"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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