Kew Gardens

Welcome to Kew Gardens! Kew Gardens was developed as a planned garden community, one of the first planned in the United States. Unlike suburbs after World War II, garden suburbs were designed so mass transit, and goods and services could be reached on foot. This allowed Kew Gardens to be an urban neighborhood with an open feel, and encouraged the mixing of different peoples and the chance encounters that make a city a city.¹

Queens Boulevard

The construction of the subway along Queens Boulevard transformed Kew Gardens from a residential community consisting of single-family homes to a dense, more active, neighborhood with a mix of single-family homes and apartments. The construction of the subway also drastically increased property values in the neighborhood.²

Along Queens Boulevard, the neighborhood is home to Queens Borough Hall, where the Queens Borough President works, and the courts. This area is very busy and has business catering to commuters heading to and from the subway, and has some chain stores. This area is very loud being located at the large, busy and dangerous intersection of Union Turnpike and Queens Boulevard, under which the Jackie Robinson Parkway and some lanes of Union Turnpike pass to get to the Kew Gardens Interchange, a sprawling and seemingly always under construction junction between the Jackie, the Grand Central Parkway and the Van Wyck Expressway.

Residential areas

Once you walk away from the subway at busy Queens Boulevard, you find a quiet neighborhood consisting of tree-lined streets, beautiful Tudor style single-family homes and apartment buildings. The neighborhood, as described by Barry Lewis, who wrote a book on the neighborhood, called it an “Urban Village in the Big City.”

Business Corridor – Downtown

Uniqueness

It is not just the clogged freeways and increased pollution that have given a sour taste to the American dream; it is also the growing alienation of a suburban society that lives entirely in its “bubble,” the automobile.

Life-in-the-car guarantees our insularity, but by living in our vehicular bubbles we are becoming a nation increasingly isolated from one another and, with that isolation, perhaps increasingly intolerant. It’s a situation that calls for an alternative, one already given form by 1990’s planners… [They have created] an alternative which has drawn the admiration and the praise of designers and city planners across the country. Yet these new communities are in fact an updated version of the garden suburbs of the early 20th century. For the “garden suburb” is an idea whose time has come back.

Barry Lewis, in the Epilogue, restated it, but more precisely, and says something that should be considered by planners across the United States-especially now given that our suburban lifestyle has played a major part in causing climate change:⁴

Kew Gardens gives us planning principles and architectural solutions for an urban community including single family homes, high rise towers, retail complexes and public buildings that can still tell us something for our present age. It shows us that the American belief in living close to nature is not incompatible with city living and mass transit. It tells us that we don’t have to pave over half of the country and that we don’t have to consider the steering wheel our fifth limb simply to “pursue our happiness.”

What the residents have to say:

For a more personal perspective of the neighborhood of Kew Gardens, ask the residents!  

We first spoke to seven-year resident and longtime city commuter Steve Block about his relationship with the Queens neighborhood. He and his wife had first been charmed by Kew Gardens as they saw it “out the window of the train as we went in and out the island.”  He described that they had turned to each other and thought: “That’s cute, maybe we should go up there.” While he could not afford to live in the neighborhood forever as his rent had gone up and as he need more space so he could start his family. He said that it had “only mansions” and “no starter homes,” it was very clear that the community that harbored his current train station still had a near place in his heart. He passes through the neighborhood on his 10 minute walk to the LIRR station.

A similar perspective could be found by our second interviewee, a two-year resident, Vicky.  She was also enamored of the neighborhood’s family feel, which had been protected by the dutiful Community Board.  Not only did the town have easy access to transportation, from the LIRR stop to the Metropolitan Avenue and Lefferts Boulevard bus stop where we had interviewed her.  She spoke fondly of the large Tudor homes and the wonderful suburban feel amidst a city. Perhaps it can all be best captured by her declaration: “It’s like a time capsule.”