37-55 87th Street

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.

1924
C.F. McAvoy designs the house for the Queensboro Corporation's first group of Jackson Heights row houses
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This three-story house went up in 1924 as one of twenty designed by C.F. McAvoy for the Queensboro Corporation on 87th Street's east side, between Roosevelt and 37th avenues. It belongs to the five-house cluster of Nos. 37-49 to 37-57, filed together under permit NB 329-1924. The Landmarks Preservation Commission calls the row the earliest of the many clusters of attached and semi-detached Jackson Heights houses put up in the later 1920s, faced in red brick with white trim and given basement garages reached by a shared rear driveway.
“Built in 1924 to designs by C.F. McAvoy, this group of twenty houses was the first of many similar groups…”
Source: NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission
1924
Queensboro sells the 87th Street row as "English Convertible Garden Homes" that owners could split in two
Queensboro promoted the McAvoy brothers' 1924 houses on 87th Street, this one among them, as "English Convertible Garden Homes": an owner could turn the single-family house into a two-family residence. The twenty houses were set in four freestanding groups of five, a plan the Landmarks Preservation Commission traces to the Garden City movement. Breaking the row into separate clusters let light and air reach the middle of the block, unlike the unbroken street walls of nineteenth-century row houses.
Source: NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission

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