How Manhattan’s Turtle Bay got its name

Turtle Bay is a wonderful name for an urban neighborhood.

I always imagine hundreds of turtles sunning themselves on the rocks along the East River between 45th and 48th Streets.

That’s where the actual bay was once located in Colonial-era Manhattan, surrounded by meadows and hills, with a stream that emptied at the foot of today’s 47th Street.

Click on the map for a bigger view; it was drawn in 1878 to accompany a book about New York during the Revolutionary War.

But while turtles were plentiful in Manhattan (and made for a tasty meal), the name may come from a corrupted Dutch word.

“Some historians attribute the name to the turtle-filled creek, while others say it had nothing to do with turtles, that the name was more likely a corruption of the Dutch word “deutal” (a bent blade), which referred to the shape of the bay,” states the Turtle Bay Association.

“Regardless, the turtle feasts of the day prevailed and so did the name, Turtle Bay Farm.”

Not the Hudson, a site about the East River, has a more definitive answer.

“It was named after the Deutal (Dutch for “knife”) Bay farm, which originally covered 86 acres of land shaped like a knife blade. Also occupied by turtles, historians are unsure as to which one of these factors resulted in the name.”

If it was named for the shape of the bay, it no longer applies. The “rock-bound cove” that sheltered ships from storms was filled in and smoothed over in the 1860s.

The Beekman mansion—known as Mount Pleasant (left)—once stood at the northern end of Turtle Bay; it was demolished in the 1870s.

The United Nations occupies most of the site now.

When New Yorkers tried to rename Third Avenue

1956 was a crucial year for seven-mile Third Avenue.

That’s when the last piece of steel from the Third Avenue El was dismantled (below at 34th Street in the 1930s), bringing sunlight and broad views to a thoroughfare long known for its shadows and grime.

And right about when the El was finally removed, some residents and real estate officials called for Third Avenue to be given a more glamorous name.

“[Borough President Hulan E. Jack] said that at least five new names had been suggested,” wrote The New York  Times on February 17, after a ceremony marking the removal of a steel column.

Among them were The Bouwerie, United Nations Avenue, International Boulevard, and Nathan Hale Boulevard (the Revolutionary War hero was reportedly hanged at today’s Third Avenue and 66th Street).

“One atomic-minded New Yorker had offered Fission Avenue,” stated the Times.

Borough President Jack was against a name change, though he did propose renaming the Bowery “Third Avenue South” to get rid of the Bowery’s “connotation of drunken derelicts and broken dreams.”

In the end, of course, Third Avenue remained Third Avenue . . . and the Bowery now connotes boutique hotels.

[Photo: New York City Municipal Archives]

A priest, a maid, and a Second Avenue murder

Ordained in his native Germany in 1904, Roman Catholic priest Hans Schmidt was assigned to St. Boniface Church, at Second Avenue and 47th Street, in 1908.

There he met Anna Aumuller, a beautiful 21-year-old housekeeper for the church rectory. Aumuller was an immigrant too; she came to New York from Austria five years earlier.

They started an affair. Schmidt even obtained a wedding license and performed a secret but obviously illegal marriage ritual.

In early September, Aumuller found out she was pregnant. Terrified that his affair would be exposed, Schmidt slit Aumuller’s throat, cut up her body, and dumped it in the Hudson River.

Unfortunately for Schmidt, a pillowcase containing some of Aumuller’s body parts washed up on the Hoboken side of the river later that month.

Police quickly traced the pillowcase back to an apartment Schmidt and Aumuller shared in Harlem.

Schmidt confessed, and officials realized that in addition to being a murder suspect, he was also running a counterfeiting ring.

At his trial, he claimed God ordered him to kill Anna. Nonsense, prosecutors replied; he was simply faking insanity to escape execution.

The jury gave him the chair in February 1914. Several months later, Schmidt changed his story: He now claimed that he accidentally killed Aumuller during a botched abortion, and should only be penalized for manslaughter.

He went to the electric chair anyway on February 19, 1916—still the only priest in U.S. history ever executed for murder.

Gentrification comes to the east side’s Dutch Hill

Mid-19th century Manhattan was dotted by lots of small villages. But few were as poor and wretched as Dutch Hill, centered around 42nd Street near the East River.

“Shantytown, this was called, a dismal collection of shacks and hovels inhabited by day-laborers, their families, and their pigs,” wrote Lloyd Morris in Incredible New York.

Adds Kenneth Jackson in The Encyclopedia of New York City: “Like most squatter settlements of the time, it was situated north of the built-up area of the city. The inhabitants were predominantly German and Irish immigrants. Many worked at the nearby Voorhis and Mott quarries.”

But it wouldn’t exist much longer. The city was moving north, and genteel residents—like the couple and little boy strolling up Second Avenue in this 1861 illustration—were moving to this area of scattered home and rock piles.

“By the end of the Civil War the growth and northward movement of population made real estate in the area valuable, and the squatters were displaced,” writes Jackson.

An Art Deco globe illuminates a New York lobby

The 37-story New York Daily News building, at 220 East 42nd Street, is pure Art Deco beauty.

And it’s even more of a masterpiece thanks to the illuminated 12-foot globe that’s been revolving under a black glass dome in the lobby since 1930.

“Around it, spreading across the floor like a giant compass and literally positioning New York at the center of the world, bronze lines indicate mileage to various international destinations,” writes Fodors.com.

“The Daily News, however, hasn’t called this building home since the mid-1990s, 15 years after it played the offices of the fictional newspaper the Daily Planet in the original Superman movie.”

It attracts lots of gawkers today, just as it has for 80 years. [Image above courtesy of New York Architecture]

The bronze celestial globe in an East Side park

In a quiet, teardrop-shaped Clara Coffey Park in the East 50s is this curious sculpture.

It’s a sundial and an armillary sphere—an astronomical model showing the relationships among the principal celestial circles, the Parks Department explains.

The stone pedestal gives the four cardinal directions, and a bronze band is decorated with impressive images of each zodiac sign.

It’s a mystical and enchanting object installed here in 1971, and it can make an observer feel very small and inconsequential in the scheme of the universe.

The same sculptor is credited with this sundial in Central Park.

The seahorses of a 57th Street apartment house

New York apartment buildings are decorated with all kinds of interesting creatures. Over the years I’ve seen birds, horses, elephants, even the heads of sheep.

But I’ve never spotted a seahorse, until recently.

This luxury apartment building at 340 East 57th Street features an enchanting row of seahorse bas reliefs. Maybe the developer made his fortune off the sea?

A proud lamppost guards the Queensboro Bridge

Right before the Manhattan-side entrance to the circa-1909 Queensboro Bridge is this beautiful bronze lamppost.

On its base is a sweet touch: the names of four boroughs (sorry Staten Island) carved into it, symbolizing the recently united city.

The lamppost no longer lights the way, but that’s okay.

Just the fact that it managed to survive more than a century is a significant achievement.

Here it is in a NYPL photo, left, dated 1910-1920.

It used to have a twin on the other side of the bridge entrance. That lamppost vanished in the 1970s, but no one knew what had happened to it (theft? Moved to make way for the Roosevelt Island Tram?)—until it was found in a Department of Transportation signal yard in Queens last year.

The Roosevelt Island Historical Society plans to restore it and display it there, next to a renovated trolley kiosk once part of the bridge.

A piece of cord busts a 1936 Manhattan murderer

On April 10th, 1936, Nancy Titterton, a 34-year-old writer and book reviewer, was found dead in the empty bathtub in her apartment at 22 Beekman Place.

She’d been raped and strangled, her body left unclothed except for a pair of rolled-down stockings. The pajamas she’d worn the night before were wrapped around her neck.

The murder made headlines because it was so brutal. “There were signs of a struggle in the bedroom,” wrote Michael Kurland, author of Irrefutable Evidence: A History of Forensic Science.

“Ligature marks on the victim’s wrists indicated that she had been tied up before she was raped, but the rope had apparently been cut off and taken away.”

Adding to the media fascination was the fact that Titterton was known in literary circles; her husband was an NBC bigwig.

Also, crimes so vicious just didn’t happen on posh Beekman Place, a two-block residential enclave in the East 50s (above photo).

Luckily police had evidence to work with. Underneath Titterton’s body in the bathtub was a 13-inch cord, similar to the cord of a Venetian blind.

They traced the cord to a Pennsylvania upholstery wholesaler. It just so happened that the two men who discovered Titterton’s body were from a local upholstery shop; they were delivering a couch to the apartment.

One of the delivery men, the shop’s owner, was cleared. The other, a 24-year-old assistant named John Fiorenza, had spent time in prison for theft, where a psychiatrist labeled him a possible psychopath.

Police brought Fiorenza in for questioning. He admitted to raping and murdering Titterton, who he’d met the day before when he came to her apartment to pick up the couch.

“He claimed to have returned to the apartment convinced that Nancy Titterton had fallen for him during their brief encounter the day before,” wrote Kurland.

“When she rebuffed him, he became so furious he tied her up and raped her. . . . Afterward, he had strangled her and left her in the bathtub.”

Convicted of murder in a trial that started six weeks after the slaying, Fiorenza (at right, the morning of his execution) went to the electric chair at Sing Sing in January 1937.

An East Side farm gives way to lovely row houses

Two centuries ago, a wealthy New Yorker named Adam Treadwell bought a 24-acre farm on Manhattan’s East Side, about where the East 60s are today.

When he died in 1852, his heirs inherited the property. Soon they began selling off small parcels to individual owners.

These new owners did something smart: they set up an agreement stipulating the height and width of the buildings they planned to put up, and they barred certain businesses from opening up there.

Their foresight leaves us with two breathtaking blocks mostly of four-story row houses built between 1868 to 1876, according to the document designating East 61st and 62nd Streets between Second and Third Avenues the Treadwell Farm Historic District.

The row houses were built in the French Second Empire and Italianate styles popular at the time.

“Today, the district is appreciated for the way it reveals the design aesthetic of the 1910s and 1920s,” explains the website for the Friends of the Treadwell Farm Historic District.

“During those years, most of the buildings were ‘modernized,’ i.e., stoops removed, and projecting detail stripped resulting in simplified elegance.”

There’s no river view or doormen standing by, but these two tree-lined blocks rank as among the loveliest in Manhattan, a tiny, little-known oasis of calm and beauty amid the crowds and traffic of East Midtown.

Take a peek inside one, recently for sale, via this Curbed listing. Price: just 7.9 million!