​The story of the hidden garden inside a Turtle Bay tenement block

 

“East 49th Street between Second and Third Avenues in Turtle Bay is a block with a backstory. During the 17th century, this was farmland owned by Dutch settlers; in the 18th century, a stagecoach stop on Boston Post Road was established here. By the Civil War, the farms vanished, subsumed into the urban city and turned into brownstones and tenements.But the story in this post concerns something that came to Turtle Bay in 1946: a hidden romantic garden of shady trees, decorative flower pots, stone block walls and paved walkways unseen from the street and accessed through a thin-slatted iron gate. ...”

Ephemeral New York