Hamilton Fish) in 1804.

[Fourth Image: Edward Henry Lamson]

Stand here and feel the ghosts of Bowery Village

Stand at Cooper Square looking toward St. Marks Place: this honky-tonk corner in today’s East Village was once the center of a 19th century outpost known as Bowery Village.

Far from the hustle and bustle of the city, Bowery Village sprang up around Petrus Stuyvesant’s estate. (Petrus Stuyvesant was a great-grandson of Peter, the director-general of New Amsterdam in the 17th century.)

It’s hard to imagine the concrete and brick East Village of today as a struggling farming community. The illustration above gives an idea, though it depicts Union Square, where the Bowery (now Fourth Avenue) and Broadway meet.

In the late 1790s, this area was part of a “rugged belt of land, with here and there a garden and a solitary house, to diversify the bareness of the stunted pasture lots with their dilapidated fences,” states an 1864 history of the Bowery Village Methodist Church. This church was a centerpiece of the community and was located at Seventh Street between Second and Third Avenues.

Early on, Bowery Village “consisted chiefly of a long unpaved street of struggling houses . . . dreaming little, as  yet, of the Russ pavement and car track,” the church historical document recalled.

After Stuyvesant laid a street grid—while keeping diagonal Stuyvesant Street, which lead from the Bowery to St. Mark’s Church (above right in the 1820s)—people moved in, driven from the city downtown by heat and disease.

“Throughout the 18th century it remained sparsely settled—a few houses plus blacksmith, wagon shop, general store, and tavern—partly from fear of highwaymen lurking in the Bayard Woods,” wrote Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace in Gotham.

Like other villages across Manhattan, Bowery Village functioned as something of a suburb. “Because Bowery Village lay just outside the city limits, farmers could sell there without paying a market tax,” wrote Burrows and Wallace.

“Wagon stands soon flourished along Sixth and Seventh Streets, along with a weigh scale for Westchester hay merchants. Comfortable residences went up along the upper Bowery, still a country road edged with blackberry bushes. . . . “

“Artisan house-and-shops arrived too; so did groggeries, a brothel, and a post office (in truth an oyster house where the postrider left mail for the village). From 1804 the community even had its own (short-lived) newspaper, the Bowery Republican.”

The enclave also had its own graveyard between First and Second Avenues and Eleventh Street, possibly this one, noted on later 19th century maps.

Not much remains of Bowery Village. The city quickly marched northward and subsumed it by the 1850s, as it did Greenwich Village to the west.

One remnant is St. Mark’s Church itself, still on Second Avenue and Tenth Street. Built on Stuyvesant family land, it was consecrated in 1799.

Another survivor is the Stuyvesant Fish House (above left), a wedding present for Stuyvesant’s daughter and her husband, Nicolas Fish (parents of Hamilton Fish, New York governor and senator), at 21 Stuyvesant Street.

This wide Federal-style house was built in 1804, predating Robert Fulton’s invention of the steamboat.

“Bowery Village’s cohesion appeared to be short-lived,” wrote Kenneth A. Scherzer in The Unbounded Community.

“With the development of the surrounding wards it rapidly broke down, and with the settlement of “newcomers” who replaced the established residents in the late 1830s, Bowery Village ceased to exist in both reality and in name.”

That’s the East Village to this day: a constant push-pull between old timers and newcomers. Find out more about both in The Gilded Age in New York, 1870-1910.

[Top photo: Ephemeral New York; second image: NYPL; third image: NYPL; fourth image: Evening Post 1819; fifth image: Edward Lamson Henry; fifth and sixth images: Ephemeral New York]