StuyTown

StuyTown (Stuyvesant Town) is a multi-building rental apartment complex on Manhattan’s East Side, listed here at 252 First Avenue, with Beam Living as manager on record. It is a complex rather than a single building: 89 red-brick residential buildings on a car-free campus of lawns and playgrounds laid out around a central Oval. Metropolitan Life built it after the Second World War as housing for returning veterans, and it is one half of the Stuyvesant Town-Peter Cooper Village development; Peter Cooper Village, to the north, is indexed as a separate record.

The complex covers the superblock from East 14th to East 20th Street between First Avenue and Avenue C, with the East River Park and the East River Greenway just beyond the FDR Drive. The L stops at First Avenue and 14th Street at the southwest corner, and the M14 and M23 crosstown buses run along its edges.

MetLife cleared eighteen blocks of the old Gas House District to build the complex, which welcomed its first tenants in 1947. Its early history is a difficult one: the company refused to rent to Black tenants in its first years, a policy challenged in court and in the State Legislature before it ended in the early 1950s. For decades afterward StuyTown was a byword for stable, rent-regulated middle-class housing in Manhattan.

In 2006 Tishman Speyer and BlackRock bought StuyTown and Peter Cooper Village for $5.4 billion, then the largest residential real estate deal in American history. The plan depended on moving apartments to market rents, and after a 2009 court ruling found that thousands of apartments had been improperly deregulated, the owners defaulted. In 2015 Blackstone and Ivanhoé Cambridge bought the property for about $5.3 billion under an agreement with the city to keep roughly 5,000 apartments at below-market rents for 20 years. Renters today will find both rent-stabilized and market-rate apartments, many of them renovated, across the 89 buildings.