SocietyActivities

by Sally Quackenbush Mason

Walking Tour of Manhattan’s East Village: from Petrus Stuyvesant’s Farm to Today

ON SATURDAY AFTERNOON, October 29, 2022, Holland Society of NewYork Members and friends, including Darlene Liebman, Chris Clark, Joop Theunissen,JeromTheunissen,JamesStuart Lansing, Paul Beery Van Dyke Jr., Nancy Van Dyke, and Sally Quackenbush Mason gathered outside St. Mark’s Church-in-theBowery,theburialsiteofPetrusStuyvesant, the last Dutch director of New Netherland, for a guided walking tour of Manhattan’s East Village. Joyce Gold, the “doyenne of city walking guides” according to The New York Times, led the tour. St. Mark’s, which is New York’s oldest site of continuous religious practice, was originally part of Petrus Stuyvesant’s 62-acre farm or “bouwerie.” Before leaving the church to walk down adjacent Stuyvesant Street, Ms. Gold pointed out a bronze bust of Stuyvesant by Dutch artist Toon Dupuis, which Queen Wilhelmina and the Dutch Government presented to the church in 1915. The group alsoadmiredalovelystained-glasswindow portrait of Stuyvesant.

NextthetourtraversedStuyvesantStreet, oneofManhattan’soldeststreets,whichruns diagonally from 9th Street at ThirdAvenue to 10th Street near Second Avenue, mostly within the St. Mark’s Historic District. Although the street runs diagonally in relation to the Manhattan street grid, it is one of the few true east-west streets in Manhattan.

Ms. Gold noted the Hamilton Fish house at 21 Stuyvesant Street (below), a brick Federal-style house unusually wide for its time, built around 1804 by Petrus Stuyvesant’s great-grandson Peter Stuyvesant as a wedding present to his daughter Elizabeth andhisson-in-lawNicholasFish,parentsof Hamilton, who served as President Ulysses S. Grant’s secretary of state.

The Holland Society tour started by the bust of Petrus Stuyvesant in the church yard of St. Mark’s Churchin-the-Bowery in Manhattan.

Headingwest,thetourreachedthesiteof the now-demolished opera house at Astor Place between 8th and Lafayette streets, where the Astor Place Riot of 1849 took place,leavingbetweentwenty-twoandthirty-oneriotersdeadandmorethan120people injured Ostensiblycausedbyalocaldispute about whether an English or an American actorwasthebestShakespeareanperformer onstage,thiswasoneofanumberofdeadly nineteenth-centuryriotsinManhattanwhich pittedimmigrantsandnativistsagainsteach other, or together against the wealthy.

Asacountertotheclasswarfareragingin themid-1800s,Ms.Goldnextledthegroup to Cooper Triangle Park to admire a stately monument to Peter Cooper (born in 1791 of Dutch, English, and Huguenot descent), whose accomplishments as a visionary inventor, industrialist, and philanthropist includedhis1858foundingofPeterCooper Union for theAdvancement of Science and Art, a coeducational college providing studentswithfull-tuitionscholarshipsinarchitecture,art,andengineering.AugustusSaintGaudens, a preeminent nineteenth-century sculptor and one of the earliest alumni of Cooper Union (class of 1864) sculpted the statue in collaboration with architect Stanford White, who created the piece’s marble and granite canopy

Moving on, the tour visited McSorley’s Old Ale House at 15 East 7th Street, the oldest surviving Irish saloon in New York City, established in 1854 to serve the Irish laborers who had moved to the area. There, amidst much historical paraphernalia, is a portrait of Holland Society member The- odore bar Germans thrived in this neighborhood then Italian, Jewish, Polish, and Ukrainian immigrants moved in, bringing new life, food, and customs. The tour strolled past thebeautifullytiledSaintGeorgeUkrainian Catholic Church, located at 7th Street and Taras Shevchenko Place, and the Second AvenuestripwheretheYiddishRialtoTheatershadthrived.Theystoppedtopeeratthe ruinsoftheMiddleCollegiateChurchat112 Second Avenue, originally constructed in 1892,the oldest ofthe CollegiateChurches ofNewYork,withacongregationoriginally organized in 1628. A fire destroyed all but the façade of this beautiful church on December 5, 2020 (below).