A Success in Community Planning

Recently, Cottage Living magazine named Forest Hills Gardens, in Queens, the best "cottage community" in America. The term cottage is used here as it was by the 19th-century builders of the planned suburban communities near central London, such as St. John's Wood. These, in turn, influenced Ebenezer Howard at the turn of the 20th century, when he theorized about and helped create "garden cities," or self-sufficient, artistically planned communities based on communal ownership of land as an antidote to the wretched industrial cities of the time. Howard's socialistic ideals (which were influenced more by John Ruskin than by Karl Marx) did not, it turned out, have much traction. But the cottages and greenswards of his architects Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker, in places such as Letchworth Garden City and Hampstead Garden Suburb, melted people's hearts.

Forest Hills Gardens was never intended by its builder, the Russell Sage Foundation Homes Company, to be a socialistic garden city, or even a philanthropic endeavor, but rather an experiment in suburb-making that, if it proved successful, would generate a profit for the foundation. To that end, the foundation's Robert Weeks de Forest hired the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. (not to be confused with his father, the co-designer of Central Park) and the architect Grosvenor Atterbury to work it all out, beginning in 1909. What they came up with ranks as one of the great works of urban design of the 20th century.

Visitors to the exhibition "Jane Jacobs and the Future of New York" at the Municipal Art Society of New York will know that Jacobs wrote in harshly critical terms of garden cities, just as she condemned City Beautiful civic centers and the superblocks of Le Corbusier's "radiant city" — "Radiant Garden City Beautiful" she mockingly labeled the lot of them. She deemed these approaches to town planning, each with its moment of historical ascendancy, to be, at core, anti-urban. Each, she said, sought to impose a top-down order on the inviolably organic nature of the modern city.

We can be Jacobsians while also noting — as she herself did down the years — that the successful modern city may comprise a range of urban visions. Forest Hills Gardens is not the West Village, but it is nonetheless magnificent.

The best place to take its measure is in and near Station Square, the gateway to Forest Hills Gardens on Continental Avenue near Austin Street (a block from the F, V, E, and R trains). Here we find Atterbury's beautiful station for the Long Island Rail Road, the old Forest Hills Inn (once a hotel, now apartments), and storefronts circling a central plaza. The vaguely Germanic Arts and Crafts design, with the perfect complement of towers, gables, bay windows, sidewalk arcades, multi-pane windows, tiled roofs, aerial bridges, and stuccoed fronts forms one of the sweetest architectural concoctions in the city.

Atterbury was one of New York's most underrated architects, a top designer of artistic buildings of all kinds in the splendid period of the 1910s and early 1920s, which the historian John Lukacs once called the "breeze of beauty" in American life, not least for the charm and salubriousness of cottage communities such as Forest Hills Gardens.

I do wonder why Station Square's storefronts aren't more successful than they are, and why, for example, a first-rate restaurant can't be there, or a café that spills tables onto the plaza. It's true that mere steps away bustles greater Forest Hills with its intensity of commerce and high-rise buildings resembling parts of the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Still, the Station Square setting beguiles, and I'd be obliged if any reader could tell me why the space appears to have stagnated commercially.

To step from throbbing Continental Avenue with its McDonald's and Duane Reade and Staples ( operating from nicely designed commercial buildings meant to complement the Gardens' design), through the portal of the L.I.R.R. viaduct, thence via Station Square into the verdant wonderland of the Gardens proper has got to be as rich an architectural experience as New York offers. Continue on Continental a short distance and you see right away how Olmsted and Atterbury created a community of mixed housing, with freestanding villas, semi-detached cottages, row houses, and even large apartment buildings, beautifully arrayed along curving paths (intercut with a handful of streets connecting the Gardens to the outlying grid) and grouped around lovely village greens.

Susan Klaus's "A Modern Arcadia" (2002) is a highly readable scholarly book on Forest Hills Gardens, and you can buy a copy at the Barnes & Noble on Austin Street. Greater Forest Hills offers many dining options, but I always return to Nick's, a bright, sleekly designed, and altogether fabulous pizzeria on Ascan Avenue, just off Austin and just steps outside the Gardens.