Queenswalk: The Homestead Apartments in Beautiful Kew Gardens

Very often we move to cities, towns and neighborhoods that we know nothing about. If we are curious, we often walk around and come up on a building that makes us pause, for one reason or another. It may be sheer beauty or craftsmanship that stops us in our tracks, or the opposite – a building so ugly we can’t believe someone allowed it to be built. But more often than not, we see what is, and wonder who built it, who lived or worked in it, and sometimes we just have to wonder what in the world happened to it. What were they thinking?

Kew Gardens, like many of Queens’ residential enclaves, was the grand idea of a developer.

Between about 1890 and around 1950, seven different planned garden communities were established in Queens by different developers. A very large chunk of real estate in central Queens was purchased by a Manhattan lawyer, a transplanted Englishman named Albon P. Man, way back in 1868. He also developed the community of Hollis Hills, south of here, but held on to what would become Kew Gardens for later. Unfortunately, he died before he could do anything more.

In 1875, a Long Island Railroad station was built near the Maple Grove Cemetery, near this land. It was designed to service the mourners coming to the cemetery. Man’s sons, his heirs, established the Queens Bridge Golf Course south of the railroad, but when the LIRR moved its tracks through the course, they abandoned it. By 1909, the LIRR had a station on Lefferts Boulevard, so Albon Man, Jr. and his brother Aldrick decided to develop a new community on their property, right near the station.

They called it Kew, which was soon switched to Kew Gardens, after the famous botanical gardens in England. They decided their planned community would have mostly Tudor and Old English style architecture, in keeping with both popular architectural trends of the day, as well as an idea of creating an English village in the heart of Queens. Beginning in 1910, they started developing the neighborhood, grading the land, laying down pipes, extending and paving streets and roads. They sold the plots as they improved the infrastructure.

The first multi-unit building to be built in Kew Gardens was constructed on busy Lefferts Boulevard, which was an “Avenue” then. It would be in the heart of Kew Garden’s retail district, and was built to have stores and restaurants on the ground floor, and two floors of apartments above. Like most of Queens, Kew Gardens was designed to be a very suburban, low-density community. Three or four story buildings kept the “village” aspect of this part of the neighborhood intact. Plus it made for a beautiful building.

The building was called the Homestead Apartments. It was built in 1914, and took up the whole part of this block, before the street makes a turn towards the railroad tracks. It was designed in as a storybook rendition of a Tudor manor, with all of the requisite charm.

The building had a stuccoed, half-timbered façade with plenty of picture windows, capped off with steep peaked dormers with circular timber trim and heavily carved bargeboard trim. It was a lovely, long building that filled this corner of Lefferts Blvd. and Cuthbert Road really well. The storefronts on the ground floor were spacious, also with large display windows. Tenants entered the building through several attractive peaked roofed doorways, spaced between the stores.

The Man brothers built about three hundred houses in Kew Gardens, selling them to mostly Manhattanites yearning to get out of the city and into the bucolic ‘burbs, with a reasonable commute. Interestingly enough, that commute was much longer then, as the LIRR took riders to the edge of Queens, at Long Island City, where they had to take a ferry across the river. This was before the subway tunnels were built, which now enable commuters to make a direct trip to Manhattan.

The suburban homes, most of which were in the Tudor or English Medieval style, sold for anywhere from $8,000 to $20,000, in the ‘teens. The neighborhood was surrounded by parkland and cemeteries, both of which added a lot of greenery and open space. Most of the original suburban housing was completed by the 1920s. In conjunction, elegant apartment buildings were also constructed, such as Colonial Hall and Kew Hall, which were both completed by 1922. In the 1920s, the neighborhood was home to Charlie Chaplin, Will Rogers, Dorothy Parker and George Gershwin, and later, the great African American diplomat, Ralphe Bunche.

Transportation spelled the greatest boon to Kew Garden’s appearance today, and it all happened in the 1930s. In 1933, Robert Moses cut the Grand Central Parkway through Queens, from Kew Gardens to Nassau County. In 1935, that roadway was connected to Brooklyn by the Interborough, now the Jackie Robinson Parkway. In 1936, the IND line of the subway was established along Queens Boulevard out to Union Turnpike, and a few months later, to Jamaica. It was now possible to get to Manhattan directly from Kew Gardens, all day, every day, for the price of a five-cent fare.

Kew Gardens began to fill up fast, with more and more larger apartment buildings going up to accommodate the growing numbers of people desiring to move into the neighborhood. The density of the neighborhood changed, and the new apartment buildings got taller. More businesses also joined them, filling the commercial streets, such as Lefferts Boulevard. Many of these new buildings kept with the Tudor theme, but as the 20th century progressed, that theme quickly slipped by the wayside.

Somewhere in the late 1920s, early 30s, the gracious Homestead Apartments changed radically. I was not able to find out if there was a fire, or just a desire of the owners to make some money. The Homestead was actually three buildings sharing party walls. The third building was torn down in order to build the bank building that stands there now. The bank was built around 1930, and is a relatively plain, but classic bank building of that period.

The center building and the corner building remain. In a grand example of how people can destroy old buildings by “modernizing” them, a close look at the center building reveals it is the original Homestead building, with a modern shell. All of the period detail was removed, from roof to cellar. The roofline was streamlined and stuccoed, the windows changed, the half timbering covered over with a plain stucco covering, and the storefront completely modernized.

Only a few sticks of half timbering show around the apartment entrance, but it’s not original, it’s a nod to the original, probably done when the building was modernized, which looks to have been in the 1980s, according to the tax photo shown below. They tried to recreate the Tudor theme in the storefront, but even that disappeared in subsequent renovations.

This might be a good time to point out that Kew Gardens does not have a landmarked district. The only landmarked building in Kew Gardens is the Ralph Bunche House. Let me repeat – the Ralph Bunche House is the only landmarked building in historic and beautiful Kew Gardens. Take a look at the Homestead Apartments, before and after. This is why we need to protect our historic neighborhoods.

GMAP

(Thanks to the Kew Gardens Civic Association’s website, which provided the spectacular “before” pictures of the historic Homestead Apartments.)