Cooper Union, at the upper end of the Bowery, was built in 1854. Peter Cooper, merchant and philanthropist, made the object of his life the establishment of an institution designed especially to give the working classes opportunity for self-education better than the existing institutions afforded. His store was on the site of the present building, which he founded. By a deed executed in 1859 the institution, with its incomes, he devoted to the instruction and improvement of the people of the United States forever. The institution has been taxed to its full capacity since its inception. From time to time it has been enriched by gifts from Mr. Cooper's heirs and friends. The statue of Peter Cooper, in the little park in front of the building, was unveiled May 28th, 1897. It is the work of Augustus St. Gaudens, once a pupil in the Institute.
On a part of the site of Cooper Union, at the east side of what was then the Bowery, and what is now Fourth Avenue, stood a house which was said to have been haunted. It was demolished to make way for Cooper Union. No permanent tenant, it is said, had occupied it for sixty years. It was a peaked-roofed brick structure, two stories high.
The house of Peter Cooper was on the site of the present Bible House, at Eighth Street and Third Avenue. He removed in 1820 to Twenty-eighth Street and Fourth Avenue, and his dwelling may still be seen there.
Astor Place is part of old Greenwich Lane, which led from the Bowery Lane past the pauper cemetery, where Washington Square is now, over the sand hills where University Place now is, and took the line of the present Greenwich Avenue. This was also called Monument Lane, because of a monument to the memory of General Wolfe erected on the spot where the road ended, at the junction of Eighth Avenue and Fifteenth Street.
Astor Place, as far as Fifth Avenue, was called Art Street when it was changed from a road to a street. The continuation of Astor Place to the east, now Stuyvesant Street, was originally Stuyvesant Road, and extended to the river at about Fifteenth Street. It was also called Art when it became a street. On the south side of this thoroughfare, just west of Fourth Avenue, Charlotte Temple lived in a small stone house.