Greystone Apartments

35-16 80th Street | Jackson Heights | built 1918

The city photographed every building for its tax records around 1940 and again in the 1980s. NYC Municipal Archives.

Written with AI from the source each entry cites, then fact-checked.

1916
Queensboro bets on low lot coverage and begins the Greystone row on 80th Street
The Queensboro Corporation's earlier Plymouth Apartments and Willow Court had covered only 58 percent of their lots, against a legal limit of 70 percent, and still turned a profit. Building on that, the company began Wells's Greystone Apartments, this building among them, in 1916. Together with Linden Court, announced in 1917, the Greystones showed that whole-block plans with generous landscaped space could pay.
Source: NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission
1918
Greystone flats get two apartments per floor, each with a kitchen and maids' rooms facing the garden
Wells planned each Greystone building with just two apartments on a floor. Every unit measured two rooms across by two rooms back, with a rear wing reaching into the garden that held the kitchen and maids' quarters, a layout the landmarks report traces to the nineteenth-century rowhouse. Every room looked out either on the tree-lined street or on the planted garden behind.
“The Greystones were planned with only two apartments per floor; each apartment was two rooms wide and two rooms deep…”
Source: NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission

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