Cannabis Dispensary Kew Gardens

Kew Gardens is a neighborhood in central Queens, in Queens Community District 9, with ZIP code 11415 and a 2020 Census population of 24,371. It is roughly triangular, bounded by Union Turnpike and the Jackie Robinson Parkway to the north, the Van Wyck Expressway and 131st Street to the east, Hillside Avenue to the south, and Park Lane, Abingdon Road, and 118th Street to the west. Its neighbors are Forest Hills to the northwest, Forest Park to the west, Flushing Meadows–Corona Park to the north, Richmond Hill to the south, Briarwood to the southeast, and Kew Gardens Hills to the east. Kew Gardens, west of the Van Wyck Expressway, is a separate neighborhood from Kew Gardens Hills, east of the Van Wyck Expressway.

Kew Gardens was laid out as a planned garden community in the early 1900s on land acquired in 1868 by Englishman Albon P. Man. It was named first “Kew,” then “Kew Gardens,” after London’s Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and English and neo-Tudor architecture still predominates. The opening of the Kew Gardens Long Island Rail Road station in 1910 and the Queens Boulevard subway extension in 1936 turned a quiet residential enclave into a dense, diverse apartment neighborhood anchored by the Lefferts Boulevard commercial strip, home to many airline personnel because of the Q10 bus link to JFK Airport.

The commercial center is Lefferts Boulevard between Austin Street and Metropolitan Avenue. Local businesses and restaurants are also found on Metropolitan Avenue, Austin Street, and Kew Gardens Road, while Queens Boulevard is the civic and commercial spine at the northern end, home to the Queens Borough Hall complex and the subway station, and Union Turnpike forms the northern boundary.

Well-known places in Kew Gardens include:

• The Lefferts Boulevard Bridge, known as the “Ponte Vecchio of Queens,” at the eastern end of the Kew Gardens LIRR station — a 180-foot bridge built in 1910, lined on both sides with one-story commercial buildings housing about 12 businesses. The stores sit on their own two bridges, built in the early 1930s, with the bridge structure running through their roofs and storefronts hung from it; the western facades are neo-Tudor and the eastern facades Art Deco. It is the only bridge in New York City — and likely in the United States — with stores on both sides, and it is described as the heart of the community, repeatedly saved from MTA demolition proposals by residents and politicians.
• The Kew Gardens LIRR station, at Austin Street and Lefferts Boulevard, on the Main Line in the City Terminal Zone, fare zone 1. The current station opened in 1910 on the site of the earlier Hopedale (1875–1884) and Maple Grove (1879–1909) stations.
• Queens Borough Hall, at the northern end on Queens Boulevard, in a complex extending from Union Turnpike to Hoover Avenue, together with a Queens criminal court. The stripped classical, red brick building was built from March to November 1940 and opened on December 4, 1940.
• Kew Gardens Cinemas, a 1930s Art Deco movie theater converted into a six-screen multiplex, on Lefferts Boulevard.
• Kew & Willow Books, on Lefferts Boulevard, described as the only bookstore in central Queens.
• Maple Grove Cemetery, on Kew Gardens Road, opened in 1875; it was the original reason the first railroad stations were built here.
• The First Church of Kew Gardens.
• PS 99, the neighborhood’s only public school, on Kew Gardens Road.
• The Kew Gardens Post Office (Kew Gardens Station), at 83-30 Austin Street.

Forest Park, including the Forest Park Carousel, lies to the west, adjacent to Kew Gardens rather than inside it, and Flushing Meadows–Corona Park is to the north, also outside the neighborhood. The retired R33 “Redbird” subway car formerly displayed beside Borough Hall was closed to visitors in 2015 and sold in 2022, so it is not a current attraction, and the former Civic Virtue statue outside Borough Hall was moved to Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn in 2012.