Peter Cooper Village

Peter Cooper Village is a multi-building rental apartment complex on Manhattan’s East Side, listed here at 360 First Avenue, with Beam Living as manager on record. It is a complex rather than a single building: 21 residential buildings set in landscaped grounds, built by Metropolitan Life after the Second World War as the northern companion to Stuyvesant Town. Together the two form the Stuyvesant Town-Peter Cooper Village development, and StuyTown is indexed here as a separate record.

The complex fills the blocks from East 20th to East 23rd Street between First Avenue and the FDR Drive, across 20th Street from StuyTown. The VA Medical Center and Bellevue sit a few blocks north along First Avenue, and Waterside Plaza is reached by footbridge at East 25th Street. The M23 SBS crosstown bus runs along the northern edge, and the L stops at First Avenue and 14th Street.

Peter Cooper Village opened in 1947 alongside StuyTown and is named for Peter Cooper, the 19th-century industrialist who founded the Cooper Union. It was planned as the more upscale half of the development, and its apartments are generally larger than StuyTown’s, with more two- and three-bedroom layouts and higher rents.

Its ownership history is shared with StuyTown. MetLife sold both complexes in 2006 to Tishman Speyer and BlackRock for $5.4 billion; that venture defaulted in 2010 after a court ruling on improperly deregulated apartments, and Blackstone and Ivanhoé Cambridge bought the pair in 2015 with an agreement to keep about 5,000 apartments across the two complexes affordable for 20 years. Residents share the combined campus’s playgrounds, ball courts and seasonal events on StuyTown’s Oval.