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With its air of medieval mystery, Station Square in Forest Hills Gardens seems more like something out of a dream than the gateway to the most exclusive neighborhood in Queens. The startling Bavarian tower, steeply pitched red-tile roofs, sweeping arcade and brick-paved plaza create a public space that has drawn visitors since the early 1900's, when the square, designed with Tudor touches by the architect Grosvenor Atterbury and Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., the landscape architect, was commissioned by the Russell Sage Foundation as the centerpiece of a model suburb. Forest Hills Gardens has been inhabited from the beginning by discerning buyers of moderate to ample means. It is one of the country's oldest planned communities and the leading American contribution to the Garden Cities movement. The turn-of-the-century movement, inspired by the English visionary Ebenezer Howard, was a humanist reaction to the Industrial Revolution that recoiled from the spread of grid-block tenements in an era when New York City was emerging as a global center. Adherents sought to bring country living to the city while open land still remained. People living in Forest Hills Gardens are still the beneficiaries. From Station Square, where the Long Island Rail Road's architecturally compatible Forest Hills station forms one side, curving streets lined by towering trees sweep past parkside rowhouses and on to elegant, substantial Tudor and Georgian homes painstakingly sited on small lots. Streetlights resembling Old English ornamental lanterns add to the English village atmosphere the founders intended. The Village Green and two small parks, Hawthorne and Olivia, offer open space and relaxation residents. A motif of towers, Tudor half-timbers, extensive brickwork, red-tile roofs, prominent chimneys and off-white stucco walls is maintained throughout. Indeed, exterior changes must be approved by the Forest Hills Gardens Corporation, a property owners' association formed in 1923 to uphold standards set by Atterbury and Olmsted, the son of the landscape architect who designed Central Park. Atterbury designed many of the early homes in the eclectic, Arts and Crafts style popular in the early 20th century. . . . . . Forest Hills Gardens is in a part of Queens once called Whitepot, a name wedded to a yarn about 17th-century English settlers buying the land from Indians for three white clay pots. Some historians say the name is a corruption of Whiteput, with "put" meaning a pit or a hollow in Dutch. In 1906, the Cord Meyer Development Company bought six farms covering 600 acres in what was called the Hopedale area of Whitepot, or Whiteput. Mr. Meyer coined the name Forest Hills in deference to adjacent Forest Park and because the land was higher than surrounding areas. IN the same year, financier and industrialist Russell Sage, a legendary penny-pincher in private life, died at the age of 89, leaving $90 million to his wife, Margaret Olivia Slocum Sage. Mrs. Sage founded the Russell Sage Foundation, which in 1909 bought land from Cord Meyer where Forest Hills Gardens was to be built on a profit-making basis for people of moderate wealth and according to Garden Cities principles. The Gardens was well established by 1917, when former President Theodore Roosevelt gave his "One Hundred Percent American" speech from the steps of the station where railroad service began in 1909. The early rural atmosphere changed in the 20's, when the Garden's popularity brought a rush of new houses. Despite the pace, they were closely regulated by the community corporation. In 1913, the West Side Tennis Club arrived from Manhattan. The club and its 43 courts remain, but the last of the major tennis tournaments departed in 1977 when crowds and traffic outgrew the club's historic stadium and the U.S. Open moved to Flushing. POPULATION: 3,243 (1990 census). AREA: 175 acres. Return to Forest Hills Home Page Click here for To go back. |