page_title: Fresh Meadows, Queens
section_title: Fresh Meadows housing and retail development
hierarchical_section_title: Fresh Meadows, Queens / History / Fresh Meadows housing and retail development
caption_attribution_description: English: Original picture by Steve Nowotarski, January 2008. View of remnant of Long Island Motor Parkway at Springfield Blvd in Oakland Gardens. Looking East.
context_page_description: Fresh Meadows is a neighborhood in the northeastern section of the New York City borough of Queens. Fresh Meadows used to be part of the broader town of Flushing and is bordered to the north by the Horace Harding Expressway; to the west by Pomonok, St. John's University and the sub-neighborhoods of Hillcrest and Utopia; to the east by Cunningham Park and the Clearview Expressway; and to the south by the Grand Central Parkway.
  Fresh Meadows is located in Queens Community District 8 and its ZIP Codes are 11365 and 11366. It is patrolled by the New York City Police Department's 107th Precinct. Politically, Fresh Meadows is represented by the New York City Council's 23rd and 24th Districts.
context_section_description: In February 1946, the golf course's land was sold to New York Life Insurance Company for $1,075,000, equivalent to $14,100,000 in 2019, in order to build a housing complex on the land. The Gross-Morton Company had also made an offer to buy the land, but it was not accepted. The New York Life Insurance Company chose Ralph Thomas Walker as the chief designer, and it signed a contract with the George A. Fuller Company, which had built the Flat Iron Building, to construct the apartment buildings. Construction cost the New York Life Insurance Company $35,000,000, equivalent to $459,000,000 in 2019.
  New York Life Insurance Company donated land on 69th Avenue at 195th Street to the city so it could build a school. In 1947, the New York City Board of Education awarded contracts of over $1,800,000, equivalent to $20,600,000 in 2019, to construct P.S. 26, an elementary school with a capacity of 1,494 students. On April 21, 1947, ground was broken for the school's construction. The school, P.S. 26, also known as the Rufus King School, opened in February 1949. P.S. 173 opened soon afterwards, in September 1949, at 69th Avenue and Fresh Meadows Lane. P.S. 173 was originally supposed to be built on the site of Utopia Playground one block west, but the school had been relocated due to opposition from Robert Moses, the New York City parks commissioner.
  
  The first twenty families moved into the Fresh Meadows Housing Development on September 2, 1947. As a result of housing segregation, New York Life Insurance Company did not allow black individuals to live in the Fresh Meadows Housing Development. It was also built to house local World War II veterans.  The complex and its eponymous shopping center were among the first in the United States designed primarily to accommodate automobile traffic rather than pedestrian traffic. Apartment rents were between $74 and $108 per month, which included gas and electricity. In 1949, architectural critic Lewis Mumford described the Fresh Meadows housing complex as "perhaps the most positive and exhilarating example of large-scale community planning in this country." The construction of the final residential building, a 20-story apartment building at 67th Avenue and 192th Street, was completed and ready for occupancy in May 1962. At the time the building's construction ended, 11,000 people were living in the Fresh Meadows Housing Development.
  New York Life Insurance Company built a 12-acre shopping center on 188th Street at Horace Harding Expressway. The shopping center was planned to include a Bloomingdale's, a movie theater, Canterbury Shops clothing store, Mary Lewis, Ormond Hosiery Shop, Woolworth's, Miles Shows, Buster Brown children's shoes, Selby women's shoes, Food Fair, a Horn & Hardart automat, Whelan's Drugs, Fanny Farmer, Union News, Womrath's Book Shop, Barrett Nephews dry cleaners, and Harris Brothers delicatessen, a Bank of Manhattan, a Jamaica Savings Bank, and a post office. Bloomingdale's opened on May 24, 1949. Century Meadows Theatre opened November 1949. In 1973, Bloomingdale's added a three-level extension to the store, on what had been a pedestrian plaza. Five 36-year-old oak trees were uprooted to construct the extension, to the dismay of nearby residents.
  The QM1 express bus to Manhattan started operating in 1968 as part of a 90-day trial run proposed by city traffic commissioner Henry A. Barnes, transportation administrator Arthur A. Palmer, and the New York Life Insurance Company. This service was eventually kept, and it was expanded in 1970 with branches running further east into Queens. The combined QM1/QM1A service eventually became among the busiest privately operated express routes in the city by the 2000s.
  In 1972, Harry B. Helmsley and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation partnered to buy the Fresh Meadows housing and retail complex for $53,000,0000, equivalent to $323,900,000 in 2019, from the New York Life Insurance Company. The MacArthur Foundation acquired the property outright in 1995. In 1997, Witkoff Group and Insignia Financial Group bought the resid
caption: Remnant of Long Island Motor Parkway c. 2008 at Springfield Boulevard in nearby Oakland Gardens
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