Sunnyside Gardens, Queens

About

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.