Near Eastern restaurants, serving dishes such as shish kebab (skewered
lamb), pilaff (steamed rice), stuffed grape leaves, and Armenian wines
and spirits.

Stuyvesant Square District

Area; 14th St. on the south to 18th St. on the north; from 1st Ave. west to 3d Ave.
Map on page 193.

Staid old Stuyvesant Square, although its neighborhood has changed
drastically, is still the quiet park it was in its opulent days of the 1860's.
It was originally part of the farm owned by "Pegleg" Peter Stuyvesant
and the Dutch were most numerous in the section until 1700. The Ger-
mans and Irish came during the last half of the nineteenth century, to be
followed later by Italians, Jews, and Slavs. In the early 1900's it was the
bailiwick of Charles F. Murphy, Tammany chieftain and overlord of the
adjoining gashouse district.

The pleasant four-acre park, bisected by Second Avenue, is landscaped
with elms, catalpas, ginkgos, sycamores, hawthornes, and ailanthuses. Walks
follow the pattern of two elongated ellipses. In the center of each half is
a small flower-bordered pool.

Bordering the park are several hospitals: the William Booth Memo-
rial Hospital of the Salvation Army, 314 East Fifteenth Street; Beth
Israel, Stuyvesant Park East; Manhattan General, 307 Second Ave-
nue; St. Andrew's Convalescent Hospital, 237 East Seventeenth
Street; and New York Infirmary for Women and Children, 321
East Fifteenth Street. The infirmary, staffed entirely by women, was
founded in the early 1850's by Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, pioneer woman
physician. At Second Avenue and Fifteenth Street is the Convent of the
Little Sisters of the Assumption, a nursing order. From 1902 until
1928 the Lying-in Hospital, now a part of New York Hospital (see page
247), occupied a building on Second Avenue between Seventeenth and
Eighteenth Streets. Doctors occupy many of the brownstones facing the
park. In early days unscrupulous midwives and medical quacks had their
quarters in this vicinity, conducting a lucrative business among gullible
immigrants.

Wedged between weathered brownstones is the German Masonic
Temple, 220 East Fifteenth Street, a building of blue-gray cast stone
designed in neoclassical style.

Rutherford Place, the west side of the square, long associated with the