This is the east side almost nobody walks — the blocks behind Grand Central that slope down to the river, where the city built its diplomats a campus and its families a set of secret gardens. Three kilometres of monumental and quiet, often in the same block.
Start up on Tudor City, the 1920s Gothic enclave on its bluff, built facing inward because the riverfront below was still slaughterhouses. Drop down to the United Nations — the line of flags, Harrison's Secretariat slab, the sculptures of guns tied in knots and swords turned to ploughs — and follow the garden along the East River if the gate's open. Then the surprise: walk back to the Ford Foundation and step into its atrium, a twelve-storey indoor garden under glass, free and nearly always empty.
North into Turtle Bay itself, the brownstone rows where the back gardens were merged into one shared courtyard — Hepburn's old street, leafy and still. End at Greenacre Park, a single lot given over to a wall of falling water loud enough to erase the traffic. Sit a while; the 6 and the E/M are two blocks west.
