The transformation of Jackson Heights

A little over halfway through Frederick Wiseman’s epic cinema verite documentary In Jackson Heights, the cameras focus on a group of Colombian residents glued to a 2014 World Cup soccer match. When the Colombian team wins, the celebration spills into the streets of this Queens neighborhood, where the residents’ joyous shouts are met with stoic silence from the local police.

---

Choosing to document Jackson Heights that summer was a strategic move on Wiseman’s part. As Daniel Dromm, the local City Council member, boasts earlier in the film, there are 167 languages spoken in the neighborhood, and Queens County is among the most diverse areas in the entire United States. For Wiseman, filming in Jackson Heights meant he probably could have picked any of the 32 countries represented in the world’s most popular sporting event and found its fans in this bustling, tight-knit community.

Wiseman’s film reveals many facets of Jackson Heights over its three-hour running time, but one that keeps coming back is the insular nature of the neighborhood. Wiseman doesn’t comment on this—his films have no narration, so he doesn’t comment on anything—but as I watch the movie, I can’t help but think that this sense of isolation is simultaneously one of the area’s chief strengths as well as one of its drawbacks. The more one uncovers about the history of this century-old enclave, the more apparent it becomes that its isolation is entirely by design.

---

In these days of strong party feeling and of keenly-contested social and religious issues, it might perhaps be thought difficult to find a single question having a vital bearing upon national life and well-being on which all persons, no matter of what political party, or of what shade of sociological opinion, would be found to be fully and entirely agreed.

While these words seem like they could be lifted from a contemporary editorial, they were in fact written in 1898 by Ebenezer Howard, the founder of the “Garden City” movement. They are the opening lines of his book To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform, a treatise that extolled the virtues of putting people back in touch with nature while excoriating the depravity of city living. Howard’s critiques focused on “the awfulness of London,” but his principles were no less applicable to the teeming masses of late 19th-century New York City.

To Howard, the Garden City movement was the solution to a problem on which everyone was “fully and entirely agreed”: Crowded cities were detrimental to the health and welfare of their citizens. The “Master-Key,” as Howard saw it, was “to restore the people to the land—that beautiful land of ours, with its canopy of sky, the air that blows upon it, the sun that warms it, the rain and dew that moisten it... [and create] a portal through which, even when scarce ajar, will be seen to pour a flood of light on the problems of intemperance, of excessive toil, of restless anxiety, of grinding poverty….”

Like many utopians, Howard’s ideas were not exactly progressive; he longed for an idealized England as it was before the industrial revolution. But unlike many thinkers whose ideas never made it off the page, Howard immediately set to work creating an actual Garden City. In 1899, he founded the Garden City Association (still going strong today as the Town and Country Planning Association); in turn, the association sponsored a contest to find architects and planners to bring his vision to fruition. In 1904, Barry Parker and Raymond Unwin won the contest and were hired to build the first Garden City in Letchworth, Hertfordshire, about a half-hour north from London by train.

Howard’s vision was not merely to plant a few trees and build a few homes. Instead, as Standish Meacham writes in After the Victorians: Conscience and Public Duty in Modern Britain, he proposed to reform “the system of land tenure” and help develop the “construction of entirely new cities throughout the countryside.” These would be “balanced communities for work and living in which country and city would merge together into a lively unity, as sterile suburbs disappeared along with the class division they encouraged.”

Unwin and Parker’s reality in Letchworth was quaint, but not so egalitarian. As Meacham points out, the town reinforced the social status quo by having “distinctive middle- and working-class neighborhoods.” While there was a strong sense of village unity, it was partially derived from preordained social relationships. Robert Fishman, in Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century: Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, further notes that Unwin’s vision of the Garden City was actually “an implicit critique of the modern quest for change.”

One thing that did unify Letchworth—and reflected the demographics of rural England as a whole—was its whiteness. (Since the United Kingdom did not begin asking about ethnicity on its census until 1991, exact numbers are hard to come by, but today Letchworth is 86 percent white. A century ago, it was likely closer to 100 percent.) While those demographics were typical of the area at the time, they would also prove to be a model for future Garden City developments in England and America.

Letchworth was immediately popular, both for new residents and for the curious gawkers who would come up from London by train to see the utopians in their native environment. In 1906, as Letchworth neared completion, Howard founded the first American branch of the Garden City Association. Howard’s American partners included August Belmont—financier of the IRT subway—Bishop Henry C. Potter of the Episcopal Diocese of New York, and Elgin R.L. Gould, president of the City and Suburban Homes Company. New York’s population had reached nearly 3.5 million by 1900, the result not just of the consolidation of the five boroughs in 1898, but of ever-increasing immigration. For men like Potter (who was concerned about the city’s substandard housing) and Belmont (who had a vested interest in finding ways to expand his underground railway empire), using the Garden City model as a way to create new suburbs for New York seemed logical.

With the opening in 1909 of the Queensboro Bridge—the first roadway to link Manhattan and Queens—this relatively undeveloped borough seemed ripe for development. In fact, the area that would become Jackson Heights was still so rural that Mayor William J. Gaynor could still refer to it as the “cornfields of Queens.” As real estate entrepreneurs began to acquire land across the borough, work began on new suburban communities that embraced Ebenezer Howard’s ideas, such as Forest Hills Gardens—built by architects Grosvenor Atterbury and Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. for the Russell Sage Foundation—and the very first Garden City in America, Jackson Heights.

---

For someone so central to the history of modern Queens, very little has been written about the creator of Jackson Heights, real estate developer Edward A. MacDougall. In 1944, his New York Times obituary noted he was born in Brooklyn, educated in public schools, and, as a young real estate agent, helped develop the Kissena Park section of Flushing. It provided few other details.

Certainly by 1908, MacDougall had the money and clout to begin a massive land grab in Queens. With a group of investors, MacDougall founded the Queensboro Corporation on August 12, 1909—exactly two months after the ceremonial opening of the Queensboro Bridge—to purchase over 300 acres in an area then known as Trains Meadow (perhaps a corruption of “Drains Meadow”) near Jackson Boulevard, which is today called Northern Boulevard.

MacDougall renamed the area Jackson Heights in honor of the boulevard, but while the area was at a slightly higher elevation than nearby East Elmhurst, there were really no heights of note. Instead, he may simply have been hoping to add an aura of exclusivity to the development, evoking the staid grandeur of Brooklyn Heights or, perhaps, the up-and-coming development in Manhattan, Morningside Heights.

Within two years of the Queensboro Corporation’s founding, the first buildings went up in Jackson Heights—a row of houses along 82nd and 83rd Streets—but at this early stage, the development didn’t really conform to any Garden City ideal. Instead, according to author Ines M. Mireyes, the original plan for the area seems to have been merely to build “concrete-slab model homes” in the style of those Thomas Edison had designed for Edison, New Jersey.

Over the next decade, MacDougall’s thinking began to evolve. In 1914, Laurel Court became the neighborhood’s first apartment building complex, one that pointed the way toward the area’s future: low-rise, low-density apartments built to the specifications of the corporation. Major development didn’t really take off in Jackson Heights until 1917, when the elevated IRT Flushing line (today’s 7 train) reached the neighborhood. Through the Queensboro Corporation, MacDougall—who understood that accessible transportation was the key to the area’s success—lobbied to get the stalled subway project off the ground. In 1907, August Belmont had built a tunnel under the East River to carry IRT traffic, but due to an ongoing dispute with the city, the tunnel was boarded up. By 1913, Belmont and the city had patched up their differences, the IRT had sold the tunnel and the right of way to the city, and construction in Queens began in earnest.

MacDougall must have been pleased with the result. On the Flushing line’s opening day, April 21, 1917, the New York Times pointed out that from the new elevated tracks, one could see the “splendid apartment house development of the Queensboro Corporation. The investments here already amount to over $1,500,000, and they will be doubled in a few years.”

The buildings the Times writer saw were likely the work of architect George H. Wells, including Laurel Court and the brand-new Garden Apartments (which coined the term), now known as the Greystones. Soon after the IRT’s opening, the Queensboro Corporation would hire architect Andrew J. Thomas to join Wells as the primary designer for the development, and it was under Thomas’s direction in the 1920s that Jackson Heights grew into a bustling, tight-knit neighborhood.

Thomas—perhaps best known today for his work with John D. Rockefeller Jr. on the Dunbar Apartments in Harlem—was able to both embrace Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City ideals and mold them to fit the needs of an urban neighborhood that was quickly becoming a commuter hub. Thomas was already deeply involved in the movement to rehabilitate the tenements of the Lower East Side, either through renovation or the construction of newer, better homes. For example, as Richard Plunz notes in his History of Housing in New York City, in 1919, Jackson “submitted a proposal to the Housing Committee of the New York State Reconstruction Commission for fourteen U-shaped buildings placed around the perimeter of a 200-by-650-foot block with a large interior garden.” This proposal had the benefit of bringing Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City principles directly into an urban core, while at the same time ensuring “greater construction savings.”

The Queensboro Corporation hired Thomas to build Linden Court in 1919, a transformative moment for the neighborhood. As the Landmarks Preservation Commission pointed out in their neighborhood report, the complex was innovative:

the buildings are grouped into attached pairs; the building wall on the periphery of the block is interrupted at regular intervals by open space. The interior of the block is an undivided landscaped space, held in common by means of easements and deed restrictions for the benefit of the residents. This type of plan creates cross ventilation, increased light, and views from the street to the landscaped garden, and encourages a sense of community.

Unlike Ebenezer Howard, whose Garden Cities removed people from the urban core, Thomas was building a Garden City-within-a-city, to balance the desire for open space with the needs of a New York commuter. The building was an instant hit, and over the next few years Wells and Thomas separately designed Hampton Court, Elm Court, Hawthorne Court, Laburnum Court, Cambridge Court, the Chateau, the Towers, and Spanish Gardens. Wells’s buildings, such as Hampton Court, tended to be more elaborate with grander facades; Thomas’s emphasized interior garden space. As is true with many planned communities, living in Jackson Heights was like being a member of a club—right down to the nine-hole golf course the Queensboro Corporation built for the enjoyment of residents. And like any country club, access to Jackson Heights was limited.

Today, when you walk down the streets of the neighborhood’s historic district, one of the singular features of the area is that the apartment buildings—particularly those by Andrew J. Thomas—seem fortress-like. From time to time, one can glimpse an interior garden through an open portico, but in general the buildings seem unwelcoming to outsiders.

This wasn’t just an architectural feature: Every Queensboro Corporation building had restrictive covenants, too. While Thomas may have had a long involvement in Manhattan and the Bronx with plans to help house working-class residents and immigrants, neither group was welcome to submit applications in Jackson Heights.

As the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development points out in their study of Jackson Heights, the neighborhood “was envisioned as an exclusive suburb for a native, White, middle-class fleeing a city that was not only crowded, but increasingly culturally diverse. Initially advertised as a ‘restricted residential community,’ Jackson Heights’ early developers specifically barred both Jews and Blacks, by custom and restrictive covenants.”

While the authors of the study point to Howard’s Garden City model in England as being “socially inclusive” (in contrast to Jackson Heights), in truth, neither community had that much economic or racial diversity. In Jackson Heights, as in Letchworth, this would continue for decades; in the 1960 census, Jackson Heights remained 98.5 percent white.

Despite these covenants—or, more likely, because of them—Jackson Heights thrived. Though most people associate the term “white flight” with changing urban demographics after World War II, the practice is much older. As early as the 1920s, in Northern cities like New York, as many as three white residents left urban areas for every black person who moved in. Jackson Heights, while technically a part of New York City, was being sold as a suburb—an antidote to urban Manhattan. Some of the first radio spots ever broadcast in America were for the neighborhood’s Hawthorne Court apartments:

Friend, you owe it to yourself and your family to leave the congested city and enjoy what nature intended you to enjoy. Visit our new apartment homes in Hawthorne Court, Jackson Heights, where you may enjoy community life in a friendly environment.

With such an invitation, it’s easy to understand the explosive growth of Jackson Heights. In 1923, only 3,800 residents called the neighborhood home; by 1930, its population was 44,500.

For Edward MacDougall, it was an incredible success, but it wasn’t just the architecture that was drawing people to Queens. In 1919, just as Andrew J. Thomas was working on his first building, the Queensboro Corporation began pushing another innovation by converting nearly all its apartment buildings from rentals to co-ops. The corporation promised current tenants “the opportunity to buy their apartments for $500 down and mortgage payments of about $52 a month.” The Queensboro Corporation stayed on as the managing agent.

Spencer Platt/Getty Images

By 1925, MacDougall was able to boast in advertising materials that Jackson Heights was the “largest community of cooperatively owned garden apartments in the world.”

However, like many residential real estate developments in New York, the further expansion of Jackson Heights was hit hard by the stock market crash in 1929. During the 1930s, the golf course was leveled, and, in its place, the area’s only new major building complex, Thomas’s massive Dunolly Gardens, was built in 1938 to 1939. While the opening of Dunolly Gardens was a sign that Jackson Heights was still a desirable neighborhood, it also marked the beginning of the end of MacDougall’s vision of Jackson Heights.

Even before the Depression, the makeup of the area was slowly changing. A number of Broadway actors and vaudevillians began to call Jackson Heights home, as it was an easy commute straight to Times Square on the 7 train. Many of these new residents happened to be gay, and “with little public notice, Jackson Heights developed into a gay haven—a remarkable contrast to the intolerance toward ethnic and racial minorities in the area.” Other entertainers came to the area as well, including musicians like Les Paul—the guitarist, composer, and inventor—who recorded his hit “How High the Moon” with his wife Mary Ford in their Jackson Heights home studio.

In the 1940s, restrictive covenants that barred people by race or religion were struck down as illegal, and the Jewish population of Jackson Heights slowly began to rise. Chaim Witz—better known as Gene Simmons—moved with his family to the neighborhood in 1949; radio personality Howard Stern was born in Jackson Heights in 1954.

However, as the HUD report also points out, black residents had a hard time renting or buying in the area until the passage of the Fair Housing Act in 1968, and, indeed, the percentage of African Americans in the neighborhood’s population remains low.

Meanwhile, the wholesale rewriting of America’s immigration laws in 1965 meant that many South and Central American immigrants began to reach New York City in the late 1960s, along with South Asian and Chinese immigrants. By 1990, the demographics of the area had shifted such that no group was the majority, and while the sizes of each demographic continue to change, that remains true to this day.

This shift in Jackson Heights’ ethnic makeup stands as a rebuke to MacDougall’s original idea for a whites-only enclave. A century ago, a neighborhood with such massive diversity—halal butchers down the street from Indian restaurants that buy fresh produce from the same vendors as the nearby Peruvian diners—would have seemed like an unlikely place to foster a strong sense of community. Yet in Jackson Heights, that neighborhood pride and investment is definitely there. In 1996, for example, the city tried to solve the issue of the area’s overcrowded schools by busing some students to other neighborhoods; the plan was met with such staunch opposition from residents that the Department of Education backed down. What’s intriguing is that the majority of the “plan opponents were White parents resisting an effort to bus their children into whiter schools.”

It is easy to scoff at planned communities—be it Frank Lloyd Wright’s far-out Broadacre City or the ersatz history glommed onto many New Urbanist gated villages—but Jackson Heights shows that a strong architectural plan can, in fact, shape social interactions. While Edward MacDougall may have envisioned a Garden City in his own image—white, Protestant, and middle class—he built a neighborhood that was able to transform into something more economically and culturally diverse without losing its innate sense of place. One aim of architecture has always been to promote social cohesion—from the temple to the town square—and it’s a testament to MacDougall (and Ebenezer Howard before him) that the Garden City vision continues to work into the 21st century. One might argue that Jackson Heights has social cohesion despite its architecture rather than because of it, but it can’t be denied that a level of activism seems to pervade planned communities in the city, from Stuyvesant Town to Battery Park City to Forest Hills, that belies the stereotypes of New York’s legendary aloofness.

Still, there are reasons not to think everything in Jackson Heights is perfect.

Throughout the three-hour running time of the film Jackson Heights, Frederick Wiseman showcases an array of individuals who exemplify this modern-day Queens neighborhood: three elderly women discussing life at a senior center, a gay support group in a synagogue rec room, Muslim men at prayer, undocumented immigrants telling harrowing stories of coming across the border, community organizers talking to shopkeepers who feel threatened by big-box retailers and the organization of a neighborhood Business Improvement District.

But only once or twice is there a glimpse inside the gardens of any of the original Queensboro Corporation apartment buildings, and that lack of access points to the downside of living in any gated community. While the high walls and lush courtyards of complexes like the Chateau or the Dunolly surely help foster a sense of solidarity among residents, do they also cut them off from genuine interactions with the rest of the neighborhood?

More to the point, as New York continues to change and Jackson Heights enters its second century, will the visions of people like Ebenezer Howard and Edward MacDougall be able to grow with it? The utopian in me hopes that Jackson Heights is the true realization of Howard’s Garden City ideals; the pragmatist wonders if 50 years from now the Jackson Heights Landmark District will be seen as a bizarre relic.

Editor: Sara Polsky