"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.
|
