About this listing
Neighborhood designed with "garden city" plan
Place Details
Borough : Queens
Neighborhood : Sunnyside Gardens
Place Matters Profile
By Angela Starita
Sunnyside Gardens is the first garden community in the United States, a forebear of such places as Radburn, New Jersey. Located in Queens and built in the 1920s, it sought to introduce a new form for urban living, one that emphasized communal green space.
Built between 1924 and 1928, Sunnyside is the first planned garden community in the United States. It was built as a project of the City Housing Corporation (CHC), a group that organized in March 1924 to counter the haphazard and extensive construction that had started in Queens after World War I. Acres of houses sprouted up without any concessions to park space or other planning elements. The CHC’s designers were adamant about providing green space for residents. To them, shared open gardens were fundamental to creating a true community that would be a haven from the city. In this, they drew on the ideas of British planner Ebenezer Howard and architect Raymond Unwin, designers of
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By Angela Starita
Sunnyside Gardens is the first garden community in the United States, a forebear of such places as Radburn, New Jersey. Located in Queens and built in the 1920s, it sought to introduce a new form for urban living, one that emphasized communal green space.
Built between 1924 and 1928, Sunnyside is the first planned garden community in the United States. It was built as a project of the City Housing Corporation (CHC), a group that organized in March 1924 to counter the haphazard and extensive construction that had started in Queens after World War I. Acres of houses sprouted up without any concessions to park space or other planning elements. The CHC’s designers were adamant about providing green space for residents. To them, shared open gardens were fundamental to creating a true community that would be a haven from the city. In this, they drew on the ideas of British planner Ebenezer Howard and architect Raymond Unwin, designers of the Garden City plan.
Although the company was designed to make a modest profit, its founders primarily had philanthropic goals in mind, with all but the architects and planner working pro bono. In a 1924 pamphlet, the CHC noted that it sought to serve as a model for other builders by demonstrating that building well could be cost effective and by showing the importance of including “ample outdoor play space.” More than 70 percent of each block was set aside for green space -- vastly more than typical contemporary construction. With their low-rise, garden-centered design, the chief designers hoped to provide a new approach to urban living.
The CHC also aimed to encourage lower middle class citizens to become property owners, by exploring new financing methods and forms of cooperative home ownership. But the notions of cooperative living were never clearly articulated, and the most communal aspect of the project -- the central courts -- were an odd mixture of public and private property.
Clarence Stein, an architect and a founding member of the Regional Planning Association of America, and Henry Wright, a landscape designer, acted as the main designers of Sunnyside Gardens, working closely with the buildings’ architect, Frederick Ackerman, and Marjorie Cautley, a landscape architect. The CHC board of directors included Eleanor Roosevelt; Felix Adler, of the Society for Ethical Culture; and Lewis Mumford, the esteemed architecture critic of The New Yorker, who lived in Sunnyside Gardens for nine years. Reflecting the CHC’s progressive politics, Sunnyside Gardens was open to Jews and Catholics, unlike many housing developments of the era.
The CHC began to look for an appropriate tract of land in early 1924 to realize the project, finally settling on 77 acres in northwest Queens purchased from the Pennsylvania Railroad. Rail yards sat just to the west of the proposed neighborhood. The street grid had already been plotted out by the city, with blocks divided into conventional lots. The CHC designers were compelled to use that framework, which later presented an obstacle to their plans for a cooperative green. The site was chosen in part because the land was cheap -- about 48 cents a square foot -- and because it was near the new subway, today’s 7 train.
Opened in 1917, the 7 train spurred development of many Queens neighborhoods, including Sunnyside. The line, a concrete viaduct running down Queens Boulevard, let Sunnysiders reach Times Square within 15 minutes. As housing replaced farmland in the 1920s, Queens’ population skyrocketed by 130 percent, with more than a million people calling the borough home by the end of the decade.
The CHC erected the first block of Sunnyside Gardens, Colonial Court -- dubbed the “superblock” -- in 1924. Stein and Wright’s original design called for three four-story apartment buildings and 40 two-story houses to be organized around a common green complete with a playground, tennis courts, a garden, and a pergola. Each house also had a private yard. These recreational areas, literally in the residents’ backyards, were to be used and maintained cooperatively. Stein wrote in 1957 that this version of the superblock was abandoned when residents complained about noise in the backyard playgrounds.
As a result, the CHC began to divide each block into three or four smaller courts with one-, two-, and three family homes, as was done in Roosevelt, Hamilton, Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson, and Madison Courts. The gardens were no longer to be used as playing fields, but as quiet havens. The CHC then built a private park to make up for the lost athletic facilities. Originally restricted to dues-paying residents, the park fell into disrepair by the 1970s. A group of concerned members, however, revived it. Now residents of any neighborhood can use the park, provided another member “sponsors” them, they pay an annual fee of $162, and they volunteer to work 12 hours during the year. Gramercy Park in Manhattan is the only other private residential park in New York City.
Homes were placed on the block’s periphery and divided by internal walkways.One- and two-family houses were sited on the long ends of each court; three-family houses sat on the short ends. Though most of Sunnyside’s houses face the street, some stand perpendicular to the road and face each other across a court. The houses themselves were cautiously modern in style: made of brick, they followed a simple floor plan meant to maximize available light and to keep costs down.
Of far greater interest to Sunnyside’s planners were the green spaces surrounding the buildings. They built centralized garages to keep cars from encroaching on the gardens. Each home had a small front yard and a backyard that extended to the middle of the block. In an effort to create a sense of cooperative living, the CHC imposed 40-year deed restrictions on the back courts. Though each homeowner legally owned the property behind his house, only a fairly small portion of it could be used privately. The rest was to be part of a quiet communal green.
The gardens attracted buyers, as did the CHC’s financing plan, which required low down payments with mortgage fees spread over years. Now the norm, such extended mortgage payments were a novelty at the time, making home ownership a possibility for many more people. The more than 500 houses built by the CHC sold quickly, and residents eagerly tended their small plots of land. The CHC conducted a survey in 1928 and learned that 355 residents were white-collar workers -- teachers, doctors, lawyers, and social workers. Another 184 were blue-collar employees, working as chauffeurs, mechanics, and restaurant workers. Over the years, Sunnyside Gardens was also home to several well-known musicians and actors, including Bix Beiderbecke, Rudy Vallee, Judy Holliday, and James Caan. On the other hand, units in the apartment buildings were intended as co-ops, a form of home ownership not yet familiar to many potential buyers. The co-op apartments were slow to sell, and by January 1926, the CHC had to cover costs for the many unpurchased apartments, still hoping that enough would eventually sell to keep the buildings from becoming traditional rental properties. Co-op owners also struggled to find new buyers, and in the long run, the majority of apartments in fact became rentals.
The clear-cut success of the project was short-lived, as the Depression left many Sunnysiders unable to keep up with their mortgage payments. The residents, many politically active with socialist and communist sympathies, organized a mortgage strike, criticizing the CHC’s 6 percent limited dividend policy and staging dramatic protests at the CHC offices. Some strikers barricaded themselves in their homes or erected barbed wire to keep police from evicting them. Even Mumford, a close friend of Stein’s, sided with the strikers. “We withheld payments for a year, then we left,” his wife, Sophie, recalled 50 years after the strike. But in the end, 60 percent of Sunnyside’s homeowners lost their houses. Stein felt betrayed by the strike, later writing, “The irony of the situation was that it [the CHC] had stimulated and helped community organization, and those living in Sunnyside had thus become accustomed to forming their own organizations.”
Another major challenge to Sunnyside came in 1964 when the deed restrictions put in place by the CHC expired. Suddenly, where fences had once been prohibited, gates were often erected, making clear boundaries between houses and revealing that Sunnyside was, legally speaking, no different from other Queens neighborhoods. (Even today, however, many courtyards and building features remain.) Residents interested in preserving the original character of Sunnyside Gardens pushed for special zoning from the New York City Planning Commission, and in 1974 the neighborhood was named a Special Planned Community Preservation District, prohibiting further fencing or curb-cutting for driveways.
A group of local preservationists calling itself the Sunnyside Gardens Conservancy felt the zoning laws didn’t offer enough protection to save the original character of the neighborhood, though. The group started to publish The Sunnyside Gardener, a newsletter filled with articles on topics like donating property for tax deductions, gardening, and maintenance of building facades, and it wrote the Sunnyside Gardens application for National Register status. The neighborhood was added to the National Register in 1984. The conservancy has recently applied to have Sunnyside Gardens named a New York City landmark.
Though there have been fewer building alterations since the 1974 zoning took effect, the expiration of deed restrictions fueled an often heated dispute that very much informs the neighborhood today. A particularly contentious battle took place in the late 1980s after a resident built an illegal driveway. The case eventually wound up in court and revealed a fault line of the Sunnyside Gardens “experiment”: while some residents have passionately defended the CHC’s original vision, others bristle at what they see as infringements on their rights as property owners. Undoubtedly, the neighborhood has been deeply influenced by the philosophy of its architects and planners. That the future of the gardens and building exteriors is still so debated testifies to the deep influence of the neighborhood’s planners, and to residents’ sense that the unique qualities of Sunnyside Gardens deserve to be fought for.
[Adapted from an article written by Angela Starita for the program book of the 2006 Vernacular Architecture Forum conference, held in New York City. Courtesy of the NYC Planning Committee. Edited for Place Matters by Seth Johnson.]
Sources
Richard Plunz,A History of Housing in New York City(1990); Jeffrey Kroessler, Building Queens: The Urbanization of New York's Largest Borough(1991).
