Jackson Heights has, in recent years, become one of the most multicultural neighborhoods in America, and a hot real-estate market has attracted refugees from the hyper-inflated Brooklyn market.

In 1909 a real-estate concern called the Queensboro Corporation bought up some Queens farmland. The Queensboro Bridge had just opened, and hopes ran high that the IRT would, as it soon did, advance its rapid transit facilities into the area. (The “Corona Line,” later extended to Flushing, opened in 1917.) Jackson Heights became, as it has again become, hot property.

The Queensboro Corporation sought to create a kind of model community of middle-class apartment living, and to that end retained one of its era’s most innovative designers of apartment houses. Andrew J. Thomas was obsessed with creating comely and salubrious high-density housing for the masses. In Jackson Heights he went to town.

Thomas created “garden apartments” – an innocuous-sounding term for what in fact was something very unusual. At a time when tenement laws mandated that apartment buildings occupy no greater than 70% of their lots, Thomas strove for much lower percentages. In one Jackson Heights instance, the Towers (1923-25), on the north side of 34th Avenue between 80th and 81st streets, he achieved a remarkable 25% coverage. His Chateau building (1922) across the avenue comes in at 37%. The typical Park Avenue luxury building uses 70 percent.

But here’s the beautiful part. When we think of such low coverages, we immediately think of high-rise “towers in a park,” and we rightly cringe. Thomas’s genius (it is not too strong a word) was to design buildings that respect the street, and form as fine street walls as on West End Avenue, while providing vast park-like spaces within the block interior.

From the street, Jackson Heights looks and functions like a proper high-density city neighborhood, with all that implies for street liveliness, commercial amenity, and proximity to transit. From the air, the Heights looks like a park. This is the “garden city” modified, modernized, and improved. The interior gardens are priceless amenities, in that they provide all the rooms in all the buildings with light, air, and pleasing outlooks, as well as providing tenants with strolling, sitting, sunning, and mingling places.

But from the street view does Jackson Heights shine? In parts, indeed it does.

Go to Joan of Arc Church on 35th Avenue between 82nd and 83rd Streets. This is one of the finest ecclesiastical complexes in Queens. The Romanesque-style church at the 83rd Street corner bears the surprising date of 1949-50. A Jackson Heights resident named Christian Schlusing designed it. (It belongs to the fascinating postwar mini-revival of Romanesque churches in New York.) At 82nd Street is the 1926 rectory by the excellent Henry V. Murphy.

What’s wondrous is how the church complex works in concert with nearby apartment blocks, like Thomas’s Cedar Court (1924-25), across the avenue between 83rd and 84th streets, to create as distinctive and comforting high-density streetscapes as any to be found in the whole city.