Tudor houses on curving lanes surround a brick paved station square, with a tennis stadium, a mile of storefronts and apartment towers close by.
What Forest Hills looks like
Forest Hills was farmland until 1906, when the Cord Meyer Development Company bought roughly 600 acres and renamed the area after the neighboring Forest Park. It had been called Whitepot before that. A few years later Cord Meyer sold 142 acres to the Russell Sage Foundation, which hired architect Grosvenor Atterbury and landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. to design a planned suburb called Forest Hills Gardens, with curving streets and every house built of masonry or concrete in a Tudor or Georgian style.
sits at the center of the Gardens, a brick paved plaza finished alongside the Long Island Rail Road station in 1913. Olmsted worked the crossing bars of the Union Jack into the paving pattern, borrowed from the English garden city model. Theodore Roosevelt dedicated the square's flagpole there in 1917, with Helen Keller among the guests. More than 800 houses, townhouses and garden apartment buildings now stand in the Gardens.
The Gardens also drew the West Side Tennis Club, which moved there from Manhattan in 1914 and built its roughly 13,000-seat stadium in 1923. The U.S. National Championships, renamed the U.S. Open, played there from 1915 to 1977. Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel graduated from in 1958 and later played the stadium as Simon and Garfunkel several times between 1966 and 1970, and Simon returned alone in 2016. The Ramones formed in Forest Hills too, and the corner outside their old high school became in 2017. A mural under the Long Island Rail Road underpass near shows the band on one wall and tennis players including John McEnroe on the other.
Away from the Gardens, runs about a mile between Yellowstone Boulevard and . The street has restaurants, chain stores and the independent Cinemart Cinemas. is lined with apartment towers, block after block of them behind a wide roadway. In 2021, an independent film called Mouse shot in Forest Hills and Kew Gardens with an all Queens crew.
Films shot in Forest Hills
Forest Hills has gone in front of cameras many times, sometimes as itself and sometimes dressed as somewhere else. Blue Bloods has shot here, and so have Boardwalk Empire and Elementary. Bradley Cooper filmed two days of Maestro on Summer Street and Seasongood Road in Forest Hills Gardens in 2022. The block was dressed with vintage cars for a story set in the 1930s and 40s.
Strangers on a Train, 1951
Alfred Hitchcock shot a long championship tennis match for the 1951 film Strangers on a Train at the West Side Tennis Club, filming while the actual 1950 Davis Cup finals were being played there. Fifty years later, The Royal Tenenbaums put Luke Wilson's character on the same court for a match of his own.
Zero Hour, 2013
The ABC series Zero Hour filmed at in September 2012, dressing it up as a small town in Germany around 1900 and giving the Jade restaurant a new facade to use as its base of operations. has also stood in for a small German town in the ABC series Quantico, which added Polizei signage and German plated cars in 2016. The plaza has hosted location shoots for Madam Secretary and The Americans as well.
Mildred Pierce, 2011
The HBO miniseries Mildred Pierce used Forest Hills Gardens as a stand-in for old Los Angeles when it filmed there in 2010.
What Forest Hills can double for
Forest Hills can stand in for old Los Angeles in the 1930s and 40s, a small town in Germany and an earlier era of New York.
