Woodhaven Boulevard is named after the neighbouring Queens community of Woodhaven.
Laid out in 1668 as South Meadow Road, it became Trotting Course Lane around the 1850s, after Woodhaven's racetracks, then Flushing Avenue in 1889. Another road shared that name, so it became Woodhaven Avenue, later Woodhaven Boulevard. The station opened in 1936 as Woodhaven Boulevard–Slattery Plaza, after Colonel John R. Slattery, a senior engineer of the city's Board of Transportation, who died in 1932.