I have never lived in Sunnyside Gardens, but I always enjoy walking around in it. I had my eye on the place ever since arriving in Queens in 1993! The turn-of-the-century English Garden City movement of Sir Ebenezer Howard and Sir Raymond Unwin served as the inspiration for Sunnyside Gardens, built from 1924-1928 and located from 43rd to 48th Streets and between the LIRR and Skillman Avenue.
This housing experiment was aimed at showing civic leaders that they could solve social problems and beautify the city, all while making a small profit. The City Housing Corporation, whose founders were then-schoolteacher and future first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, ethicist Felix Adler, attorney and housing developer Alexander Bing, urban planner Lewis Mumford, architects Clarence S. Stein, Henry Wright, and Frederick Lee Ackerman and landscape architect Marjorie S. Cautley, was responsible for the project. Co-founder Lewis Mumford [the long-time architecture critic at The New Yorker] was also one of the Garden’s first residents. The part of Skillman Avenue that runs through Sunnyside Gardens has been renamed in his honor.
The design of the Gardens was novel in that large areas of open space were included in the plan. Construction costs were minimized, which allowed those with limited means the opportunity to afford their own homes. Rows of one- to three-family private houses with co-op and rental apartment buildings were mixed together and arranged around common gardens, with stores and garages placed around the edges of the neighborhood. Just about every interior window in the Gardens offers a view of a landscaped commons. A typical price for a two-story attached brick house in the development cost $9,500 in 1927!
Artists and writers were also attracted to the amenities of Sunnyside Gardens ; in fact, the development in its early years was sometimes referred to as the ‘Greenwich Village annex’.” Artistic residents of the Gardens included painter Raphael Soyer, singer Perry Como and actress Judy Holliday. Crooner Rudy Vallee, NYPD Blue actress Justine Miceli, “Rhoda’s mom” and musicals star Nancy Walker, and tough-guy actor James Caan also lived in Sunnyside Gardens.
While I never attempted to live in Sunnyside Gardens I found the next best thing in the much smaller garden apartment complex in Little Neck, Westmoreland Gardens on Little Neck Parkway, two blocks from the LIRR. I had my eye on it ever since I began to frequent Little Neck when working in Port Washington beginning in the mid-1990s and finally obtained an apartment in 2007, some of the best money I ever spent.
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7/23/24