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 (31ha) 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.", quoting Ada Louise Huxtable.

Geography Sunnyside Gardens occupies most of 16 blocks in the northeastern part of Sunnyside, Queens, bounded roughly by Skillman Avenue on the south, Barnett Avenue on the north, 43rd Street on the west, and 52nd Street on the east. Within the borough as a whole, the district lies in northwestern Queens, about three miles east of the Queensboro Bridge.. Several of the district's streets carried different names before the 1920s renaming of Queens addresses: 39th Avenue, which bisects the district, was Middleburg Avenue; 47th Street was Carolin Street; and 43rd Street was Laurel Hill Avenue.

The site sits between Queens Boulevard to the south and the Sunnyside Yard, the Pennsylvania Railroad's 192-acre coach yard, to the north.. The 7 train of the New York City Subway runs along Queens Boulevard and along Roosevelt Avenue a few blocks south of the site, with the nearest station at 46th Street–Bliss Street. The station, opened in 1917 as part of the IRT Flushing Line's elevated extension into Queens, gave the site quick subway access to Manhattan, and the company marketed the development in the 1920s as a 15-minute subway ride from Grand Central. Two Phipps Garden Apartments complexes occupy the northeastern corner of the district, between 50th and 52nd Streets along 39th Avenue.

History

Pre-development land use In the colonial era the area that became Sunnyside Gardens was farmland, including an eighteenth-century farm on the sunny western slope of a hill near present-day Skillman Avenue, from which the neighborhood takes its name. The Bragaw family was among the area's early settler landowners. Beginning in 1902 the Long Island Rail Road and the Pennsylvania Railroad acquired and graded much of the surrounding land to build Sunnyside Yard; Sunnyside Hill was levelled to fill the wetlands and colonial-era farmhouses were demolished over local protest. The opening of the Queensboro Bridge in 1909, the Long Island Rail Road tunnels in 1910, and the extension of the elevated IRT Flushing Line into Queens (Alburtis Avenue/Corona in 1917) brought rapid transit to within walking distance of the future Sunnyside Gardens site.

By the early 1920s much of Sunnyside south of Queens Boulevard had been developed with new residential construction, spurred by a state-authorized municipal tax exemption for new dwellings adopted by the city in 1921. North of Queens Boulevard, however, the Long Island Rail Road still owned several hundred unimproved lots adjacent to its Sunnyside Yard...

Background: the garden city movement and the RPAA The architectural and social ideas that shaped Sunnyside Gardens originated in the English garden city movement launched by Ebenezer Howard's 1898 book To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform. Howard proposed self-contained, low-density satellite cities surrounded by agricultural green belts and linked by rail.. Howard's theories were translated into built form by architects Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker at Letchworth Garden City (1903) and later at Hampstead Garden Suburb. Unwin's 1912 pamphlet Nothing Gained by Overcrowding argued that lower-density planning could deliver returns to investors equal to those of higher densities while producing more open space; the LPC designation report credits Unwin with "the greatest single influence in shaping the [Regional Planning Association of America]'s thinking on the economics and site-planning of residential neighborhoods.".

In April 1923 a group of architects, planners, economists, conservationists, and social critics met in New York to form the Regional Planning Association of America (RPAA, not to be confused with the unrelated Regional Plan Association).. Founding members included Clarence Stein, Henry Wright, Benton MacKaye, Lewis Mumford, Frederick L. Ackerman, Robert D. Kohn, Stuart Chase, and the developer Alexander Bing. The housing economist Edith Elmer Wood, landscape architect Marjorie Sewell Cautley, and Catherine Bauer joined the group later, with Bauer serving as the RPAA's executive secretary. In 1924 Stein and Wright traveled to England, where they met Howard and Unwin and toured Letchworth, returning convinced that a similar community could be built in metropolitan New York.

City Housing Corporation To provide a vehicle for the RPAA's housing ideas, Alexander Bing organized the City Housing Corporation (CHC), incorporated in March 1924 as a limited-dividend company with returns to investors capped by charter at six percent.. CHC's stated purposes were to "develop better plans and methods for home and community building ... build the type of low-priced houses that are needed by self-respecting citizens in New York ... [and] encourage and develop cooperative methods of home ownership." Its long-term goal, articulated by Bing, was to build "a garden city along the lines of the English towns of Welwyn and Letchworth," using "the work of building and selling houses as a laboratory to work out better house and block plans, and better methods of construction and financing."

The corporation was capitalized at a planned $5 million in $100 shares; by mid-1926 subscribed capital reached approximately $1.75 million among about 300 stockholders.. Officers and directors served without compensation. The 1924 board included Bing as president; his brother Leo S. Bing of Bing & Bing; the philosopher Felix Adler, founder of the Society for Ethical Culture and a member of the New York State Tenement House Commission; the economist Richard T. Ely of the Institute for Research in Land Economics and Public Utilities; the lawyer John G. Agar; the banker Arthur Lehman of Lehman Brothers; the state senator Thomas C. Desmond; the civic activist Mrs. Joseph M. Proskauer; and Eleanor Roosevelt.. William Sloane Coffin Sr. served as vice-president, with Douglas Elliman, Charles S. Bird Jr., and V. Everit Macy also on the board. Stein, Wright, Ackerman, and Mumford were affiliated with the project through the RPAA rather than as CHC directors; Stein, Wright, and Ackerman were the corporation's contracted architects, and Mumford, who lived in the development from 1925 to 1936, was associated with CHC through the RPAA. Although prominent New York real-estate figures invested, the LPC report notes that the directors "all received a 6% return on their investments" only "for many years (until the Depression)."

In February 1924 CHC purchased about 76.7 acres of land north of Queens Boulevard, most of it from the Long Island Rail Road and a smaller fraction from neighboring private owners. Bing wrote in 1926 that "it was realized that the development of the larger tract would inevitably mean an enhancement of value of all the surrounding land, and the principle of excess condemnation was applied in the purchase of the adjacent land." Studying the corporation's land accounts, the economist Rosalind Tough found that of its 76.67-acre purchase the company resold about 21 acres as vacant lots at a large profit (roughly $1.62 a square foot, against production costs near 15 cents), a return that helped finance its next project at Radburn, New Jersey.

Planning and design

Stein and Wright led the design, with Frederick Ackerman responsible for the individual house designs and Marjorie Sewell Cautley as landscape architect. The principal design constraint was imposed by the Queens borough engineer, who would not permit the closing of city streets: Stein and Wright had hoped to consolidate two or more blocks into a single superblock of the kind Unwin had used at Hampstead Garden Suburb, but were obliged to retain the existing grid.. They responded by eliminating interior lot lines on each block and treating entire city blocks as their unit of planning. Houses were drawn close to the street in continuous brick rows, set in shallow front gardens and varied setbacks, with private rear yards of about 400 to 500 square feet (37 to 46 m) and a much larger landscaped common court in the interior of each block. Garages were not built next to individual homes; they were grouped at the edges of the development, and the CHC easements explicitly prohibited "garage of any kind or nature."