"A Thoroughly Conscious and Workable
Community"
| "It
is evident that both the City Housing Corporation and
the Institute start with certain assumptions regarding
home ownership... The first and most evident is
the social importance of home ownership as a basis of
good citizenship...[A] home owner is almost invariably
a good citizen..."
Richard Ely, "The City Housing
Corporation and “Sunnyside”," Journal of Land
and Public Utility Economics (April 1926)
|
Part 2. A Social Laboratory
Sunnyside's architects also wanted to
show that their planning was more than just a clever reconfiguration
of space—that it would lead to more highly valued communities
in both economic and social terms.
As Henry Churchill wrote, “What Henry
[Wright] did was to evolve a qualitative as well as quantitative
analysis of land-planning and house-planning, considered as
an unitary and indivisible process. He developed economic
analysis to match, and to justify, social reform. Thus,
by a process of indirection, he gave respectable status to
‘social values’.” For many of Sunnyside Gardens’ early
residents, including Wright and Mumford, the development was
a kind of activist utopia, that used communal spaces to unite
and stimulate its residents.
|
Breakdown of Sunnyside
home buyers, circa 1926
| Building
trades |
26 |
| Tradesmen |
21 |
| Chauffeurs |
8 |
| Store
and office employees |
39 |
| Housekeepers |
3 |
| Factory
employees |
8 |
| Salesmen |
8 |
| Teachers
and city clerks |
12 |
| Professions |
21 |
| Domestic
employees |
11 |
| Miscellaneous |
|
Source: Sunnyside Foundation
|
Some of its other proponents, however,
portrayed Sunnyside Gardens as an exciting new spin on traditional
social aspirations. Richard Ely of the Institute for
Research in Land Economics and Public Utilities, and one of
CHC’s directors, made explicit connections between private
ownership and good citizenship.
The original literature about Sunnyside
Gardens managed to evoke socialist ideals while simultaneously
stressing individuality and upward mobility. In the
1920’s, before the respective trainwrecks of the United States
economy and the Soviet socialist system, this combination
looked to be the formula for a newly authentic American Dream.
Sunnyside Gardens was portrayed by Richard
Ely and others as a scientific laboratory where experiments
were being carried out to develop a new product. If
successful, the product was to be replicated not only in New
York City, but around the country, even the world.
This idea that corporate vision could
change social conditions now seems a relic of an unusually
progressive and prosperous historical moment, when it seemed
likely that both the economy and the government might support
ongoing experiments.
Unfortunately, the Depression hit soon
after Sunnyside opened. The first wave of settlers,
most of whom were carrying their first mortgages, had great
difficulties making their monthly payments, and about half
of them lost their homes.
Sunnyside children demonstrate
to prevent foreclosure of their parents' mortgages, May
1933
|
Many Sunnyside Gardeners who had been
drawn to the community because of its utopian ideals participated
in rent and mortgage strikes against the City Housing Corporation.
Others barricaded their doors against marshals serving foreclosure
notices. Others simply bailed out, and moved elsewhere.
By the mid-thirties it was evident that
as an experimental model of a new kind of homeownership for
lower income New Yorkers, Sunnyside Gardens was a public failure.
But by then both civic leaders and Sunnyside Gardeners were
preoccupied with the basic elements of survival, and no longer
thinking in terms of utopian visions.
By
the late 1940’s, those who had survived the lean years, and
the newer residents who had moved in to the foreclosed homes,
were squarely middle-class. And the political spirit
that had united many Sunnyside Gardeners died down, though
many of its residents continued to attract unwanted attention
from the government through the McCarthy era and into the
1960’s.
|
