Sunnyside is a neighborhood in the western portion of the New York City borough of Queens. It is bounded by Hunters Point and Long Island City to the west, Astoria to the north, Woodside to the east, and Maspeth and Newtown Creek to the south. The Sunnyside Yard rail complex separates the neighborhood from Astoria along its northern boundary, and the Brooklyn–Queens Expressway forms part of its southern edge.
The area developed as a residential bedroom community in the years after the Queensboro Bridge opened in 1909 and the Flushing Line subway reached Queens in 1917. Most of the neighborhood was built up between the early 1920s and the late 1930s. North of Queens Boulevard, the planned community of Sunnyside Gardens was constructed between 1924 and 1928 as one of the first applications of the garden-city model in the United States; it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1984 and designated a New York City historic district in 2007. Sunnyside is served by the subway and is along the route of the annual St. Pat's for All parade.
Sunnyside is located in Queens Community District 2, and its ZIP codes are 11101, 11104, and 11377. It is patrolled by the New York City Police Department's 108th Precinct. Politically, Sunnyside is represented by the New York City Council's 26th District.
Geography The neighborhood is located in western Queens. It is bounded by the Long Island Rail Road Main Line and Sunnyside Yard to the north and by the Brooklyn–Queens Expressway and Newtown Creek to the south. Sources differ on the neighborhood's eastern and western extent; for example, The Encyclopedia of New York City gives Van Dam Street as the western boundary and Calvary Cemetery and 51st Street as the eastern boundary, whereas a New York Times article gives boundaries at 39th Street to the west, and to the east by 48th Street south of Queens Boulevard and 52nd Street north of Queens Boulevard. The Department of City Planning's 2020 Neighborhood Tabulation Area (NTA) for Sunnyside occupies approximately .
Queens Boulevard runs through the middle of Sunnyside on a southwest-to-northeast diagonal and divides the neighborhood into two distinct residential areas. North of Queens Boulevard lies the Sunnyside Gardens historic district, a planned community of brick rowhouses and small apartment buildings constructed between 1924 and 1928. South of Queens Boulevard includes prewar apartment buildings as well some houses, and residences south of Queens Boulevard tend to be larger and less expensive than residences north of it. Queens Boulevard also marks the boundary between New York City Community School Districts 30 and 24.
Sunnyside Yard, a rail yard built by the Pennsylvania Railroad and opened in 1910, occupies the northern edge of the neighborhood and is now owned by Amtrak and shared with NJ Transit Rail Operations. The yard's deck has been the subject of repeated proposals for housing development above the active rails. Calvary Cemetery is located south of the Brooklyn–Queens Expressway and abuts the southern and eastern edge of the neighborhood.
The principal commercial corridors are Queens Boulevard, Greenpoint Avenue between 39th and 49th Streets, and Skillman Avenue and 43rd Avenue.
History
Pre-1909 The area was farmed in colonial times by the Bragaw family, French Huguenot settlers who acquired land at Dutch Kills in 1690. During the Revolution, British forces occupied the Sunnyside area from 1776 to 1783, billeting troops in the colonial farmhouses along old Middleburgh Avenue (now 39th Avenue) to control the strategic "Narrow Passage" at the junction of present-day Northern Boulevard, Woodside Avenue, and Newtown Avenue. According to the local historian Vincent F. Seyfried, Richard Bragaw built a gambrel-roofed house "in the English style atop Sunnyside Hill" in 1790, on the line of present-day 32nd Place between Northern Boulevard and Skillman Avenue; the house was demolished in July 1903 after the Pennsylvania Railroad acquired the property as part of the land assembly for the Sunnyside Yard. A 1925 county history and a 2016 railroad history of Sunnyside Yard trace the area's name to "Sunnyside Hill," the Bragaw family estate established with that 1690 purchase and consolidated under Brocard's son Isaac in 1713. The Encyclopedia of New York City alternatively traces the modern neighborhood's name to a roadhouse built on Jackson Avenue in the 1850s and 1860s for visitors to the Fashion Race Course in Corona. South of Jackson Avenue, the Fitting, Gosman, Heiser, Lowery, and Van Buren families owned farms that were subdivided in the 1880s and 1890s, and a small hamlet built between Northern and Queens Boulevards came to be known as Sunnyside. The area was incorporated into Long Island City when that city was chartered on May 4, 1870, and into the City of Greater New York when Long Island City was consolidated into Greater New York on January 1, 1898.
In 1901, the Irish-American Athletic Club established Celtic Park near 48th Avenue and 43rd Street as a venue for Gaelic games and other Irish-American sporting events.
The Pennsylvania Railroad adopted a plan in 1901 for a large rail yard in the area, and between 1902 and 1905 it acquired the land south of Northern Boulevard between 21st and 43rd Streets, much of which was low-lying marshland. The Pennsylvania Railroad acquisitions and demolitions continued through 1905. Between 1907 and 1908, it leveled an approximately 200-acre hill at 34th and 35th Streets and used the earth to fill some 250 acres of tidal marsh at the headwaters of Dutch Kills. At its opening the largest coach yard in the world, Sunnyside Yard opened to rail traffic in November 1910, occupying and containing 25.7 miles of track.
1909–1929 The opening of the Queensboro Bridge in 1909 and the extension of the Flushing Line subway across Queens Boulevard in 1917 made Sunnyside accessible to Manhattan and triggered apartment construction. Through the 1920s, much of the area was built up, and the neighborhood became a bedroom community for middle-class workers commuting to Manhattan.
Industrial development accompanied the residential boom on land adjoining the new Sunnyside Yards: by 1912 the Degnon Terminal, a rail-served industrial complex developed by Michael J. Degnon's Degnon Terminal & Realty Company, was largely built out, with early tenants including the Loose-Wiles Biscuit Company (later Sunshine Biscuits), the Packard Motor Car Company, the American Ever Ready Co., and the American Chicle Company. In 1922 the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company broke ground on the Metropolitan Houses, an early Sunnyside multi-family apartment complex on the blocks bounded by Queens Boulevard, 48th Avenue, 48th Street, and 49th Street; the complex was later renamed Cosmopolitan Houses after Met Life sold the property, and portions remain federally subsidized.
Between 1924 and 1928, the City Housing Corporation, a limited-dividend organization led by developer Alexander Bing, built Sunnyside Gardens on a 77-acre site of about 16 blocks north of Queens Boulevard, between 43rd and 51st Streets. Architects Clarence Stein, Henry Wright, and Frederick L. Ackerman, working with landscape architect Marjorie Sewell Cautley, designed the development as a garden city–inspired community of low-rise attached brick houses arranged around shared interior courts. The development comprised 1,202 housing units and was the first major American application of the principles of Ebenezer Howard and Raymond Unwin. It was promoted by the Regional Planning Association of America, whose members included Lewis Mumford.
Reflecting the neighborhood's growth over this decade, ridership at the Lowery St. subway station increased from 256,080 in 1923 to 2,117,809 in 1930.
1930–1960 In 1931, the philanthropic Phipps Houses organization, founded by the family of steel industrialist Henry Phipps Jr., opened the Phipps Garden Apartments at 39th Avenue and 50th Street, on land adjoining Sunnyside Gardens. Designed by Clarence Stein, the original 1931 complex consisted of 22 connected four- and six-story buildings housing 344 families, arranged around a landscaped interior courtyard. A second group of thirteen four-story buildings was added on the northern portion of the superblock in 1935.
On August 6, 1931, the jazz cornetist Bix Beiderbecke died in his apartment at 43-30 46th Street.
The Depression brought heavy losses to the new homeowners of Sunnyside Gardens; about half lost their homes to foreclosure during the 1930s, and marshals attempting evictions were sometimes met with organized resistance. Sunnyside Gardens residents organized rent and mortgage strikes in response to the wave of foreclosures. The remainder of Sunnyside's prewar apartment stock was completed during the 1930s and 1940s, much of it as middle-income rental housing. In the 1940s and 1950s, the apartments of Sunnyside attracted artists and writers from lower Manhattan in such numbers that the neighborhood became known as the "maternity ward of Greenwich Village".
Sunnyside Garden Arena, at 44-11 Queens Boulevard, operated as a boxing and wrestling venue from the mid-1940s until June 24, 1977. The arena seated about 2,500 spectators and hosted bouts featuring Floyd Patterson, Emile Griffith, José Torres, and Gerry Cooney, as well as Golden Gloves tournaments; under owner Michael Rosenberg in the 1970s the venue's programming also extended to karate, dancing, and bingo. John F. Kennedy delivered a campaign address at the venue on October 27, 1960, less than two weeks before the presidential election, and the DuMont Television Network broadcast a weekly program, Boxing From Sunnyside Gardens, from the venue from 1949 to 1950. The arena was demolished in late 1977; a memorial monument was installed at the former site (now a Wendy's restaurant) in October 2012, and a portion of 45th Street was co-named in its honor in 2014.
1960s–1990s Beginning in the 1960s and accelerating after the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, successive waves of immigrants settled in Sunnyside. In July 1977, The New York Times reported that Armenian refugees fleeing the civil war in Lebanon were resettling in the neighborhood, describing how "the exotic sounds of spoken Armenian have been spreading in the homey sidestreets of Sunnyside, Queens." In the late 1960s, threats from urban blight and white flight prompted the formation of local civic groups such as Gateway Community Services, which worked to combat crime and improve schools in Sunnyside and adjacent Woodside. Despite these changes, the article observed that Sunnyside "continues to house two and three generations of its original home buyers." A 1971 New York Times article characterized Sunnyside as a somewhat marginalized community of 50,000 people that was suffering from a narcotics problem, though it had relatively little violent crime. The article described Sunnyside as a "generally blue collar community, until recently virtually all‐white, mostly Irish‐American, with a sprinkling of Jews. Now there are Colombians and Puerto Ricans and a smattering of blacks."
According to Ultimate Classic Rock and contemporaneous reporting, the rock band Kiss played its first concert on January 30, 1973, at the Coventry (formerly the Popcorn Pub), a small live-music venue at 47-03 Queens Boulevard near 47th Street; the Ramones also played early shows at the venue.