"A Thoroughly Conscious and Workable
Community"
Part 3. Sunnyside Gardens Today
Place in History's display
on the history of Sunnyside Gardens, at the Skillman
Avenue street fair, Summer 2000
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So what is left of Sunnyside Gardens?
Well, after three-quarters of a century, much of the original
plan is still visible. The architectural elements that were
a part of the initial package have stood the test of time,
though changes have been made to the original buildings. The
courtyard structure still survives, and most (though not all)
of the courts still have a combination of shared and private
space. Some of them have thriving associations and related
clean-up days and social events. Sunnyside Park, which
was reserved by the initial design for the exclusive use of
Sunnyside Gardens residents, continues to be a popular spot
for recreation, especially for families with younger children.
And many of the original trees are now mature and loom majestically
over their emerald courts—though just in the past two years
several have been lost to the Asian long-horned beetle.
Sunnyside Gardens
has survived not only as a chapter in planning textbooks,
but also as a neighborhood in 21st century New
York. The collaborators from Place in History, a non-profit
organization that sponsors projects about the complex histories
underlying everyday urban places, decided to look more closely
at Sunnyside’s past and present as a historically significant
planned community. With the help of Dorothy Morehead,
Director of the Sunnyside Foundation, Paul Parkhill, Katherine
Gray, Molly Turner, and Tina Chiu thumbed through boxes of
old photographs, programs, letters, journals, and newspaper
articles. We interviewed several residents, some of
whom had lived at the Gardens through much of its history.
Then we put together an installation on a Skillman Avenue
kiosk, in the heart of the community, on the morning of the
annual September street fair.
The kiosk display included quotes from
our interviews, blown-up photographs, old newspaper clips,
and miscellaneous fragments of the past, including, maps and
plans, social programs, and letters. The display was
organized around three different themes. “The Home Ideal
Versus Reality” chronicled the different obstacles and conflicts
that had eaten away at the original vision of Sunnyside Gardens’
designers throughout its history. “A Radical Community”
examined the socialist leanings of both the developments’
planners and its residents through the years. “A ‘Social Laboratory’?”
displayed artifacts of some of the theoretical models that
had been applied to Sunnyside Gardens, along with other items
that showed how those models might have looked in practice.
As local residents wandered past and
read around the kiosk, we asked them what they knew about
Sunnyside Gardens. Many of those who stopped were residents
of the Gardens, and we conducted an additional series of interviews
and asked people for their reactions to our installation.
Most locals we talked with felt that
Sunnyside Gardens was a special neighborhood, that was different
from the rest of the Sunnyside community. Its tree-lined
streets and uniform architecture marked it clearly as a unified
development, and its extra open space made it seem special,
perhaps exclusive. One resident remembered growing up
outside of the Gardens: “They had a private park.
When I was a kid—and I resented this--you had to belong to
Sunnyside Gardens, and I was just on the borderline.
So I couldn’t get in there…I says, they’re a bunch of snobs,
which they were” (Modica, 2000). Like others we
spoke to who had grown up in the neighborhood but not in Sunnyside
Gardens, he eventually “moved up” to living in the Gardens.
Place in History talks to Sunnyside
Gardens residents at the Skillman Avenue street fair,
Summer 2000
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Several of the people we met at the street
fair had moved into the community in the last few years.
Some of them felt that it was a wonderfully friendly and active
community, where neighbors looked after one another’s children,
and where different generations and, to some extent, different
ethnic groups and cultures coexisted in harmony. Others
found the shared open spaces to be over-bureaucratized, expensive,
and badly managed. Several people had found the houses
to be a good bargain and weren’t interested in the other benefits
of the community.
Residents did not agree on whether or
not Sunnyside Gardens had succeeded as a planned community,
but they did all have some sense of what the original plan
had been, and how it had been altered in recent decades.
Original easements that prevented homeowners from adding on
to their houses, enclosing their porches, cutting their curbs,
or fencing in their yards ran out in the early 1960’s.
Although some residents took preventive action and tried
to extend the easements starting in the fifties, many other
homeowners took immediate advantage of the lapsed regulations
and renovated or altered their properties, sometimes radically.
Immediately preservationists began to band together to try
and protect the initial plan for the development. By
1974 the New York City Planning Commission had rezoned the
community as a preservation district, and put an end to the
alterations. But those that had been made were allowed
to remain.
Such tensions are common to historic
neighborhoods, but they have a distinctive twist in Sunnyside
Gardens since a major goal of the preservationists has been
to preserve the shared common space, and revive the court
associations. For many contemporary urban residents,
open space is either a public park run by government, or a
private yard that is free of government regulation.
The public/private nature of Sunnyside Gardens is baffling
to many residents, and consequently less governable.
Several long-term residents spoke regretfully of having
to lock the gates of courtyards to keep out roving teenagers
with boomboxes, thus closing the public right of way.
They tended to agree that the courtyards’ primary value was
aesthetic, and that aside from landscape maintenance, done
in many cases by the residents, they should be quiet sanctuaries.
“I think it’s more for a visual effect; you’re allowed to
walk around the perimeter but you can’t have the kids running
all over it because it would destroy it.” Some younger
residents, however, wanted their small children to be able
to play in the courtyards, or to sunbathe, or have barbecues
there. People on both sides agreed that many new residents
moved in without understanding either the rules or their history.
The original plan of the Gardens incorporated
community organizing and activism into its architectural design.
The common courtyards were to be the foundations for what
urban planner and Sunnyside Gardens resident Lewis Mumford
later described as “a robust political life, with effective
collective action and a sense of renewed public responsibility”
(Mumford 1938 p. 484) “Stein and Wright wanted to create
a place where a democratic community could flourish, with
the courts as the focus of neighborly activities and the park
serving as the communitywide social center.” (Havelick
and Kwartler 1982, p. 69). Their ideas echoed public
park designer Frederick Law Olmsted, who believed that city
dwellers must be guaranteed access to open space, fresh air,
and some kind of natural sanctuary from concrete and urban
bustle. This guarantee would lead to improvements in
the individual human spirit, which in turn would lead to increased
productivity and a lower crime rate.
| “There
were human problems of the same sort as those raised by
the deed restrictions, problems which required responsibility
on the part of owners and led to the appointment of trustees
within each block. The neighborly consideration
which these efforts called forth, along with the physical
advantages of the plan, helped to weld Sunnyside into
a thoroughly conscious and workable community unparalleled
in any similar experiment in this country”
Henry Wright, " Housing—Why,
when, and how? Part II," Architecture
(August 1933)
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Stein and Wright carried Olmsted’s ideas
one step further. Their vision for Sunnyside Gardens
reflected their belief that guaranteed open space and pleasing
buildings, offered to a socially and economically diverse
collection of urban dwellers, would diminish differences in
income, education, and culture, and in turn lead to improved
community morale and the possibility for collective action.
In a 1933 article, Wright noted that the relations between
homeowners and renters in Sunnyside Gardens had posed a challenge
to the overall sense of community, but that this challenge
would strengthen the activist spirit in the long run.
It is clear from documentary and oral
histories that the community was indeed “workable” at different
points in its history, if not quite in the way its founders
had intended. In the 1930’s residents banded together
against the City Housing Corporation to participate in the
rent strike, and to prevent evictions. Bea Badian remembers
that activist spirit of the thirties lasting throughout the
war years, particular among women who depended on the community
for help as their husbands were overseas and they themselves
had joined the workforce. She tells a story of a group
of working women who organized to eject a school principal
because he insisted on sending the children home for lunch
even though their mothers weren’t there to receive them.
There is less evidence, however, to suggest
that the physical layout and planning of the Sunnyside Gardens
community had any direct link to the “consciousness” of the
community. The overall consensus that arose from conversations
with residents was that Sunnyside Gardens had experienced
similar ebbs and flows to other New York City neighborhoods.
Many early residents were left-leaning, and as a result of
that as well as the currents of the times, Sunnyside Gardens
had an activist bent in the 1930’s and 40’s. Most current
residents stated that the Gardens’ carefully designed buildings,
plentiful trees, and well-maintained open space enhanced their
lives, and sometimes made for better neighbors. However,
they didn’t seem to think that the design of Sunnyside Gardens
possessed intrinsic community-building qualities. And
many evoked the conflicts over the community’s easements and
restrictions that raged during the 1950’s and 60’s, as those
easements ran out, as evidence that the design elements of
the Gardens did not lead to any kind of consensus.
As planned communities grow and mature,
they become more less planned and more like other neighborhoods—collections
of people living in close proximity. The original design
fades, deteriorates, and gets painted over, and the original
residents who moved there for ideological reasons grow old
or move away. How does such a community in an urban
setting perpetuate its own identity, if at all?
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Second-generation Sunnyside resident
Jerry Modica shares a photo of his father at work in
the family grocery
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To a certain extent all urban neighborhoods
are subject to periodic reinvention as a result of patterns
of homeownership, the rises and falls of the real estate market
and the local economy, and trends in lifestyle and labor.
Sunnyside Gardens, like any other urban neighborhood, has
slipped in and out of favor. But one sign of a real
“neighborhood” is multi-generational loyalty. And we
found many Sunnyside Gardeners who had grown up there and
moved back, or bought in when they’d reached home-buying age.
Another clue to a cohesive neighborhood
is well-groomed houses and yards, and neighbors who share
a pride in the taking care of their environment. One
striking feature of our interviews with Sunnyside Gardens
residents was the frequency with which certain community leaders
or long-term residents’ names would arise in conversations,
showing that many residents knew, or knew of, one another.
They were in most cases cognizant of efforts to preserve the
neighborhood, even if they were uninvolved, or opposed to
some of the methods used in preservation.
Since Alexis de Tocqueville published
his travel observations about the United States in the nineteenth
century, it has been a truism that Americans create and reinforce
community life through the formation of civic associations.
Sunnyside Gardens was designed to hang together around court
associations overseen by a five-member board of trustees.
That original decision-making structure has evolved through
the neighborhood’s changes into a more splintered system of
court associations and the independent, preservation-oriented
Sunnyside Foundation. Over the years the associations
have generated their own documentary history and archives,
which work to define Sunnyside Gardens and distinguish it
from the larger Sunnyside neighborhood. The neighborhood
has been further defined by Sunnyside Gardens’ legal status
as a preservation district, and projects such as the Place
in History research and interviews reinforce the idea that
the neighborhood and its past contain special meaning.
In the context of Sunnyside Gardens’
history, Stein and Wright’s intent to create a neighborhood
that facilitates organizing and exchange amongst residents
has been successful, but with different causes and effects
than they had foreseen. The physical design has often
been a source of discord rather than a site for consensus.
However, it has been enjoyed and appreciated by most residents,
and has given them incentive to become involved in the neighborhood
issues. It seems fair to assume that with sustained
public attention (such as this project) Sunnyside Gardens
will continue to develop its sense of place and history.
This in turn will continue to fuel an organizing spirit as
Sunnyside Gardens faces new obstacles and challenges.
Sources
Badian, Bea (2000). Personal Interview
with Molly Turner, May 26.
Badian, Bea (2000a). Personal Interview
with Paul Parkhill, July 19.
City Housing Corporation promotional
pamphlets: “Good Homes and Good Citizenship”; “Sunnyside
and the Housing Problem”; “Garden Homes”; “Low Priced Garden
Homes Next Door to Manhattan”; “Ask us Another!.”
Churchill, Henry (1936) Henry Wright:
1878-1936. Journal of the American Institute of Planners
Ely, Richard (1926) The City Housing
Corporation and “Sunnyside” in Journal of Land and Public
Utility Economics April: 172-185.
Friederick, Anton (1933) Case History
of a Community of Mortgaged Home-owners. In Survey
Graphic 22:311-312, June.
Havelick, Franklin and Michael Kwartler
(1982). Sunnyside Gardens: Whose Land Is It Anyway?
New York Affairs, 7(2): 65-80.
Modica, Jerry (2000). Personal
Interview with Paul Parkhill, May 18.
Mumford, Lewis (1938) The Culture
of Cities. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co.
Shacker, Maxine (2000) Personal
Interview with Paul Parkhill, May 21.
Wright, Henry (1926) Home Ideal
Versus Reality. In American Federationist 33:65-69,
January.
Wright, Henry (1933) Housing—Where,
when, and how? Part I, in Architecture, July
1933:1-32.
Wright, Henry (1933a) Housing—Why, when,
and how? Part II, in Architecture, August 1933:
79-110.
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