Turtle Bay
The British forces landed, on the day of the stop at the Murray House, in Turtle Bay, that portion of the East River between Forty-sixth and Forty-seventh Streets. It was a safe harbor and a convenient one. Overlooking the bay, on a great bluff at the present Forty-first Street, was the summer home of Francis Bayard Winthrop. He owned the Turtle Bay Farm. The bluff is there yet, and subsequent cutting through of the streets has left it in appearance like a small mountain peak. Winthrop's house is gone, and in its place is Corcoran's Roost, far up on the height, whose grim wall of stone on the Fortieth Street side at First Avenue became in modern times the trysting-place for members of the "Rag Gang."
The Elgin Garden
Forty-seventh and Forty-ninth Streets, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, enclose the tract formerly known as the Elgin Garden. This was a botanical garden founded by David Hosack, M. D., in 1801, when he was Professor of Botany in Columbia College. In 1814 the land was purchased by the State from Dr. Hosack and given to Columbia College, in consideration of lands which had been owned by the College but ceded to New Hampshire after the settlement of the boundary dispute. The ground is still owned by Columbia University.
The block east of Madison Avenue, between Forty-ninth and Fiftieth Streets, was occupied in 1857 by Columbia College, when the latter moved from its down-town site at Church and Murray Streets. The College occupied the building which had been erected in 1817 by the founders of the Institute for the Instruction of the Deaf and Dumb—the first asylum for mutes in the United States. The original intention had been to erect the college buildings on a portion of the Elgin Garden property, but the expense involved was found to be too great. The asylum property, consisting of twenty lots and the buildings, was purchased in 1856. Subsequently the remainder of the block was also bought up.
St. Patrick's Cathedral
At Fiftieth Street and Fifth Avenue is St. Patrick's Cathedral, the cornerstone of which was laid in 1858. The entire block on which it stands was, the preceding year, given to the Roman Catholics for a nominal sum—one dollar—by the city.
The Roman Catholic Orphan Asylum in the adjoining block, on Fifth Avenue, between Fifty-first and Fifty-second Streets, was organized in 1825, but not incorporated until 1852, when the present buildings were erected.
