Turtle Bay Gardens Historic District

Turtle Bay Gardens is a tranquil enclave of twenty row houses on East 48th and East 49th Streets in midtown Manhattan. The four-story Italianate brownstones were built by a speculative builder in the 1860s. After Mrs. Walton Martin bought them in 1919, architect Clarence Dean removed the stoops, added rusticated English basements, installed uniform casement windows and covered the spalling brownstone with tinted stucco. Each house gave up six feet of its rear lot to form a shared garden with a flagstone walk and a fountain based on a Roman prototype at the Villa Medici. An old willow there appears in E.B. White's 1949 book Here is New York. The district matters as a 1920s planned community drawing on English terrace house and garden suburb ideas. Residents also adopted covenants limiting height, additions, materials and building use. Well-known theatrical and literary figures have lived here, drawn by the privacy the enclave offers.