Hamilton Fish House

You are approaching the Hamilton Fish House, a stately brick residence built in eighteen-oh-four. It stands on Stuyvesant Street, a rare diagonal thoroughfare that cuts across the city's rigid rectangular grid because it once served as a private lane through the original Stuyvesant family farm. Petrus Stuyvesant, the last Dutch colonial governor of New York, owned this land in the seventeenth century, and his descendants maintained this specific family enclave long after the surrounding city had been plotted out.