"A Thoroughly Conscious and Workable
Community"
By Molly Turner
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"That
hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers should be living
in homes which injure both health and morals, and that
for other hundreds of thousands the limitations and
discomforts are only a degree less acute, challenges
thoughtful citizens to find a remedy. What would
it not mean to the happiness and well-being of the people
of the New York if each of these families were living
in a home that made possible a normal, wholesome, healthful
family life? Utopian though this objective may
seem in the light of present conditions, it would be
unthinkable to pronounce it beyond the capacity of American
enterprise to achieve…."
City Housing Corporation, Sunnyside
Gardens promotional brochure, 1920s
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Part 1. The Early Years
In 1924, a partnership of prominent
New Yorkers, including Eleanor Roosevelt and Felix Adler,
founder of the Ethical Culture Society, joined real estate
developer Alexander Bing in forming the City Housing Corporation
(CHC), a limited dividend company dedicated to building model
communities. The aim of the CHC was to carry out the
practical application of the social theories of the Regional
Planning Association of America, which had been founded in
1923 by a group of leading planners including Bing, Lewis
Mumford, and architects Clarence Stein and Henry Wright.
The CHC launched its program by commissioning
Stein and Wright to design a residential development on an
80 acre plot in Queens. Sunnyside Gardens, by providing
quality affordable homes in a “garden city” to the middle
and lower classes, was to demonstrate how enterprising civic
leaders could solve social problems, beautify the city, and
take in a modest profit at the same time (investors were paid
no more than 6% of profits).
The homes at Sunnyside, built between
1926 and 1928, are plain, well-built brick boxes with lots
of windows and decent-sized rooms. “Common brick is
the chief material; cheap ornament and bizarre inventions
are avoided as well as archaeological survivals of other times
and other needs.” The buildings, designed by Frederick
Lee Ackerman, are flanked by open spaces in the form of front
and back gardens and shared inner courtyards, laid out by
landscape designer Marjorie Cautley. The houses vary
in size, configuration, and relation to the street; in general,
they were designed to house several families in close urban
proximity without crowding, and with plenty of sunlight, grass,
and shade available to all.
Sunnyside Gardens (the
dark polygon at the center of the picture) is located
just across the Queensboro Bridge from midtown Manhattan
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The development was targeted toward
working individuals and families unable to afford Manhattan.
The houses were sold with a low 10% down payment, at a cost
of about $10 per month per room ($15 per room was the usual
cost at that time).
Just across the Queensboro Bridge from
the city’s commercial center, and close to the subway line,
the new development was an easy commute. A City Housing
Corporation survey of homeowners in 1928 counted 184 blue
collar workers (mechanics, chauffeurs, restaurant workers)
and 355 white collar workers, including tradesmen, salesmen,
government employees, teachers, social workers, lawyers, and
doctors (Havelick and Kwartler 1982). 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” (Badian 2000).
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"The
home ideals of hundreds of men and women are coming
true. At Sunnyside Gardens... families that have
searched for a real home are finding substantial brick
one-, two- and three-family homes, gardens such as they
never hoped to have within the city limits, and all
to be had for what they would ordinarily pay in rent
or less."
City
Housing Corporation, Sunnyside Gardens promotional brochure,
1920s
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The ambitious vision of the City Housing
Corporation reflected both the inflated affluence of the Roaring
Twenties and the belief in scientific method that had begun
to pervade the American business world. In such a prosperous
time, the main obstacle to homeownership for lower-income
people seemed to be the high cost of land and building materials.
For architects Wright and Stein, for city planner and social
critic Lewis Mumford (an early resident of the Gardens) and
for the founders of the City Housing Corporation, the challenge
was to use scientific knowledge and private enterprise to
do better than government—better in terms of aesthetic, moral, and economic
value.
For the architects, the most exciting
challenge of Sunnyside was to find the maximum amount of privacy,
light, and interior space in the limited square footage available.
Wright and Stein were determined to adapt Ebenezer Howard’s
model of the English Garden City to the American urban environment.
They had first thought about the project on a large tract
of available land in South Brooklyn, and eventually developed
it in Sunnyside. Some of their main concerns involved
mixing up single, two, and three-family houses in the same
cluster (to achieve what Wright called “group housing,”) and
configuring the interior space so that many of the windows
looked into the landscaped courtyards.
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