Boulevard Gardens in Woodside

Boulevard Gardens, entered at the NE corner of 54th Street and 31st Avenue, was founded in 1935 as part of the United States’ New Deal initiative. T.H. Engelhardt designed Boulevard Gardens in 1933 in concert with renowned landscape architect C.N. Lowrie for the Cord Meyer Development Corporation, and based on a design Engelhardt developed for Forest Hills Gardens. The complex won an award for architectural merit from the Queens Chamber of Commerce in 1936. Ten six-story buildings comprising 960 apartments occupy approximately two square blocks between 30th and 31st Avenues, Hobart Street and 57th Street, with only about one-quarter of the property taken up by brick and mortar; the remaining property is open space and parkland. It was heralded as a “model village” when it first opened.

The Gardens was founded largely by a Federal loan of $3,450,000 from Queens’ Public Works Administration. In a modern era when “affordable housing” is being given at least some lip service, it’s interesting to note that initial rents at Boulevard Gardens were a mere $11.00 per month per room, with the average family paying between $35 and $50 per month depending on number of rooms in the apartments. An accompanying strip of retail stores were constructed along 31st Avenue in 1935, which remains today. At least at first, Boulevard Gardens management was bound to rent to families not exceeding a certain income threshold, and tenants whose income exceeded five times their annual rental cost were evicted.

Today, Boulevard Gardens is a 960-unit co-op.

At 31st Avenue, 54th Street also intersects Hobart Street, a small piece of the colonial-era Bowery Bay Road, which in the colonial era up to the early 20th Century once ran continuously from Calvary Cemetery north to Bowery Bay, an inlet in the East River just west of LaGuardia Airport. The triangle formed by the three is now Strippoli Triangle, named for Pfc. Joseph Patrick Strippoli (1946-1968) a local soldier killed by a land mine near the Cambodian border with Vietnam.

Jack Hastings Square at 31st Avenue and 55th Street honors a World War II veteran and longtime NYPD detective who after his retirement tended bar at the nearby Garden Grill, and who was well-regarded by local neighbors in the Gardens and the surrounding neighborhood who was murdered in October 1991.