Current ranking based on review analysis and technical signals.
How we chose: 10 places selected by rating and number of reviews. Source — Google Places. Updated 04 August 2026.
At a glance
| # | Place | Score | Reviews | Stands out for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Flushing Meadows Corona Park | ⭐ 9.3 | 30 255 | Editors' pick |
| 2 | Astoria Park | ⭐ 9.5 | 12 986 | — |
| 3 | Gantry Plaza State Park | ⭐ 9.7 | 10 168 | People's favorite |
| 4 | Forest Park | ⭐ 9.3 | 7 411 | — |
| 5 | Cunningham Park | ⭐ 9.3 | 6 828 | — |
| 6 | Hunter's Point South Park | ⭐ 9.7 | 5 554 | — |
| 7 | Jacob Riis Park (Gateway National Recreation Area) | ⭐ 9.3 | 5 298 | — |
| 8 | Alley Pond Park | ⭐ 9.3 | 4 881 | — |
| 9 | Juniper Valley Park | ⭐ 9.5 | 4 531 | — |
| 10 | Kissena Park | ⭐ 9.3 | 4 425 | — |
Highlights
-
Editors' pick:
Flushing Meadows Corona Park -
People's favorite:
Gantry Plaza State Park
Opening hours
Open late: Gantry Plaza State Park, Hunter's Point South Park, Jacob Riis Park (Gateway National Recreation Area).
Check the hours before you set out — they shift on holidays and out of season.
Full ranking
1. Flushing Meadows Corona Park · ⭐ 9.3
(30255 reviews)
+7 photos
P5R5+2P, Flushing, NY 11354, United States
A stainless-steel globe twelve stories high stands at the center of 897 acres, ringed by fountains and circled by three steel orbits, and almost everything around it was once a promise about the future. This is the ground F. Scott Fitzgerald turned into the "valley of ashes" in The Great Gatsby; the ground Robert Moses buried under lawns and lakes; the ground that staged two Wo…
«As a diehard city dweller, I never knew how to spell the word "park" until I did graduate…»
2. Astoria Park · ⭐ 9.5
(12986 reviews)
+7 photos
19 19th St, Astoria, NY 11105, United States
Sixty acres of lawn and plane trees run down to the East River at its most dangerous point, a tidal strait the Dutch called Hellegat and English speakers turned into Hell Gate. Two of New York's most dramatic bridges frame the park — a red steel railroad arch at the north end, the long span of the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge at the south — and between them sits the largest outdoor…
«Astoria Park is definitely one of the best parks in Queens. The view of Manhattan alone is…»
3. Gantry Plaza State Park · ⭐ 9.7
(10168 reviews)
+7 photos
4-44 47th Rd, Long Island City, NY 11101, United States
Two immense black steel gantries stand at the water's edge in Hunters Point with the words LONG ISLAND lettered in red across their crossbeams, and behind them, close enough to feel like a stage backdrop, the whole of midtown Manhattan. This was a working freight yard where entire railroad cars were floated across the East River on barges; today it is a state park of twelve acr…
«I drove past this park on my way to work in New York. There were a lot of people jogging,…»
4. Forest Park · ⭐ 9.3
(7411 reviews)
+7 photos
P535+M5, Woodhaven, NY 11421, United States
A wooded spine runs across the middle of Queens along a ridge left behind by an ice sheet, and on it stands 543 acres of park with the largest continuous forest in the borough at its heart — roughly 165 acres of oak and hickory, some of it well over 150 years old. Underneath the trees the ground is lumpy and irregular, full of hollows and hummocks, because this is a terminal mo…
«Running through Forest Park as a beginner, I felt like I'd found a hidden refuge right in…»
5. Cunningham Park · ⭐ 9.3
(6828 reviews)
+7 photos
196-10 Union Tpke, Fresh Meadows, NY 11366, United States
Three hundred and fifty-eight acres of oak woods, ballfields and glacial hollows sit in eastern Queens, cut across by expressways and stitched back together by an overpass built for mountain bikers. More than two thirds of Cunningham Park is left wild — forest, vernal pools and kettle depressions on the same moraine that runs the length of Long Island — and threaded through it…
«I've lived near this park for the past six years and I'm still discovering something new e…»
6. Hunter's Point South Park · ⭐ 9.7
(5554 reviews)
+7 photos
Center Blvd, Long Island City, NY 11101, United States
For most of a century this stretch of the Queens shoreline belonged to freight, not to people: a rail depot, a coal yard, a concrete plant, a newspaper printing works, and finally a fenced-off strip of fill where the Manhattan skyline stood just out of reach. Today it is one of the most quietly radical parks in New York — eleven acres of promenade, marsh, lawn and steel that we…
7. Jacob Riis Park (Gateway National Recreation Area) · ⭐ 9.3
(5298 reviews)
+7 photos
1-57 Rockaway Beach Blvd, Rockaway Park, NY 11694, United States
Riis Park is the strangest and most generous beach in New York City: roughly a mile of Atlantic shoreline on the Rockaway peninsula that is not run by the city at all, but by the National Park Service, as part of Gateway National Recreation Area. Behind the sand sits a monumental 1932 bathhouse the size of a city block, a landscaped central mall, a street clock that has kept ti…
8. Alley Pond Park · ⭐ 9.3
(4881 reviews)
+7 photos
Union Tpke, Oakland Gardens, NY 11364, United States
Alley Pond Park is the wild half of Queens. Some 655 acres — the borough's second-largest park — draped across a ridge of glacial debris left when the Laurentide Ice Sheet stalled here roughly 15,000 years ago, then dropped down through oak-hickory forest to a tidal creek and a fringe of salt marsh on Little Neck Bay. Inside it are seven kettle ponds, a spring-fed lake, about 1…
9. Juniper Valley Park · ⭐ 9.5
(4531 reviews)
+7 photos
Juniper Blvd., Lutheran Ave., 71 St, Dry Harbor Rd, Middle Village, NY 11379, United States
There is nothing exotic about Juniper Valley Park at first glance: fifty-five acres of ballfields, courts, a running track and playgrounds in the middle of a quiet Middle Village grid, busy every weekend morning with leagues and dog walkers. What makes it remarkable is what is underneath. This was Juniper Swamp — a hundred acres of cedar bog left by glacial meltwater, where loc…
10. Kissena Park · ⭐ 9.3
(4425 reviews)
+7 photos
Kissena Blvd and, Booth Memorial Ave, Fresh Meadows, NY 11365, United States
Kissena Park is what happens when a nineteenth-century plant nursery is left to grow up into a park. Roughly 235 acres in Flushing, it holds a spring-fed lake named with a Chippewa word, a fourteen-acre grove of exotic trees that a Quaker horticulturist planted in the 1870s and that nobody properly noticed again until 1981, a banked asphalt oval that is the only bicycle racing…
Questions & answers
Which place tops the ranking? Flushing Meadows Corona Park — score 9.3/10 (Editors' pick).
How many places are in the list and how were they chosen? The selection includes 10 places chosen by our editors based on rating and reviews.
What is the average rating in the top? 9.4/10 — average score of 10 places in the list.
Which place has the most reviews? Flushing Meadows Corona Park — 30255 visitor reviews.
See also:
Best flower shops
Sources: Google ratings and reviews, official websites and social media of the places, other open data. Selection and texts by the queens.name editorial team, August 2026.