Forest Hills Gardens: Lenape Land to a Widow's Utopia

Queens was Lenape land, part of Lenapehoking, the territory that ran from the Delaware River to the Hudson and beyond. The Lenape fished and farmed these Long Island plains for thousands of years before Dutch traders arrived in the sixteen twenties. The area around here was known in the colonial era as Whitepot, a rural settlement where the land was said to have been purchased from the Lenape for three white clay pots, though historians debate the name's origin.

For two centuries this remained farmland, then scraggly fields. In nineteen oh six, the Cord Meyer Development Company bought six hundred acres and renamed the area Forest Hills after nearby Forest Park. A few years later, Margaret Olivia Slocum Sage, widow of the railroad financier Russell Sage, acquired about one hundred forty-two acres from Cord Meyer with a different kind of ambition: to demonstrate that a working-class community could be beautiful by design.

Through the Russell Sage Foundation, she commissioned Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. and architect Grosvenor Atterbury to plan Forest Hills Gardens. Opened in nineteen oh nine, it introduced winding streets, a central station square, Tudor-style housing, and common green space to Queens. It became one of the most influential planned communities in the country and an early argument that civic design was a form of social good.