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.
That courtyard, Amster Yard, was the brainchild of interior decorator James Amster (below). Two years earlier, Amster had heard that a cluster of buildings on East 49th Street were for sale. Constructed around 1870, the buildings were now dilapidated and the neighborhood not quite as desirable as it once had been, especially with the elevated train still roaring along Third Avenue.
Amster purchased these buildings, which included "a boarding house, a carpenter's workshop and the home of an elderly woman with 35 cats," according to a New York Times article from 2002.
He then enlisted the help of friends to "create a garden complex surrounded by offices and apartments renovated from the shells of the original buildings," wrote Pamela Hanlon in Manhattan's Turtle Bay: Story of a Midtown Neighborhood.
The result: "a picturesque cluster of one- to four-story brick houses around an L-shaped garden courtyard filled with trees and shrubbery," stated the New York Times in 1986.
"You go through a thin-barred iron gate down a long flagged corridor till you're midway between the north side of 49th Street, but perhaps 40 feet short of 50th Street, and you're in a cool, ailanthus-shaded garden restored to look much as it was, say, 150 years ago," wrote a New York Times reporter in 1953.
Amster Yard was also something of an artists' enclave, home to interior designer Billy Baldwin and sculptor Isamu Noguchi.
In the 1960s, Amster Yard became a New York City landmark, a "pleasant oasis in the heart of Manhattan" that altered the original buildings but recreated the feel of an Old New York garden. Amster himself was a presence there until he died at age 77 in 1986.
Amster Yard still exists, and it's semi-open to the public. But while today's Amster Yard looks like the courtyard James Amster designed, it's actually a recreation.
In the early 2000s, Amster Yard's new owner, the nonprofit cultural group Cervantes Institute, found that the buildings surrounding the garden were structurally dangerous. The group decided to demolish them, then built reproductions.
Wander into Amster Yard now, and you'll experience an illusion of Amster's buildings, which were recreations of the original dilapidated circa-1870 houses. It's a little convoluted, but the courtyard itself is romantic and delightful, a peaceful respite that blocks the sounds of the modern city.
[Third photo: Wikipedia]
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