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notes
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Petrus Stuyvesant
built this house at 21 Stuyvesant Street in 1803. It was a wedding gift to
his daughter Elizabeth, who married Nicholas Fish, a close friend and
political ally of Alexander Hamilton. Son Hamilton Fish became New York
State governor, senator, and secretary of state. It is now known as the
Stuyvesant-Fish House.
At No. 21 is the Stuyvesant-Fish house,
built in 1803 by Petrus Stuyvesant, the great-grandson of Peter Stuyvesant.
Petrus gave the house to his daughter, Elizabeth, as a wedding present
when she married Nicholas Fish, a Revolutionary War hero and a political
ally of Alexander Hamilton. In February, George Campbell Jr. and Mary
Schmidt Campbell moved in with their youngest son, Britt.
For 30 years, the Stuyvesant Fish house was
owned by F. Phillip Geraci, an advertising executive who bought it when it
was a rooming house and restored it. Deciding it was too big for him to
keep, and wanting it to have an owner who would appreciate it, he offered
it as a gift to Cooper Union, the college of art and engineering down the
street. The college decided to use it as housing for its president. George
Campbell, who became president of the college last summer after more than
a decade at Bell Labs and then 10 years as president of the National
Action Council for Minorities, is the first Cooper Union president to live
there.
They have three sons -- Garikai, 30, is a
professor of mathematics at Swarthmore, and Sekou, 24, is in
graduate school at Columbia studying acting -- and when their children
were younger, they would take them on trips to the artists' studios, to
engage them in the process of collecting. |