Alexander Turney Stewart paid $55 an acre for land that most Long Islanders considered worthless. That gamble turned into Garden City.
Stewart was born in Ireland in 1803 and arrived in New York in 1818 with the kind of ambition that doesn’t sit still. By the time he died, the New York Times estimated his net worth at between $40 million and $50 million, built on a retail empire that rewired how Americans thought about shopping. What the Times missed, according to Long Island Press, was the real estate.
His department store, A.T. Stewart & Co., was itself a machine built on cutting out the middleman. Instead of buying through third-party distributors, Stewart had goods shipped directly to his stores, which let him set fixed minimum prices and pass savings to customers. He pushed cash over credit, advertising “great reduction in prices for cash” on everything in the store. It sounds obvious now. In the mid-1800s, it was revolutionary.
The model worked. Stores followed in Philadelphia, Boston, Manchester, and Paris. Stewart then reached rural customers with a mail-order catalog that, within a decade, laid the groundwork for Sears to do the same thing at scale.
He didn’t stop at retail. To eliminate suppliers he didn’t trust, Stewart built his own production network: a linen mill in Belfast, a silk mill in Lyons, a carpet mill in Connecticut, a lace factory in Nottingham, and multiple factories across New York City. That global footprint caught the attention of Ulysses Grant, who appointed Stewart Secretary of the Treasury in 1869.
He turned the job down.
What Stewart chose instead was land. Specifically, the Hempstead Plains, a flat, treeless expanse in Nassau County that had served as cattle grazing territory for more than two centuries. Most locals wrote it off as a wasteland. Stewart saw something they didn’t: the train lines going up in neighboring areas would put this empty acreage roughly 40 minutes from Manhattan.
In September 1869, he bought 7,170 acres of the plains for $394,350. That’s $55 per acre. Critics called it a foolish purchase, a man of great business sense making his first great mistake.
They were wrong.
Stewart’s vision was a planned community, one of the first of its kind in the country, where design and infrastructure came before residents rather than scrambling to catch up with them. The treeless plains he’d bought would become streets, parks, and homes built to a coherent standard. He wasn’t just selling houses. He was building a place from scratch with a specific kind of life in mind.
The ambition was staggering when you hold it against the landscape he started with. Ten thousand acres of open Nassau County flatland, no shade, no infrastructure, no reason on paper for anyone to want to live there. Stewart’s bet was that proximity to the city and the promise of the train would be enough to attract residents who wanted space without sacrificing access.
He didn’t live to see it fully realized. Stewart died in 1876, seven years after he bought the land, and the village incorporated after his death. But the bones of what he built, the grid of wide streets, the deliberate spacing, the whole premise that a community could be designed rather than simply accumulated, survived him.
Garden City today is one of Nassau County’s most sought-after addresses. Median home prices have pushed well past $1 million. The school district draws consistent praise. The Cathedral of the Incarnation, the Garden City Hotel, the tree-lined blocks that somehow feel both planned and organic: none of it happened by accident.
Stewart’s retail innovations fed his fortune, and his fortune funded the land purchase, and the land purchase produced one of Long Island’s most enduring communities. The chain of cause and effect is almost too clean.
“He saw its greatest value in its proximity to Manhattan,” the source material notes, a read of the plains that every skeptic in 1869 missed entirely.
The 7,170 acres he bought for less than $400,000 are now among the most expensive real estate in New York State. Not bad for a wasteland.