The Prettiest Block In New York

Freshly renovated, it tells a story of how our city became what it is.

- Justin Davidson

NEW YORK’S COMELIEST DISTRICTS are mostly the product of accident or repetition. Some are haphazard accumulations of ornate façades that acquired atmosphere over generations of construction, demolition, and rebuilding. Others are uniform chains of brownstones. When a colleague challenged me to pick the prettiest block in New York, my thoughts made a quick tour of all those candidates. I excluded single buildings and hidden courts (they’re not blocks) and evocative remnants of urban grunge (the word pretty doesn’t apply to a brawny old warehouse). I also resisted one of the essentially interchangeable stretches of townhouses that always look as though they’re preening for a film shoot. I was hunting for a spot that deployed beauty with a purpose, that told a specific story, and that aspired to act modern while looking appealingly classic.

Station Square in Forest Hills is both alluring and anomalous— not a block, exactly, but a planned piazza that isn’t even whole-heartedly urban. After years in which scaffolding and orange cones had been shunted from entrance to street and back again, the square has just reopened to pedestrians, renovated and camera ready. (And the neighborhood corporation that manages it is apparently considering keeping car traffic permanently away.) But it is more than a pretty place: It represents an important episode in the story of how New York became modern.

In the early years of the 20th century, when Manhattan was growing taller, vaster, and more crowded by the day, Station Square, the centerpiece of the new outlying development of Forest Hills Gardens, provided a caesura at the end of the day for midtown workers, who could hop off the train and take a deep breath of serenity before walking home. The tightly planned neighborhood is neither pastoral nor quite suburban but an antidote to Manhattan’s dense chaos.