Stuyvesant Town–Peter Cooper Village is a large, private community where people live. It is on the east side of Manhattan, a borough in New York City. It is one of the most and successful post-World War II private housing communities. Stuyvesant Town is known to its residents as "Stuy Town". It was named after Peter Stuyvesant, the last Director-General of the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam, whose farm occupied the site in the seventeenth century. Peter Cooper Village is named after Peter Cooper, a 19th-century industrialist, inventor and philanthropist. Cooper also founded Cooper Union.