Excerpt from Newsday, "A Modern Arcadia"

From Newsday, Sunday May 19, 2002

How the Gardens Grew
by Sorah Shapiro

Strict rules about parking and home improvement are just a few details that set Forest Hills Gardens apart.

It may be one of the city's best-kept secrets that only 15 minutes from booming Broadway lies a sleepy hollow where little is heard but the song of a bird and the sigh of an aged-birch.

Fondly referred to as the "modem Garden of Eden," Forest Hills Gardens is a serene community that has retained its Old World charm in the shadow of New World chic.

Purchased in 1909 for $6,000 per acre (well over $100,000 per acre in today's dollars), the 142-acre tract resembles medieval college towns as well as English and European garden cities. Its entrance square, towers, architecture and lampposts, and its lawns and gardens flowing into public areas, are but a few of the attributes that attest to its abiding antiquity, originality and continuity. (The neighborhood is, in fact, so flush with greenery that one fails to see the forest hills for the trees.)

"Forest Hills Gardens is an extremely rare example of a suburb that's as intact now as when it was built almost a hundred years ago. It hasn't been bulldozed for a bunch of little houses and still remains a thriving, desirable place to live," said Susan Klaus, 57, an independent urban historian in Washington, D.C., and author of "A Modern Arcadia: Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. and the Plan for Forest Hills Gardens" (University of Massachusetts Press).

Except for a few stores and professional offices, and its 13,500-seat West Side Tennis Club, which once hosted the U.S. Open, the floral enclave is still as quaint and quiet as it was in its genesis, even though it has grown to include 880 houses and at least 10 apartment buildings. Formerly home to celebrities such as Dale Carnegie and actress Thelma Ritter, and now Geraldine Ferraro, the Gardens is a top choice for prospective homeowners willing to pony up from $500,000 to $3 million for a one- or two-family home.

Betty Pretlow Seeler, 75, is a lifelong Gardens resident. "There aren't any other communities like this," she said. "We have the sophistication of the city and the beauty of the country all in one, and we have a cross section of the world." (The population of 6,000 is multi-ethnic and upper-middle class.) Seeler estimates that her huge house, with its walled garden, driveway and two-car garage, may be worth $2 million today -- a far cry from the $3,000 to $8,000 those homes drew in the early 1900s.

Another longtime resident, Floyd Hasselriis, 79, a retired mechanical engineer, said, "We're not accustomed to seeing a community that was deliberately planned to be this beautiful in terms of placement of trees and kinds of trees and winding streets and so forth. the rest of the city, with its rows and rows of almost identical houses and straight streets, just happened. Those weren't deliberately designed like ours was."

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