Kip's Bay and Turtle Bay

Area: 27th St. on the south to 59th St. on the north; from 3d Ave. east to East River
(excluding Beekman and Sutton Places).

Kip's Bay-Turtle Bay neighborhood, sometimes known as the mid-town
East Side, is a riverside back yard for the more imposing mid-town section
west of it. Huge industrial enterprises—breweries, laundries, abattoirs,
power plants—along the water front face squalid tenements not far away
from new apartment dwellings attracted to the section by its river view and
its central position. The numerous plants shower this district with the
heaviest sootfall in the city—150 tons to the square mile annually.

The area near Second Avenue and East Thirty-fifth Street was the site of
Jacobus Kip's farm, "a goodly estate, covering one hundred and fifty acres,
and comprising meadow, woodland and stream." It extended eastward to
a bay subsequently named for Kip. In 1655 he built a mansion of im-
ported brick for his young bride, Marie de la Montagne; the house stood
on the farm for almost two hundred years. A sixty-acre tract, one mile
north, was settled in 1677 by the De Voors who called it the Spring Valley
Farm. Through it ran the Saw Kill to a rocky indentation of the East
River. Because of its shape, the indentation was called Turtle Bay.

Important events of the American Revolution took place in this dis-
trict. A British military storehouse at the foot of East Forty-fifth Street was
stormed by the Liberty Boys in a midnight raid in 1773. It was in Kip's
Bay that British men-of-war anchored September 15, 1776, to take over
Manhattan Island. The Revolutionary army, wearied and disheartened after
the disastrous defeat on Long Island, broke before broadsides from these
vessels and fled toward Harlem Heights. George Washington tried to stem
the rout. "It was said that he drew his sword and threatened to run the
cowards through," wrote Rupert Hughes in his biography of Washington,
"he used the cane whip he carried, and he beat his people over the shoul-
ders in an insane hatred of their shameless cowardice. He flogged not only
private soldiers but officers as well. He lashed colonels across the shoul-
der blades . . . He flailed a brigadier general." The next day Washington
succeeded in rallying his troops and defeated the enemy at Harlem Heights.
Before the Battle of Long Island the Americans had thrown up redoubts
at Kip's and Turtle bays, which were subsequently captured, and for the
duration of the war British frigates were stationed there. During the War
of 18r2 the shores were again fortified.

Early in the nineteenth century this region was the site of the country