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Neighborhood · Queens

Fresh Meadows & Utopia

Fresh Meadows and Utopia sit in northeast-central Queens, south of the Horace Harding Expressway, with Cunningham Park along the eastern side and 188th Street as a main road. The area is largely low-rise: about 80% of residential lots in PLUTO data hold one-family houses, while garden-apartment complexes add most of the rest of the roughly 8,100 homes. The best known is the Fresh Meadows housing development built by New York Life Insurance Company on a former golf course, where the first families moved in in September 1947. There is no subway station here; local buses such as the Q17, Q30, Q31 and Q88 connect to the E, F and 7 trains. Utopia Playground was built in the early 1940s on the site of the old Black Stump School.

Fresh Meadows & Utopia has 1,136 open HPD housing violations, 193 of them Class C (immediately hazardous). Inspectors issued 801 new violations here in the last 12 months. That's the 55th most open violations of 60 neighborhoods in Queens.

Check a building in Queens

Open HPD violations
1,136
193 Class C
New violations, last 12 months
801
174 Class C · 42nd in Queens
How serious are the open violations?
Open HPD violations by class
Class C193 · 17%Class B509 · 45%Class A434 · 38%Class A here includes a small number of Class I orders.

Source: NYC HPD Housing Maintenance Code Violations · data as of Oct 15, 2026

New violations in the last 12 months
By class
  • Class C · immediately hazardous174
  • Class B · hazardous206
  • Class A · non-hazardous350

Source: NYC HPD Housing Maintenance Code Violations · data as of Oct 15, 2026

Good to know

  • No subway station; buses link to Jamaica, Flushing and Kew Gardens–Union Tpke
  • About 80% of residential lots are one-family houses (PLUTO 26v2)
  • Fresh Meadows development: first residents moved in September 1947
  • Parks include Utopia Playground and part of Kissena Corridor Park; Cunningham Park borders the east side

Before you rent or buy here

Check the buildingLook up any address for violations, complaints and owner.Read the violation classesWhat A, B and C mean and how fast owners must fix them.Work out your budgetThe 40× income rule most NYC landlords use.

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Fact-checked October 12, 2026

Verified: Horace Harding Expressway north and Cunningham Park east (Wikipedia and NTA adjacency); New York Life bought the golf course in 1946 and the first families moved in on September 2, 1947; Black Stump School remains were demolished in 1941 to build Utopia Playground; Q17, Q30, Q31, Q88 listed in Wikipedia's bus section. PLUTO 26v2: 80.1% of residential lots one-family; 8,134 units, with walk-up and elevator buildings holding about half. No subway or LIRR station within 800 m. Utopia Playground (3.0 ac) inside; about 44% of Kissena Corridor Park (45.9-ac parcel) inside. Re-checked 2026-10-12: housing shares recomputed from PLUTO 26v2 (version confirmed via the API) by point-in-polygon against the 2020 NTA boundary (9nt8-h7nd); subway/LIRR stations re-placed from MTA station coordinates (39hk-dx4f, wxmd-5cpm); park names and acreage re-checked in NYC Parks Properties (enfh-gkve); history and boundary statements re-read in the cited Wikipedia articles; landmark addresses geocoded with NYC Planning GeoSearch.

Sources

  1. Fresh Meadows, Queens (Wikipedia) · Wikipedia (accessed October 12, 2026)
  2. Primary Land Use Tax Lot Output (PLUTO), version 26v2 · NYC Department of City Planning (accessed October 12, 2026)
  3. NYC Parks Properties (park names, acreage and boundaries) · NYC Department of Parks & Recreation (accessed October 12, 2026)

General information, not legal, tax or financial advice. Rules change; confirm with the agency or a professional before you act.

“Open” counts every HPD violation not yet recorded as corrected, including old ones owners never certified, so totals can exceed the number of apartments. Statistics: NYC Open Data (HPD violations, 311 service requests, DCP PLUTO) and rent-stabilized counts from DOF tax bills (via JustFix), updated Oct 15, 2026. Heat season runs October 1 to May 31; season-to-date counts compare the same dates.