Named after 90th Street and Elmhurst Avenue; ‘Elmhurst’ means ‘a grove of elms’.
Elmhurst was founded in 1652 as Middleburgh, after the capital of the Dutch province of Zeeland; under the English, from 1664, it became New Town, later Newtown. Cord Meyer proposed the name Elmhurst, adopted in 1897, partly to dissociate the town from the polluted Newtown Creek and partly to celebrate the elm trees that abounded there.