Roof gardens from before the twentieth century are an understudied topic in the history of architecture and settlement patterns, urban or suburban. While they had precedents going back to antiquity, gardens on rooftops became a locus of modern utopian aspiration in the 1700s in the West and a broad popular phenomenon in the 1800s, especially in the English-speaking world. Debates about their possibilities in the United States and Great Britain were consistently keyed into larger discussions about the value of urban living and the desirability of escaping dirty, smelly, crowded, chaotic urban streets for more bucolic environs of beauty, order, health, virtue, fecundity, and seclusion. Airy gardens promised, like suburbs, to blossom within easy reach of both a domestic retreat and the socio-economic blessings of the city, providing modern luxury as well as broad vistas and perfect privacy. By the late 1800s, many roof gardens flourished, especially in New York City. The consistent suburban ethos in their description reveals much about city life and the suburban dream as it was then developing; their subsequent disappearance during the rise of the actual twentieth- century suburb is also suggestive of their original intents.