THE United Nations vividly altered Turtle Bay’s shoreline in the 1940s, replacing slaughterhouses and rotting piers with its six-block limestone-and-glass campus. Like the republics, kingdoms and nations represented within its walls, Turtle Bay is a loose group of enclaves. Micro-neighborhoods scattered along Midtown Manhattan’s eastern fringe, they have boundaries drawn by developers, brokers and block associations.
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But it was the broader neighborhood that took a blow earlier this month, when a construction crane toppled from a site on 51st Street, just off Second Avenue, killing seven people and destroying buildings.
The outpouring of empathy and support from those who live throughout Turtle Bay’s 70 blocks was widespread and heartfelt.
Cynthia Fields was in Florida when the accident occurred. After returning to discover her street barricaded, she instinctively headed to Deux Amis, a restaurant on East 51st that became a gathering spot for those displaced from 300 apartments in 17 buildings.
Inside, “everybody was hugging each other in a scene reminiscent of 9/11,” Ms. Fields said. “This is a very friendly, loving and homey neighborhood, where people are concerned about each other.”
The restaurant, too, holds a special place in her heart. She was dining there six years ago, during a city outing from suburban Mountainside, N.J., when she peered out the window and discovered her current address. Called the Beekman Regent, it is a 19-story condominium housed in an 1892 school building.
In November, Ms. Fields and her husband, Larry, moved within the building. They traded a one-bedroom with 880 square feet and one and a half baths, for a three-bedroom with 1,780 square feet and three baths, and “more than a peek-a-boo view of the river,” said Ms. Field, who declined to say what they had paid.
In addition to raising concerns citywide about construction safety, the crane accident has crystallized fears in Turtle Bay that the historically low-rise neighborhood might be adding too many out-of-scale structures.
“They create bad wind tunnels, and they’re just not civilized,” said Buddy Radisch, a 38-year resident.
In 1970, he said, his 1,200-square-foot one-bedroom co-op cost $40,000; based on list prices in his building, it could probably fetch at least $1 million today.
But at street level, at least, Turtle Bay is a safe place, according to Mr. Radisch, who said he founded the Beekman Place Association in 1980 after a mugger tried to steal a diamond ring from a woman getting out of a taxi.
Despite such incidents back then, he said, “we never went through an undesirable phase.”
WHAT YOU’LL FIND
Turtle Bay’s federation of enclaves includes some oases: Climb 42 granite steps from First Avenue and 43rd Street to the elevated, compact Tudor City complex, where 11 tall co-ops, with terra cotta centaurs, crowns and rosettes across their facades, surround two verdant parks.
Then there is Beekman Place, also just a few blocks long. Its prewar co-ops nuzzle town houses with dormered windows jutting from their top floors. Many of the cars lining the curbs have diplomatic plates.
Foreign governments have snapped up many properties in Turtle Bay through the years, as outposts for their United Nations missions. Flags indicate their presence, though identifying them may require reading a name plate. (For the record, the red, white and black flag on a Beaux-Arts row house on East 51st Street is Yemen’s.)
Quiet elegance also rules along Sutton Place, in Turtle Bay’s northeastern corner, where some buildings have wooden shutters, and others have porte-cocheres, while the impressive One Sutton Place South has lush lawns.
Near Second Avenue, there are condominiums with tinted glass walls — cousins to the commercial high-rises crowding Third and Lexington Avenues. In fact, two of Midtown’s more recognizable skyscrapers — the Chrysler Building and the Citigroup Center with its beveled roof — guard the neighborhood’s edge.
Such structures dwarf the 19th-century clapboard homes at 312 and 314 East 53rd Street, as well as the earth-toned row houses lining East 48th and 49th Streets, in the Turtle Bay Gardens Historic District.
Still, by now the neighborhood is long used to residential towers. It was in the 1960s that 860 and 870 United Nations Plaza went up on East 49th Street. And the Trump World Tower, whose silhouette mimics the United Nations Secretariat building’s clean lines, though not its scale, rose earlier this decade.