There Are Hidden Gardens and Then There's Turtle Bay Gardens

In the East 40s, 19 townhouses-where Stephen Sondheim, Robert Gottlieb, and Katharine Hepburn all once lived-surround a lush garden.

- ADRIANE QUINLAN

WEDGED BETWEEN THE CHEERLESS skyscrapers of Third Avenue and an uncharming stretch of Second, just blocks north of the bro bars of Murray Hill, is a row of nine townhouses. They have flat façades and modest entrances a step down from the street beside lines of trash bins. One block south, on 48th Street, is another row of similarly unassuming design. Anyone passing by might not guess that these houses are connected and centered on a shady private garden. Or that they have acted as a sort of year-round summer retreat for generations of actors and writers—a place where E.B. White could get writing done, where Robert Gottlieb could edit from bed, and where Bob Dylan could avoid prying eyes, except for those of his next-door neighbor, Katharine Hepburn.

Together, these 19 townhouses make up Turtle Bay Gardens, created around 1920 by a developer who renovated the 1860s-era homes all at once. Each has its own small private space, with low walls, that looks onto an unusually beautiful shared garden. That developer was an heiress named Charlotte Hunnewell Sorchan. The press at the time reported the idea first came up at a tea at the Ritz-Carlton shortly after World War I, where her friends had apparently been complaining they couldn’t find good affordable housing; the war had put a stop to new construction, and prices were out of control. She had the funds for a solution. After some hunting, she came across two rows of brownstones in a “quarter that was then considered too far east,” as she later wrote. Working families, wedged there between elevated-train lines, had used their yards to vent kitchen smoke, hang laundry, and store garbage. She and her friends saw potential, with press reports saying that they were inspired to create something like “a little villa in ancient Italy.”