Just down from St. Mark's

There are two buildings on 2nd Ave. between 9th Street and St. Mark's Place.  They are: The Ottendorfer Branch of the New York Public Library and the Stuyvesant Polyclinic.
They were built by the architect William Schickel, 1850-1907, in the German round-arched neo-Romanesque style.  They were completed in 1884 using brick and terracotta.  He also built the church of St.Ignatius Loyola on Park Ave. and 84th Street and many other buildings throughout N. Y. State.  Both of these buildings are listed on the National register of Historic Places.  "The American Institute of Architects Guide to New York City" calls them "an architectural confection."

At the time of their construction there were 150,000 German immigrants in the east village also called Kleindeutschland or Little Germany.

The Library opened in 1884 and was the first branch of the NY Free Circulating Library.   It is the oldest in the NY Library system.
The Clinic provided free medical care to residents of the east village and also training for medical students.  It was originally called The German Poliklinik but had to change its name because of anti-German sentiment during the First World War.
The Library is named for Anna and Oswald Ottendorfer.
Anna Behr was born of a poor family in Germany in 1815 and immigrated to the States in 1837.  Her first husband, Jacob Uhl, purchased the "New Yorker Staats-Zeitung" in 1845, a small German language weekly.  With Anna's help it became a daily in 1852, the year Jacob died.  In 1859 Anna married her editor Oswald Ottendorfer.  She was the mother of six children with Jacob, none with Oswald.  She was the owner and publisher of The New Yorker Staats-Zeitung and was very successful.  Her estate at the time of her death was $3,000,000.  In the 1870s the circulation of the paper was equal to The New York Tribune and The New York Times.
A word about The Tribune.  It was  founded by Horace Greeley in 1841, the 'go west young man' Horace Greeley, and was considered the leading newspaper in the United States.  Greeley's foreign corespondent in Europe between 1851 and 1861 was Karl Marx. That Karl Marx.
Anna on the other hand was building what she felt was needed to uplift "both the body and mind of fellow Germans in the United States".  Besides these buildings she built the Isabella Home for Aged Woman [named after her deceased daughter] a woman's wing at a city hospital, and numerous other kinds of aid to German citizens.  So much so that she received a gold medal  from Empress Augusta of Germany, and a plaque in the east village on an "architectural confection" that is landmarked for history.  When she died her funeral was the largest for any woman in New York at that time.