By Maria Rocha-Buschel
Town & Village newspaper has been providing news for the Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village community for over 65 years and we’ve decided to start taking a look back to see what was going on in the community 50 years ago. Here are a couple of snapshots from the April 16, 1964 issue of Town & Village.
1964 World’s Fair debut
T&Vers (as residents of Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village were called) were clearly excited about the then-upcoming 1964 World’s Fair.
According to the report, three to four thousand tickets for the fair were sold at the First National City Bank at 262 First Avenue and about 80 percent of those were sold to ST/PCV residents. The story also enthusiastically noted that residents would be able to see their building in a to-scale model, which represented every building in the city and would debut at the fair. The panorama is still on display not far from where the World’s Fair originally took place, housed in the Queens Museum.
At the time of the exhibit’s debut, it cost attendees 10 cents to take a look and find their building. (These days, the Queens Museum’s suggested admission is $8, so trying to hand over the 1964 fee isn’t recommended.)
Police Officer Felicia Shpritzer (Photo from Town & Village)
Policewoman breaks barriers by taking sergeant test
Police Officer Felicia Shpritzer helped break gender barriers in the city’s police department by taking the sergeant’s exam.
Shpritzer, who was a 21-year-old resident of 446 East 20th Street at the time, had previously sued the city because the NYPD claimed that women were “unsuitable” for the position of sergeant. She challenged the department’s decision, and in the previous November, the State Court of Appeals upheld her position that women had the right to take the test.
The New York Times obituary that was published when she died in 2000 noted that Shpritzer was one of two policewomen who passed, out of the 127 women who had taken the test.
