During World War II, Walentyna Stocker (1913-2020) was the primary secretary and translator for the Prime Minister of the Polish Government-in-Exile. Walentyna (pronounced “Valentina” in English) translated reports from the Polish Underground State into English which first revealed Nazi atrocities–including the existence of concentration camps in German-occupied Poland–to the United Nations. Walentyna’s translations revealed the humanitarian crisis occurring in Europe to the Allies, putting her at the center of Polish intelligence during the War. Walentyna also kept the Polish resistance alive from abroad, organizing and broadcasting Dawn, a secret radio station to Poland. Her service didn’t end after the War – she joined the Women’s Auxiliary Service in the rank of Second Lieutenant in the Polish Army. In this role, she worked with concentration camp survivors and prisoners-of-war, and was present at the Nuremberg Trials. She was recognized in 2011 with the Medal of Merit for Polish Culture by Poland’s Ministry of Culture and National Heritage and received the Jan Karski Eagle Award in 2016. Her life will be honored with a state funeral in Poland in 2021. A coalition of local activists seeks to honor her life by securing landmark status of her chosen and adopted home of Elmhurst, Queens. Walentyna’s husband Aleksander was a Polish author and reporter. He was living in Paris when Germany invaded Poland, and promptly joined the Polish Army there. When the Nazis captured France, Aleksander concealed his Polish identity and played the role of a Frenchman, as it was known among soldiers that Nazi treatment of Polish partisans was especially brutal. He passed as a French prisoner-of-war and was kept as a slave by a German family until his escape to England in 1942. While Walentyna and Aleksander were in France and later England during the same time, they didn’t meet until they each moved to Buffalo, New York after the War. They married only five months after meeting, and left Buffalo for New York City in 1955. They made their home in Elmhurst (88-28 43rd Avenue) by 1960, and their house was known as the nucleus of the Polish émigré elite in the United States. Walentyna remained here until her death at 107 years old in April 2020. Support the designation the Walentyna Janta-Połczyński house!

Linden Court 37–11 to 37–59 84th Street and 37–12 to 37–60 85th Street Designed by Andrew J. Thomas 1919 Linden Court, the earliest entire-block development in Jackson Heights, is made up of 10 four-story apartment buildings. The buildings are situated back-to-back and have a common interior landscaped yard. These apartments were the model for subsequent block-plan garden apartments in the neighborhood. Linden Court was also the first complex to have parking facilities, which are located in the light-court areas at the rear of the buildings. These Neo- Georgian style apartment buildings feature patterned brickwork, keystones, sun porches, and loggias.

Linden Court, 1920. Linden Court is a complex of 10 four-story apartment buildings constructed in 1919. The earliest entire-block development in Jackson Heights, the complex was developed by the Queensboro Corporation and designed by Andrew J. Thomas, an early advocate of garden apartments. Thomas's design allowed for abundant light and ventilation to each apartments. This was also the first complex in the area to have parking facilities. The Neo- Georgian style apartment buildings were a model for later development in the area and today are part of the Jackson Heights Historic District, designated 1993.

Jackson Heights is an early-20th-century neighborhood in central Queens, composed of low-rise garden apartments and houses as well as institutional and commercial buildings. It was the first and remains the largest garden-apartment community in the United States— the product of both the early 20th-century model tenement and the Garden City movements. Starting in the late 19th century, poor living conditions in city slums resulted in reform efforts to improve urban housing. As a result, light, ventilation and open green space became key pieces in the design of new developments. This is particularly evident in Jackson Heights. Queens grew rapidly in the early 20th century, beginning with the opening of the Queensboro Bridge in 1909 and accelerated by the arrival of the elevated subway in 1917. These transportation routes established fast, direct connections between Jackson Heights and Manhattan and the thriving industrial area of Long Island City. Beginning in 1910 the Queensboro Corporation started developing former farmland into an idyllic residential alternative to crowded Manhat- tan. Development continued until 1950, by which time all of the vacant land in the area was built up. The Queensboro Corporation required that builders and developers not otherwise affiliated with the corporation adhere to strict design requirements. The picturesque residences were designed in Georgian, Tudor, Gothic, Italian Renaissance and Spanish Romanesque styles. Decorative brickwork, loggias and slate roofs are quintessential design elements found in the architecture. Institutional and commercial buildings were produced to match the residential. The continuity of design throughout Jackson Heights is its most defining feature, but the community is home to many other innovations, including some of the first purpose-built cooperatives in New York City for the middle class. The first passenger-operated elevator in the world debuted here in 1922. Most importantly, Jackson Heights was the first community in the United States where green space was provided as part of the architecture—a “garden city.” The development of Jackson Heights reversed many of the traditional architectural and planning concepts of the time. Entire city blocks were designed as a whole, as opposed to developing lots individually. Additionally, only 40% of each block was built up, leaving the remaining 60% for open green space. By contrast, it was commonplace in Manhattan to build as densely as 90% on a block, to reap as much profit as possible. In Jackson Heights, structures were typically built around the perimeter of a city block, and they enclosed landscaped gardens at the center, giving the buildings the name of “garden apartments.” Apartments had views of both the street and the interior courtyard, allowing light and breezes in and creating a sense of openness. Jackson Heights was designated as a New York City historic district in 1993, and an extension of those boundaries, which would meet those of the 1998 National Register Historic District, is currently being sought. This would include buildings that, due to the restrictions placed upon them by the Queensboro Corporation, possess the same quality design, materials and scale of the earliest buildings creating historic Jackson Heights.

The first European settlement in Elmhurst was founded in 1642 at the head of the Maspeth Creek. The town was destroyed due to increasing conflicts between Native Americans and the Dutch, and was replaced in 1652 by a new village located on safer ground inland, at what is now Queens Boulevard and Broadway. The English called the place Middelburgh, since Dutch authorities required a Dutch name, but referred to it as Newtown among themselves, to distinguish it from the old town at Maspeth. The 18th century was a period of prosperity for Newtown Village, population slowly increased and the local economy became more diversified. The proximity to New York allowed for crops to be sold in the open market or traded for manufactured goods, and also provided access to luxury goods and services. The road system was largely created during this time, connecting the outlying hamlets with the churches and town offices at Newtown, giving them access to the mills, the meadows and the shore. During the Revolution, the British Army occupied Newtown. Officers were billeted in the houses and buildings were repurposed for field hospitals, armories and headquarters. After the war, the town recovered gradually, mostly thanks to new practices and technologies in agriculture that boosted the economy. Social change was spurred by the abolition of slavery in New York State in 1827 and a group of newly freed African Americans established the first African Methodist Episcopla (A.ME.) Church and cemetery in the town. In the years before the Civil War, and during the first decade after, Newtown remained largely a one-street town. Although there was some commercial growth, and a new building was erected for the Newtown High school (site 6), attempts to expand the limits of the old village were unsuccessful. This began to change in 1869, when large estates were auctioned. In 1893, the Meyer brothers, led by Cord Meyer Jr., bought over 100 acres of the Samuel Lord estate to develop an ambitious plan for a new suburb northwest of the old Newtown Village. This development was planned to offer amenities rarely present in a rural district, and certainly nowhere else in Queens at the time: paved streets, a water system and private sewers. The project proved to be extremely successful, and the neighborhood became known for its fashionable housing developments and infrastructure. Cord Meyer, Jr. also lobbied to have the name of the village changed to Elmhurst, to avoid any association with the polluted Newtown Creek. The name is said to have been inspired by large, mature American elms that existed along Broadway, particularly in front of St. James Church (site 9a). Despite initial resistance from the townspeople to discard the historic name of the village, in 1896 the Post Office officially changed to Elmhurst. The opening of the subway in 1936 spurred local development which resulted in the destruction of much of the old village’s building stock, most notably the Moore Homestead (site 1). After the Second World War, Elmhurst became a place for architectural innovation. Influenced largely by the New York World’s Fair of 1964, buildings like the Pan American Hotel, the Queens Place Mal, and the former Jamaica Savings Bank branch changed the neighborhood’s landscape. In the 1980s, immigrants from many different countries changed Elmhurst from an almost exclusively white community to the most ethnically diverse neighborhood in the city.

English Garden Homes 33–18 to 33–44 83rd Street Designed by Alfred H. Eccles 1928 Along 83rd Street there are 13 English Garden homes, each three stories high. The houses in the middle have slate mansard roofs, while those on the ends have front facing gabled roofs with side-facing dormers. All of these structures have continuous brick bandcourses under the second-story windows and feature cast-stone window boxes with brick brackets under the first-floor windows.

Elmhurst Baptist Church and rowhouses on Judge Street, 1936. The cobblestone church was built in 1902 and today offers services for the local Burmese and Indonesian communities.

Cambridge Court, 1923. Completed in 1922 to the plans of architect George H. Wells, Cambridge Court is a massive through-block apartment complex. Like many of the apartments constructed in Jackson Heights at the time, this one has a common landscaped garden in the middle of the rows of buildings. Wells worked for the Queensboro Corporation on the development of Jackson Heights, creating at least five such garden apartment complexes. Cambridge Court was the last of his apartment designs for the neighborhood.