At the corner of Second Avenue and Seventeenth Street, adjacent to the newly renovated Stuyvesant Square Park, stands a venerable limestone and brick ediface. Its gleaming slate roof and Beaux Arts detailing attest to its pedigree as a National Landmark building. Its decorative terra cotta medallions depicting infants in swaddling clothes give a clue to its original place in New York's history.

Rutherford Place, at 305 Second Avenue, is now a fashionable apartment building, currently renting beautiful and spacious apartments. But the building was once the home of Manhattan's first maternity hospital. Built by J.P. Morgan, it became the darling of New York society for many decades.

Oddly enough, Rutherford Place had its origins in the yellow fever epidemic of 1798. It was then that a prominent physician, Dr. Davic Hosack, concerned about the number of expectant mothers who were widowed by the epidemic, founded the New York Lying In Hospital, the first maternity facility in Manhattan.