# Garden City

## New York. Alexander T Stewart, developer. 1869

Much of Garden City's interest lies in the possibility that Ebenezer Howard took its name for his own idealised town plan, but the planning of this suburban town does have other features of interest.¹ Garden City was founded in 1869 by Alexander T Stewart, a New York merchant, on a 7000-acre site in the Hempstead Plains of Long Island for which he paid $385 000 in cash. Stewart, assisted by the architect John Kellum, proposed a model village of 500 acres to provide 'pleasant and reasonable' housing on a rental basis for executives and clerks who worked in his stores and other enterprises. The plan also called for a 30-acre park surrounding a four-storey building designed by Kellum that the Stewarts intended for use as their own house when they visited Garden City, and as a 25-room hotel at other times: the house/hotel and its park were to be the focus of the village. A gridiron plan was adopted for the village, its streets lavishly planted with trees and ornamental bushes in keeping with the idea of a garden city. Stewart built 12 commodious houses for the wealthy families he hoped to attract to Garden City and a number of others to rent at lower rates. Commercial buildings were erected near the railroad right-of-way.

In 1876, as a memorial to her late husband, Mrs Stewart began the construction of Long Island Cathedral, designed by Henry Harrison on a 60-acre parcel near the hotel and park. Despite that grand gesture, as a result of peculiarities in Stewart's will (not to mention the theft of his mortal remains in 1878), Garden City languished until the early 1880s, when it began to flourish as a suburban village. In 1895 McKim, Mead & White remodelled the hotel in an American Adamesque style, compromised four years later by a vast expansion after a fire.

The automobile had a splendid entrance to Garden City: the village was the gateway to the Long Island Motor Parkway, a pleasant road leading eastward which William K Vanderbilt Jr built in 1909-11, and which is generally regarded as the first limited-access highway built for the car. The toll lodge was designed in a French Provincial style by John Russell Pope in 1911.

In 1907 a large tract of the original Stewart holdings was sold to a separate company, which developed what is now known as Garden City Estates. The new community was organised by Cyril E Marshall and Charles Leavitt Jr along lines similar to Garden City. But in order to relieve the 'barren plain of Garden City East, curvilinear streets were introduced into the gridiron plan and Nassau Boulevard was planted with a central mall, a

feature later repeated at an even bolder scale on Stewart Avenue.

In 1910 the publishers Doubleday, Page and Doran purchased 40 acres for use as a printing plant, thereby bringing the village more closely in line with the ideals advocated by Ebenezer Howard and his disciples.¹ The Doubleday plant, christened the Country Life Press, was designed by Kirby & Petit to resemble Hampton Court in England.

The arrival of industry increased the demand for modest houses, resulting in the construction of a number of interesting groupings based on English precedents. Most notable of these is Franklin Court, a row of cottages designed by Ford, Butler & Oliver.² In addition,

the Garden City Company built for rental 25 seven-room workmen's cottages, as well as a tenement building which furnished 'cheaper apartments for laborers'.³

### Notes

1. Mumford states that Ebenezer Howard called the new form of town he was proposing the 'garden city, a name he may have picked up from A T Stewart's Garden City experiment, on Long Island, during the few years he spent in America, though Chicago, which he also knew, had been called, once upon a time, the Garden City'. The Highway and the City, Harcourt Brace & World, New York 1963, p. 63.

2. Harriet Sisson Gillespie, 'An English Cottage Group', House Beautiful 46, August 1919, pp. 74-76. See also Architecture 32, November 1915, pp. 305-306.

3. Garden City, promotional brochure, Garden City Company c. 1910; Avery Library, Columbia University.

1. Illustrated plan, 1895

2. Ford, Butler and Oliver, Franklin Court, c. 1915

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