Preservationists Focus on a Little Brick House
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/19/nyregion/19metjournal.html?pagewanted=1&nl=nyregion&emc=ura1
Cooper Square was an unnamed but thriving business district about 1825 when a descendant of Peter Stuyvesant, Nicholas William Stuyvesant, built what is now one of the oldest remaining Federal-style houses on the Bowery.
In its day, the house, now known as 35 Cooper Square, was nestled among three similar dormer-roof structures. Today it resembles a pink mushroom, propped up against the towering glass and steel sequoia that is the Cooper Square Hotel.
Perhaps not for long. Already scaffolding surrounds the building, and the black tiles of the roof are being torn away as the first step in making way for what preservationists suspect will be another hotel or high-rise condominiums. But not without a fight. In another of those classic New York struggles between the future and the past, steel and wood, high tech and quaint, forces have been lining up to protect 35 Cooper Square.