Garden City, NY real estate market

Garden City was built on purpose, which makes it unusual on Long Island. In 1869 Alexander Turney Stewart, an Irish born department store millionaire, bought a stretch of the open Hempstead Plains and set out to build a village from nothing: roads, water, and houses laid out before the residents arrived, with his own railroad, the Central Railroad of Long Island, founded just to reach it. It stands as one of the country's earliest fully planned communities. Stewart never saw it finished. He is buried in the Cathedral of the Incarnation, completed in 1885, whose spire still marks the village center.

For its first decades the Garden City Hotel was the center of village life. The 1895 version, designed by McKim, Mead and White, burned in 1899 and was rebuilt; the building standing today went up in 1983 on the same grounds. The village also had a publishing chapter: Doubleday moved its presses to Franklin Avenue in 1910 and got its own train stop, Country Life Press, a name the station carries to this day. And in May 1927 Charles Lindbergh spent his last night before Paris at the hotel, then took off from Roosevelt Field next door.

The village incorporated in 1919 and covers about 5.4 square miles, sitting mainly in the Town of Hempstead with a small northern piece in the Town of North Hempstead, which is worth checking on a listing because permits and services follow the town line. About fifty of the original Stewart era buildings were designated a historic district in 1978. For a buyer that cuts two ways: the older stock carries real character, and anything inside the district can carry landmark rules worth reading before you plan a renovation.