Forest Park is a park in the New York City borough of Queens. Spanning 543 acres (220 ha), it is the tenth-largest park in New York City and the third-largest in Queens. Acquired between 1895 and 1898, it was originally referred to as Brooklyn Forest Park, since the original owner was the then-independent city of Brooklyn.

The park contains a 165-acre (67 ha) forest. It sits on hills left behind by the Wisconsin glacier and is a haven for native plants and wildlife in the midst of the city's sprawl. In addition to the park's large full-time bird population, migratory birds pass through in the spring and fall.

Several trails are available for area residents and urban day hikers. Other facilities include playgrounds, a carousel, a running track, two dog runs, a pond, tennis courts, basketball courts, baseball fields, a skate park, and a golf course. The park is operated and maintained by the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation.

Approximately 20,000 years ago, the terminal moraine of the receding Wisconsin Glacier that formed Long Island, known as the Harbor Hill Moraine, established a string of hills and kettles through the center of Long Island. The site of Forest Park was part of the ancestral lands of several Native American tribes, specifically the Rockaway, Lenape, and Delaware. The site was settled by Europeans in 1635 when the Dutch West India Company claimed the land. For the next two and a half centuries, the site was occupied by several private landowners.

The development of Forest Park dates to the early 1890s, before the City of Greater New York was created. At the time, the city of Brooklyn and the various towns in Queens County were not yet part of New York City. In early 1892, New York state legislators introduced a bill to create one or more new parks in Kings County (where the city of Brooklyn was located). That May, the New York State Legislature passed Chapter 461 of the Laws of 1892, which authorized the city of Brooklyn to identify sites for new parks. The legislation empowered the Brooklyn government to appoint a commissioner to "select and locate parks in the County of Kings, or adjacent thereto".

James S. T. Stranahan, the onetime president of the Brooklyn Board of Park Commissioners, originally envisioned one large park extending eastward to Jamaica, Queens, and westward to Park Slope, Brooklyn. However, Brooklyn's rapid development made this impossible; the largest remnants of this proposed landscape are Forest Park and the 526-acre (213 ha) Prospect Park in Brooklyn. In conjunction with the park's development, there were also plans to extend Eastern Parkway from central Brooklyn to Highland Park and Forest Park. Although the extension of Eastern Parkway was constructed as far as Highland Park, the section between Highland and Forest parks was not completed because Cypress Hills Cemetery officials would not allow a roadway to be constructed directly across their land.

Brooklyn mayor Charles A. Schieren appointed a committee to obtain sites for new parks. At the time, there were more vacant sites available in Queens County than in Kings County. By November 1894, Brooklyn park commissioner Frank Squier had suggested issuing bonds to buy land in Queens County; a public hearing on the site was hosted the next month. Squier claimed that the new Queens park would cost one-fourth as much as Prospect Park, which had been developed a quarter-century earlier, and that it would be a park "for the poor man". Albert E. Lamb, a lawyer for the Brooklyn Parks Department, said the park was necessary because Brooklyn had very little park land per capita, compared with other cities around the world. After Frederick Law Olmsted's landscape firm Olmsted, Olmsted & Eliot published a report on possible park sites, Schieren's committee recommended in March 1895 that ten parks be developed, including a "forest park for immediate use" in Richmond Hill, Queens, east of Cypress Hills Cemetery. Only the Kings County government could allocate funds for these parks because of a law that prohibited cities in New York state from issuing large amounts of debt to pay for new parks.

In May 1895, Squier submitted a report to the New York Supreme Court, calling for the establishment of four large and six small parks in and around Brooklyn; the largest of these was the 500-acre (200 ha) Forest Park at Richmond Hill. The Forest Park site was selected both because it was near Brooklyn's Eastern District and because it was a forested plateau. At the time, the park's site belonged to either about 60 or more than 100 landowners. One lawyer, Sidney V. Lowell, asked the Supreme Court not to approve the Forest Park site, claiming that the site was unsuitable for park use because it was too close to Brooklyn and Queens' Cemetery Belt. Nonetheless, Supreme Court justice Charles F. Brown approved the report that June, allowing the Kings County treasurer to allocate funds to buy these sites. The Brooklyn Times-Union estimated that it would cost about $1,800 per acre ($4,400/ha) to acquire the parkland.