Negroes and whites don’t mix. Perhaps they will in a hundred years, but not now. If we brought them into this development, it would be to the detriment of the city, too, because it would depress all the surrounding property.
Frederick H. Ecker, President, Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, New York Post, May 1943
When we look at much of Manhattan today it is hard to imagine neighborhoods south of 23rd Street as a vast immigrant slum. Prior to 1940, the area that now encompasses Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village was known as the Gas House District because of the stench of leaking gas from power plants that enveloped the tenements, small storefronts, warehouses and manufacturing entities.
In 1942, Frederick H. Ecker, president of Metropolitan Life Insurance Company had an idea that would change this so-called ‘blighted” area forever: Stuyvesant Town. Metropolitan Life acquired the 18-block footprint ( to build their own version of “suburbia in the city” to house returning veterans and serve as an enclave for middle and professional class people who were ideal customers for their insurance policies and who preferred urban lifestyle to suburbia. Eminent domain would clear the slum of its roughest elements – leftover Irish Catholics, Italian, Jewish and Eastern European who called the neighborhood home. The complex would become the largest public/private partnership between government and a corporation in US history (Met Life was worth $6 billion at the time). In fact, the whole arrangement was considered a win-win altruistic enterprise by the corporation and government.
Yet, because of redlining, ingrained racist political and real estate practices that equated racially segregated (homogenous) housing patterns with “safe” real estate investment strategy and good economic policy, Stuyvesant Town and its sister development, Peter Cooper Village, was designed to ensure that black and white people (including veterans) would not mix. To quell protest, an all black development called Riverton was proposed and built for Harlem.
There were important voices of dissent that joined together to protest Met Life policies of enforced racial segregation and city government’s, specifically, Mayor Laguardia and Robert Moses’s enthusiastic endorsement of the project. The Town and village Tenants Committee to End Discrimination in Stuyvesant Town rose up in opposition against dominant market-based, government subsidized racism in housing. This group of WWII veterans, academics, political activists and ordinary residents believed in the wartime Double-V campaign to wipe out fascism and racism at home and abroad.
Ironically, within the story of Stuyvesant Town was a bit of my own story as well. I attended JHS 104 on East 21st Street located across from Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper in the mid-1970’s. I was ignorant of the fight to desgregate Stuyvesant Town while I attended school. Yet, as I recall, it struck me as odd that I knew no people of color, black or otherwise, who lived in the housing complex. The complex has more or less maintained its lack of diversity ever since. And, with ever increasing rents the development has become more homogenous.
(Thank you to Amy fox and Elizabeth Fox who contributed their family documents to this section of the archive)