Space and Community at Sunnyside
Part 1. An Introduction
Mews, Sunnyside Gardens
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Over the last thirty years, Sunnyside
Gardens in Queens has been the site of an ongoing series of
disputes concerning the private adaptation and appropriation
of space within a planned community. Designed in the
mid-1920s using English garden city principles, the community
was organized around a number of large common courts and parks
which provided shared space for gardening and other group
activities. City Housing Corporation (CHC), the developer
which commissioned Clarence Stein and Henry Wright to plan
the neighborhood, protected this common space by establishing
a series of covenants and easements, most of which lasted
forty years. When these easements expired in the mid-1960s,
effectively deregulating the neighborhood, many residents
began to make changes to their property immediately. These
modifications included renovating facades, adding decks or
porches to the backs of houses, cutting curbs for driveways,
and fencing off sections of the common courts for private
use.
The actions taken by many Sunnyside Gardeners
in the wake of the expiration of the CHC easements engendered
angry reactions from the more preservation-minded residents
of the community. Claiming that newcomers failed to
appreciate the spirit of Stein and Wright’s plan, many original
residents argued that the fencing off of common courts constituted
a violation of the entire community’s rights. After
several years of dispute among the neighborhood’s various
factions, the New York City Planning Commission intervened
in 1974, pushing through zoning which established Sunnyside
Gardens as a Special Planned Community Preservation District.
Following the Planning Commission’s rezoning decision,
which required special permits for virtually any modification
to the neighborhood, the alterations to the neighborhood’s
buildings, courts and sidewalks stopped almost completely.
The zoning was not retroactive, however, and many of the changes
realized between 1966 and 1974 remain to this day.
More recently, a community land conservancy
called the Sunnyside Foundation has implemented a number of
programs designed to restore the original character of Sunnyside
Gardens. In spite of sustained efforts over the last fifteen
years, however, the neighborhood remains divided both socially
and spatially. Only one section of one common court is currently
free of backyard fences; renegade curb cutters have gone ahead
with their plans in spite of legal obstacles; and a number
of the walkways and mews providing access from the street
to the courts are now gated. Newer residents have tended to
view the 1974 zoning plan as excessively restrictive, and
the process of obtaining a special permit for property modifications
daunting. Currently the Sunnyside Gardens Civic Association
is attempting to push through a rezoning proposal which would
allow for as-of-right construction of decks, porches, porch
enclosures and dormers, suggestions which have inspired counter-proposals
from the more preservationist Sunnyside Foundation.
The disputes which have characterized
life in Sunnyside Gardens over the past thirty years underscore
the complexity of the legal, political, architectural and
cultural issues surrounding the planning process in New York
City, particularly in neighborhoods dubbed historic districts.
Furthermore, the clear desire among many residents for fenced-in
space and as-of-right building privileges illustrates the
difficulties of maintaining early twentieth century planning
ideals in the context of a late twentieth century society
ever more suspicious of regulation and increasingly anxious
to control space through privatization. The optimistic, paternalistic
evaluation of community space embodied in Stein and Wright’s
plan represents a progressive era vision which seems strangely
at odds with the contemporary American notions of civic society
and the urban environment.
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