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One can still step back in time in
Stuyvesant Square. St. George’s Church was begun in 1846, before the park itself was
completed, and dedicated in 1856. It stands on the park’s west border, Rutherford
Place, named for peter Gerard Stuyvesant’s wife. Built in the early Romanesque
Revival style, the church’s spires are conspicuous in renderings of New York of that
year, but they were weakened by fire in 1865 and in 1889 declared unsafe and were removed.
In 1967, St. George’s was officially designated a landmark.
To he south on Rutherford
Place sand the Friends Meeting House and Seminary, constructed in 1861 b the Hicksite
branch of the Quakers. It was doubtless recognized at the time that a meeting of Friends, within the original Stuyvesant homestead, contained a certain irony.
In his day, the old Director-General had strongly opposed any religious order other than
his own Dutch Reformed Church and, in fact, had hindered a settlement of Quakers at his
distant outpost of Flushing, in Queens.
Situated on he east border
of the park – Nathan D Perlman Place (originally Livingston Place) – is the
Dazian Pavilion of Beth Israel Medical Center. While the main building dates to 1923, the
hospital itself traces back to the late 19th century. Another Stuyvesant Square
institution was the New York Infirmary. Founded in 1853 by Elizabeth Blackwell, the first
woman physician in the United States, the Infirmary took up residence on Livingston Place
in 1875. The former Infirmary is now part of the Medical Center and is named the Bernstein
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