"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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