Hiking Trails in Queens: Forest Park's Oak Forest Loop

Most New Yorkers picture Queens as a grid of rowhouses and elevated subway tracks, not as the site of the largest contiguous forest inside the five boroughs. Forest Park holds roughly 413 acres of native red and white oak within its 543-acre footprint, spread across a ridge that Frederick Law Olmsted laid out as parkland in the 1890s. The result is a real answer to a phone search for hiking trails near me from Kew Gardens or Woodhaven: an actual forest loop with glacial terrain underfoot, not a green rectangle with a jogging path painted on it.

Ask Karpo which entrance puts you closest to the oak forest loop instead of the golf course side, and how to time the car-free stretch of Forest Park Drive.

Forest Park is a formal NYC Parks complex, catalogued as Park ID Q015, and it sits across four neighborhoods rather than tucked behind one address: Woodhaven, Richmond Hill, Kew Gardens, and Forest Hills all touch its edges. That spread matters for how the park reads on foot. Walk in from one side and you get golf-course open lawn; walk in from another and you drop straight into oak canopy with almost no transition.

The park's trail network is also folded into the Brooklyn-Queens Greenway, a marked route that links parks across both boroughs. That designation is useful in a practical sense: it means the paths inside Forest Park are maintained as connective walking infrastructure, not just internal loops, so a hiker can treat the visit as one leg of a longer, mapped system rather than an isolated stroll.

The terrain is the part visitors underestimate. NYC Parks' own ecological assessment of the site describes kettle holes, knobs, and erratic boulders left behind by glacial activity, features that show up as sudden dips, rises, and stray rock formations scattered through otherwise level-looking woods. Combined with a historic oak forest that includes trees documented at over 150 years old, the ground itself is doing more work than a typical city park path.

The Ridgewood Reservoir area sits inside this same landscape, another physical layer on top of the glacial one. None of this requires technical hiking gear, but it does mean the footing changes more often than a flat greenway path would suggest, and shoes that handle uneven dirt are a better call than anything meant for pavement.

Forest Park does not have one obvious front door. Entrances and access points cluster around Woodhaven Boulevard and Forest Park Drive, Myrtle Avenue, Park Lane South, and the Victory Field/Overlook area, and each one drops a walker into a different part of the terrain described above. Because the layout follows Olmsted's original wandering main drive rather than a grid, the fastest way to avoid backtracking is to pick one entrance, commit to a direction, and use the drive itself as the spine of the walk.

• Myrtle Avenue entrance has restroom access and connects directly to greenway markers
• Woodhaven Boulevard and Forest Park Drive form another primary entrance point
• Victory Field and the Overlook both have nearby restroom facilities
• Q52/Q53 SBS, Q37, and Q55 buses run near the park's edges
• Forest Park Drive is closed to cars between Woodhaven Boulevard and Metropolitan Avenue

The auto-free segment of Forest Park Drive, running between Woodhaven Boulevard and Metropolitan Avenue, is the single most useful fact for anyone treating this as a hike rather than a picnic stop. It gives walkers, and cyclists sharing the same stretch, a continuous car-free corridor through the densest part of the oak forest, which is rare enough inside city limits that it changes the character of the walk. There is no traffic noise competing with birdsong, and no need to dodge crossings mid-route.

Given the kettle holes and boulders noted in the park's terrain, pacing a walk around this drive rather than cutting through unmarked woods is the more sensible approach for anyone unfamiliar with the ground. The drive acts as a reliable backbone; side paths that branch off it can be explored and abandoned without losing the main route back.

The park's history is older than most people assume for a Queens green space. The first parcel was purchased on August 9, 1895, and the city kept acquiring land in 124 separate parcels until the last of 538 acres was secured in 1898. Frederick Law Olmsted conceived the park's design, and the wandering, pastoral shape of the main drive still reflects that original planning rather than any later retrofit.

That makes Forest Park one of New York City's older parks by acquisition date, assembled piece by piece rather than carved from a single estate. Walking the loop today means moving through a landscape whose boundaries were fixed more than a century ago, which is part of why the oak forest inside it has had time to mature into something closer to a real woodland than a planted buffer.

A handful of built and natural landmarks give the loop natural stopping points: Strack Pond, the Seuffert Bandshell, the historic Overlook, Pine Grove, and Oak Ridge all sit along or near the trail system, along with a carousel. The Forest Park Nature Center, by contrast, is currently closed to the public, which is worth knowing before planning a route around it specifically.

Anyone extending the day beyond the park itself can walk toward Forest Hills Gardens, which sits close enough to treat as a natural add-on rather than a separate trip. The pairing works because both places reward slow walking rather than a fixed itinerary.

Forest Park functions as a standard public park with no admission fee for general access, though the golf course inside it runs on separate tee-time booking. There is no single confirmed street address for the whole park; entrances cluster near Woodhaven Boulevard and Forest Park Drive, Myrtle Avenue, and Park Lane South, with restrooms available at the Myrtle Avenue entrance, the visitor center, Victory Field, and near the Overlook. Bus service via the Q52/Q53 Select Bus Service, Q37, and Q55 reaches the park's edges; no single nearest subway stop is confirmed here, so cross-checking a bus-plus-walk route before heading out is the more reliable approach. The Forest Park Nature Center is closed to the public, so it should not be part of any planned stop.

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Ask Karpo which Forest Park entrance lines up best with the bus you're already taking, and whether the car-free stretch of Forest Park Drive is the right spine for the amount of time you have. It's worth confirming which landmarks along the loop, like Strack Pond or the Overlook, are actually reachable from your chosen entrance before setting out.