Stuyvesant Town, as well as the adjacent Peter Cooper Village, is a large residential development on the East Side of the borough of Manhattan in New York City.

One of the most iconic and successful of postwar housing projects, Stuyvesant Town was planned in 1943.

The model, middle-income housing development was named for the last Director-General of New Amsterdam, Peter Stuyvesant, whose farm occupied the site in the seventeenth-century. In the late nineteenth-century the area became known as the Gashouse District because of the many huge gas tanks that dominated the streetscapes.

The tanks, which sometimes leaked, made the area undesirable, as did the Gas House Gang and others that operated in the area. With the construction of East River Drive the area began to improve. By the 1930s, all but four tanks were gone and, while shabby, the area was no more blighted than many parts of the city after the years of the Great Depression.


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