Garden City: Stewart's Folly on the Metoac Plain
Near Jones Beach, New York
The flat grassland stretching across central Long Island was Metoac land, tended for thousands of years before English settlers bought land from local sachems in the mid-sixteen forties. They named it the Hempstead Plains, ran cattle across it, and left it largely open for two centuries. Then in eighteen sixty-nine, department-store magnate Alexander Turney Stewart paid about fifty-five dollars an acre for roughly seven thousand acres of what neighbors called a wasteland.
Critics called it Stewart's Folly. He called it a planned community: wide boulevards, hundreds of elms, a grand hotel, a private railroad to Manhattan. Stewart died before it was fully built, but his widow and heirs carried it forward, and it incorporated as a village in nineteen nineteen.
Garden City became the template America used when it imagined how suburbs ought to look, its orderly geometry rising from a prairie that once rippled unbroken to the sea.
