Last Friday, I was walking through a neighborhood with quite a few of these handsome bow-fronted rowhouses.
It was not in upper Manhattan, the south Bronx, Brooklyn, or Hoboken, as you might expect. It was in Queens. More specifically near the Ridgewood/Glendale border, a moderate walk from the Fresh Pond Road station on the M train, which is about as obscure a location as you can find served by the New York subways.
In the 1910s, when few people owned cars, a whole bunch of these houses were constructed in an area that is now notable for being annoying to get to by mass transit. The reason for this was quite simple: there were two now-closed Long Island Railroad stations nearby (Glendale and Fresh Pond) that gave good access to Jamaica and Long Island City (two of three downtown areas in Queens, with Flushing as the third) and to Manhattan and the brand-new Penn Station. Semi-suburban development like high-end rowhouses made sense in a rail-commuter zone.
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