Ottendorfer Public Library and Stuyvesant Polyclinic Hospital
in New York, United StatesCategory: Attraction
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44 Stuyvesant Street, New York, NY 10003, USA Print route »
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The Ottendorfer Public Library and Stuyvesant Polyclinic Hospital are two adjoining historic buildings located at 135 and 137 2nd Avenue in the East Village neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City. The buildings were built in 1883-84 and were designed as a pair by German-born architect William Schickel. They were a gift to the City of New York by philanthropists Oswald Ottendorfer, a German immigrant and publisher of the Staats-Zeitung, the city's largest German-language newspaper, and his wife Anna Ottendorfer.The Ottendorfer Library was the second branch of the New York Free Circulating Library, and is currently the oldest library in the city to occupy its original building. It opened on December 7, 1884. Even before the library opened, the Ottendorfers had donated their own collection of books to the NYFL.
The Stuyvesant Clinic was affiliated with the German Hospital uptown – now Lenox Hill Hospital – and was originally known as the "German Dispensary", a name that was dropped with the anti-German sentiment of World War I. It provided free medical care to German immigrants on the Lower East Side, on the model of the Northern Dispensary in Greenwich Village. The building features terra cotta busts of Hippocrates, Anders Celsius, Alexander von Humboldt and Antoine Lavoisier, among others. The building was restored in 2009 by David Mayerfied.
The Stuyvesant Polyclinic building was designated a New York City landmark in 1976, and the Ottendorfer Library in 1977, with its interior being designated in 1981. Both buildings were added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1979.
