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.