Stuyvesant Square Historic District

Stuyvesant Square Historic District covers the blocks around the southern and western sides of Stuyvesant Square Park on Manhattan's lower east side. It contains almost 50 row houses, a church, a seminary and several apartment and commercial buildings, most built in the late nineteenth century after the park was laid out in 1836. The row houses are mainly Greek Revival and Italianate, built by architect-builders as speculative housing; one, at 245 East 17th Street, was designed by Richard Morris Hunt in 1883. On the west side of the park stand St. George's Church, an early Romanesque Revival building of brown sandstone, and the Friends Meeting House and Seminary of 1860-61, which echo earlier Federal and Greek Revival styles. Many houses have been altered, yet the area still reads as a low-scaled residential neighborhood around a small square. Its significance lies in preserving the character of a once-fashionable pre-Civil War district that commercial development erased elsewhere downtown. The park's fence and fountains survive from its original plan.