Sunnyside Gardens Historic District

About this property

Sunnyside Gardens is a planned residential community and historic district in the Sunnyside neighborhood of the borough of Queens in New York City. Built between 1924 and 1928 by the City Housing Corporation, a limited-dividend company led by developer Alexander Bing, the 77-acre (31 ha) development was the first attempt to create a garden city in the United States, applying the planning principles of the English garden city movement of Ebenezer Howard and Raymond Unwin. It was conceived as the first built community of the Regional Planning Association of America (RPAA), a circle of architects, planners, and social critics whose founding members included Clarence Stein, Henry Wright, and Lewis Mumford. The principal architects, Clarence Stein and Henry Wright, treated each block as a single planning unit rather than the lot-by-lot subdivision typical of New York row-house development. They arranged two-story brick rows around landscaped common courts at the interior of each block. Buildings cover only 28 percent of the land, and the common interior courts alone total nearly six acres of shared open space. Frederick L. Ackerman designed many of the individual houses, and Marjorie Sewell Cautley served as the development's landscape architect. The use of the courts was protected by 40-year easements administered by court-level trustees, an unusual legal instrument drafted by City Housing Corporation general counsel Charles S. Ascher. The City Housing Corporation also reserved roughly three acres at the eastern edge of the site for Sunnyside Gardens Park, the largest privately held park in New York City and one of only two members-only parks in the city, the other being Gramercy Park. More than half of Sunnyside Gardens homeowners lost their houses to foreclosure during the Great Depression. A coordinated mortgage strike, led by the resident-run Consolidated Home Owners Mortgage Committee, secured only partial concessions from second-mortgage bondholders. The 40-year easements protecting the common courts began to expire in 1965 and 1966, prompting a decade of disputes over fences, driveways, and additions. In response, in 1974 the New York City Planning Commission and Board of Estimate designated Sunnyside Gardens one of the city's first four Special Planned Community Preservation Districts, a zoning tool intended to preserve the original site plan. The historic district was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1984 and, after a contentious campaign led by the Sunnyside Gardens Preservation Alliance, was designated a New York City Historic District by the Landmarks Preservation Commission on June 26, 2007. The district encompasses more than 600 buildings on all or part of 16 city blocks, including 12 named courts and the Phipps Garden Apartments, a pair of Stein-designed apartment complexes built for the Society of Phipps Houses in 1931–1932 and 1935. Stein and Wright extended the Sunnyside Gardens approach in their later projects at Radburn, New Jersey and Chatham Village in Pittsburgh, and its planning ideas were carried forward in the New Deal greenbelt towns of the 1930s. The architectural critic Ada Louise Huxtable called the development "an example of simple, physical planning ... a social dream based purely on those physical arrangements, with their bonuses of light, air, open space and greenery."

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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