The neighborhood was the site of the Beekman family mansion, Mount Pleasant, which James Beekman built in 1765. James Beekman was a descendant of
Willem Beekman, for whom Beekman Street and
William Street were named. Willem Beekman came from
Zutphen, Netherlands, to the new colony of New Netherlands and was one of the first influential settlers in the Dutch town of New Amsterdam. The
British made their headquarters in the mansion for a time during the
American Revolutionary War, and
Nathan Hale was tried as a spy in the mansion's
greenhouse and hanged in a nearby
orchard.
George Washington often visited the house during his presidency. The Beekman family lived at Mount Pleasant until a
cholera epidemic forced them to move in 1854, but the home survived until 1874, when it was torn down. Beekman Place was laid out in the 1860s and was initially flanked by four-story brownstone residences. It developed as a residential enclave because the topography was higher compared to the rest of the neighborhood. Samuel W. Dunscombe, who had previously been a minister, owned most land around Beekman Place at the time. James Beekman's family retained ownership of a small strip of land along the
East River waterfront just east of Beekman Place. In 1865, when Beekman sold his family's land, he created a
deed agreement that prohibited any structures on the plot from rising above , the height of Dunscombe's retaining wall just east of Beekman Place. This restriction was meant to preserve views from the new buildings on Beekman Place. With the surge of
immigration from Europe in the late 19th and early 20th century, the
Lower East Side's slums expanded north. The Beekman Place area's well-off residents gave way to impoverished workers employed in the coal yards that lined much of the
East River. Consequently, in 1922, that lot was leased to a group that planned to erect a studio apartment and a parking garage on the site. Only the garage was ultimately built; it was rebuilt in 2000 after having deteriorated. With the construction of the
FDR Drive on the East River in the 1940s, the commercial uses of the waterfront were eliminated, and Beekman Place was isolated from the shoreline proper. The strip of land east of Beekman Place, along the FDR Drive, was opened as a park from 1942 to 1951. That park was renamed the
Peter Detmold Park in 1972, after a cofounder of the
Turtle Bay Association who had been murdered. Developer
William Zeckendorf, who lived in 30 Beekman Place, gave up his land immediately south of the enclave in the mid-20th century to make way for the
headquarters of the United Nations. ==Notable buildings==