History
Sunnyside Gardens was built from 1924 to 1928, and Phipps Garden Apartments in 1931-32 and 1935. The builders were inspired by the English Garden City movement of Ebenezer Howard and Raymond Unwin. Architects Clarence S. Stein, Henry Wright, and Frederick L. Ackerman worked with landscape architect Marjorie Sewell Cautley. Their philosophical colleague, the urban critic Lewis Mumford, became one of the first residents. The real estate developers were philanthropic idealists, too, and included Alexander M. Bing, William Sloane Coffin, Felix Adler, and Eleanor Roosevelt. Reserving unusually large areas for open space and minimizing construction costs, the designers created homes affordable to working people by combining rows of one- to three-family private houses with co-op and rental apartment buildings, arranging these around common gardens and parks, and placing stores and garages on the periphery of the neighborhood.
The Sunnyside Gardens National Register Plaque Program honors notable past residents. To date, plaques mark the homes of Judy Holliday, Lewis Mumford, Elizabeth Polk, Lilia Skala, and Henry Wright. Historic neighbors from many fields crowd our waiting list for future plaques. To read more about each honoree, see the PDF Downloads in the right column of this page.
The Sunnyside Gardens Oral History Program records interviews with selected residents, past and present. Oral histories are preserved and accessible at our archival partners, Cornell University Rare and Manuscript Collections and the Archives @ Queens Library.
The Sunnyside Gardens Digital Archive gathers photos and artifacts like those on this site, by making digital copies from personal and institutional collections. This project will post historic materials such as Eleanor Roosevelt’s “Vanishing ‘Vine & Fig Tree’”, Lewis Mumford’s “Ask Us Another!”, and Marjorie Sewell Cautley’s 16mm films of Phipps Garden Apartments and Sunnyside Gardens.
Please share your historic photos and documents. E-mail us at History@SunnysideGardens.us.
Founders Gallery
Architect Clarence S. Stein (1882-1975) designed Phipps Garden Apartments shortly after leading the group of architects who designed Sunnyside Gardens. He is seen here in 1928, on the occasion of his parents' 50th wedding anniversary. Courtesy #3600, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library.
Henry Wright (1878-1936), Sunnyside’s visionary planner who was both an architect and landscape architect, about 1920. Courtesy of Wright’s granddaughter, Abbie Elwell Brown. See his National Register Plaque for more information.
Architect Frederick L. Ackerman (1878-1950), shown in 1934, five years after Sunnyside Gardens was completed. His title was Architect of Rows of Houses, and his design for Madison Court attracted the Mumfords to live there.
Landscape architect Marjorie Sewell Cautley (1891-1954), about 1930, after she planted Sunnyside Gardens and just before she landscaped Phipps Gardens Apartments. Courtesy #4908, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library.
Developer Alexander M. Bing (1878-1959), in a portrait taken during the years he led the City Housing Corporation, the organization that bought the land, built Sunnyside Gardens, sold and rented its homes.
Lewis Mumford (1895-1990) was the chief advocate for Sunnyside Gardens as a community built on a human scale, a relief from urban congestion—as illustrated in the brochure “Ask Us Another!” that you can download from this page. This photo from 1926 shows him with his son, Geddes; courtesy of the University of Albany. See his National Register Plaque for more information.
A prominent elder among City Housing's Board of Directors was the housing and social reformer Dr. Felix Adler (1851-1933), founder of the Ethical Culture Society, where Clarence Stein and Alexander Bing had been classmates in the Workingman's School.
Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962) served on the Board of Directors of the City Housing Corporation and wrote a glowing assessment of Sunnyside Gardens after the first two years’ construction. You can download her article using a link on this page.
PDF Downloads to print, read and enjoy
Audio Clip
Eddie Lawrence on Judy Holliday
Actor-comedian Eddie Lawrence (1919-2014, grinning above on his 1955 LP album) performed on Broadway with Judy Holliday in the original cast of Bells Are Ringing (1956), and he was our guest speaker at the National Register Plaque ceremony honoring her. The first few seconds of this recording are faint, but here are his opening remarks:
“Well, when I was in Bells Are Ringing, I was called up for jury duty. It was a murder case. A woman killed her lover and, she said, in self defense. And I got on line to go into the jury room, and the bailiff came over and he said, ‘The judge wants to see you in his chambers.’…”
Historic Images
For his "Toward New Towns for America" in 1957, Clarence Stein minimally updated this map of Sunnyside Gardens, taken from the City Housing Corporation's 1928 Annual Report. Despite antiquarian street names and Stein's mis-dating Phipps Garden Apartments, which opened in 1931 and was completed in 1932 (the Sunrise Tennis Courts were replaced by Phipps’ second phase in 1935), it remains a definitive overview.
Sunnyside Gardens never welcomed a more distinguished visitor than Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois, who spoke to a community forum in September 1957 at the age of 89. Photographer Dan Shapiro of Harrison Place took this portrait at the occasion; courtesy of Dan Shapiro.
The song “(Keep Your) Sunnyside Up” became a lighthearted antidote through the Depression years after Janet Gaynor introduced it in the 1929 Hollywood musical of the same name. A wit living in Jefferson Court set new lyrics to Ray Henderson’s tune to create a theme song for Sunnyside Gardens. (B.G. DeSylva and Lew Brown’s original chorus begins, “Keep your sunny side up, up,/ Hide the side that gets blue./ If you have nine sons in a row,/ Baseball teams make money, you know!") Thanks to Bob Crawford.
Charles E. Martin contributed over 150 New Yorker covers in his 50 year association with the magazine. While living in Hamilton Court, he painted this slightly fanciful rendering of Sunnysiders awaiting a train for Manhattan on the elevated platform of the #7 subway line.
While the neighborhood was going up, children gardened at its gateway, and a billboard beckoned to buyers and renters. This is 47th St. north of Queens Blvd. Directly across 47th St. are the Carolin Gardens co-ops (1925), with Colonial Court (1924) in the distance beyond 43rd Ave. On the site of this garden, the Wilson Court Apartments were built in 1928. Photo c.1926 for City Housing Corporation, courtesy of the Sunnyside Foundation.
Dorothy and Charles Cavallo of Phipps Garden Apartments have gardened the entrance plots of Sunnyside Park for more than 40 years, starting in the early 1970s. Midway through the decades they posed among the bulbs and blossoms of spring 1996.
Tree rings document that our large London Planes are original to the neighborhood. This street tree stood on 39th Avenue until 2018, where the houses were completed in 1928. It had no fewer than 104 identifiable rings, suggesting it was 15 years or older when planted. Thanks to arborist Wayne Morris.
In May 1931, Marjorie Sewell Cautley trucked in large specimen trees, like this American elm, to landscape the central gardens in Phipps Garden Apartments. Her documentary film shows how this was done, as you can watch in the Video Archive. This is a frame enlarged from the film by Tony Rohling, courtesy #4908, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library.
Marjorie Sewell Cautley documented her landscaping of Phipps Garden Apartments in a remarkable short film from the early 1930s, which demonstrates the first tenants’ pleasure in their garden surroundings. In one sequence, a window in the R Building opens to this overview of Phipps’ great center court. You can watch this film in the Video Archive on this page. Frame enlargement by Tony Rohling, courtesy #4908, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library.
The early neighborhood recognized the best children's gardens with heptagonal medals and appendages, as here—bronze for 1928 and silver for 1929, 1930, and 1932. A champion gardener might reap a rich bounty, as did the winner of all these, Katherine Carr of Lincoln Court. Photo by JFA Assocaites, courtesy of Katherine Carr.
In its first years, Sunnyside Park held athletic competitions on May Day and Labor Day, with awards in many sports and age groups. This is a 1933 gold medal in intermediate girls' track, won by Alicia Vitolo of Jefferson Court.
The crowning medal for all-round athletic achievement in the boys’ or girls’ Park sports competitions evoked an Olympic gold, with the goddess Nike extending the laurel wreath and “SGCA” (for the Sunnyside Gardens Community Association) speaking for the entire neighborhood. The senior boys’ award for 1939 went to Michael Gwynne Pearson of Harrison Place.
The back of the 1939 senior boys' medal shown in the previous image, engraved with the name of its winner. Medals were awarded generously in individual events as well as overall, within age groups for boy and girl athletes.
Our first and foremost pre-school was the Sunnyside Progressive School, founded by Sunnyside parents with advice from educators at Columbia University, but the Park Play School soon followed. Operated by the Community Association and advised by New York University, it boasted the better logo, this stylish arts-and-crafts woodblock (circa 1933).
You’ve shown up for a ball game in Sunnyside Park in shirttails and high fashion sandals? All right, Batter Up! Just be sure you don’t swing at any pitches in the dirt. Photographer unknown, early 1950s; courtesy of an anonymous neighbor.
The 1950s on a summer's day: making the most of shallow water in the Sunnyside Park pool. Photo by Park Director Russ Olson, courtesy of Poki Olson.
Our Sunnyside Mustangs were a legendary football team in the late ’30s and early ’40s, coached by former All-Pro and college star Francis “Hap” Moran. The Mustang cheerleaders were no less dynamic. These four, in uniform for the 1939 season, are (from left) Marion MacLeod, Joan Pearson, Gert Sigmann, and Eleanor Egger. (Does anyone know the name of the fellow in the helmet?) Courtesy of Eleanor Pearson.
Paul Crosbie of Jefferson Court, a hardworking community activist, received this gavel following his election as President of the neighborhood organization. Its full inscription reads, “Paul P. Crosbie From His Co-Workers of the Sunnyside Gardens Community Assn. 1931 Executive Committee.” Photo by Via Photo, Montréal; courtesy of Don Donderi.
Innovation in Sunnyside Gardens during the Depression included milk and laundry coöperatives that expanded into a full grocery at the end of 1933. This announcement ran in the neighborhood’s monthly newspaper, the “Sunnyside News.” The leader of the coöperative movement, Meyer Parodneck, lost his home to foreclosure but stayed close by renting in the Hamilton Court Apartments.
A craftsman restoring a craftsman-style porch, William Jones replaced the floorboards on his Hamilton Court home in the late 1940s. More than the average do-it-yourselfer, he had managed all the houses repossessed by the Equitable Company throughout Sunnyside Gardens. Courtesy of Robert W. Jones.
Phipps’ Social Hall transformed into a pirates’ lair in 1956 when the resident Cub Scout troup outfitted themselves as a colorfully scurvy band. (And the wall map of the Eastern Hemisphere began to resemble Treasure Island.) A Kodachrome slide courtesy of Rev. Michael Moran.
Phipps resident William A. Casselman was a devoted amateur photographer, as befits a newspaperman who rose to become Editor of “New York's Picture Newspaper,” as the Daily News dubbed itself during his career with the paper. From the late 1940s, he rented darkroom space in the basement of Phipps’ Q Building, where he artfully toned this black and white shot he took in Phipps' Cherry Court. Courtesy Martha Casselman, with thanks to Emma Robbins.
Sunnyside basements have been adapted for use as dens, darkrooms, dance studios, playrooms, a place of worship, and in this instance, the performing venue for a recorder ensemble. Photo by Molla Corson, 1988, in her Washington Court home; courtesy of Eric Corson.
The Sunnyside Musicians Group pose in their concert best following their performance at the Thalia Theater, November 12, 1989. Courtesy of Naomi Lehman.
Why do our numbered streets bear historic names that predate the construction of the streets themselves? It's thanks to a series of Local Laws from 1982, introduced by then-City-Councilman Thomas Manton (later, our Congressman), and certified by then-City-Clerk David N. Dinkins (later, our Mayor). Here's the law for “46th Street–Bliss Street.”
Rosy in Kodachrome in 1954 in Washington Court, Liivia Ranna was then a ballet student, but for decades later she studied modern dance with Anci Neumann, a former Anna Sokolow dancer who instructed adults as well as children in her basement studio in Roosevelt Court. Courtesy of Liivia Westervelt.
Among its children’s services in the late 1930s and 1940s, Phipps offered dance classes taught by Irene Wilson, remembered as having danced with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. Younger and older students used two barres along the wall of the “big kids'” indoor nursery (today’s Social Hall). Mothers provided exotic wardrobes. The central trio here, circa 1939, are Ann Casselman, Margery Gray, and Mary Lou Anderson. Photo by Alexander D. Gray, courtesy of Ann C. Graff, with thanks to Emma Robbins.
Costumed with crepe and balloons for a recital at Elizabeth Polk’s dance class in her Washington Court basement are Betty Brody, Rita Zuckerman, and Ellen Fried, about 1950. Courtesy of Rita Z.Jaros. For more on Elizabeth Polk, see the PDF Download of the program from her plaque dedication.
By day, the Sunnyside Progressive School on 47th Street near Queens Boulevard filled with animated pre-schoolers for a half century. After hours, the space became a community room where parents took their turn, most vivaciously for the folk dancing that enlivened the 1930s. Here, Dave De Witt partners with Sonya Cohen, as Lily Fern peers over their shoulders. Courtesy of John Cohen.
Winter brings igloos to many neighborhoods, but few as impressive were ever constructed within the confines of a rear garden in Hamilton Court. (Note clotheslines, hedges, balustrade of back porch.) "Snowfort" was taken March 9, 1941, by Sunnyside Gardens's virtual photographer laureate, Alfred Lowenherz. Courtesy of Robert W. Jones.
Honorary Plaques and Street Signs
Henry Wright’s plaque at 43-05 47th Street, the Monroe Court Apartments, where he and his family took a rental apartment when Sunnyside Gardens was completed. Photo by JFA Associates. See the PDF Download of the program from the plaque dedication.
After his untimely death, Henry Wright's friends and family placed his important book collection in Avery Library at Columbia University, where Wright taught in the School of Architecture. This bookplate, from an engraving by Hans Alexander Muller, is also part of Wright's papers that his widow donated to the Special Collections at Cornell. Courtesy #2736, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library.
Christina Wright Lowenstein (top), who unveiled the plaque to her great grandfather, is joined by her husband, Drew Lowenstein (left), and representatives of three communities designed by Henry Wright: Radburn (Fair Lawn, NJ), Colonial Terraces (Newburgh, NY), and Sunnyside Gardens. Photo by Irma Rodriguez.
Jonathan and Netalia Oppenheim, the son and granddaughter of Judy Holliday, unveil the plaque honoring her. Photo by Arthur Pearson.
Judy Holliday's plaque at 39-45 44th Street, Lincoln Court. Photo by Liz Reynolds. See the PDF Download of the program from the plaque dedication. Hear Eddie Lawrence share his reflections on Judy Holliday in the Audio clip.
Special guests at Judy Holliday Appreciation Day included (from left) Marilyn & Eddie Lawrence, Josie & Jonathan Oppenheim, and film director Joan Micklin Silver. Photo by Arthur Pearson. Actor and comedian Eddie Lawrence, an original cast member of "Bells Are Ringing" with Holliday, gave a personal tribute to her.
Judy Holliday was fondly remembered by childhood playmates here, and by at least one great Sunnyside Gardens teacher. Biologist Molla Corson taught Judy general science at P.S.125 in the 1930s. After the plaque dedication in 2005, Molla leafed through the biography by Will Holtzman (a special guest at the event) and explained her memory of a grade school kid for seven decades: "She was a brilliant student."
Lewis Mumford’s grandson, James Morss, the unveiler and special guest who once lived in Sunnyside Gardens himself, takes a first look at the Mumford plaque. Photo ©2004 Arthur Pearson.
The Mumford plaque at 40-02 44th Street, Madison Court North, where the family moved from 48th Street in Colonial Court. See the PDF Download of the program from the plaque dedication.
Following the plaque unveiling, Mumford scholar Casey N. Blake delivered the keynote address at a celebratory symposium hosted by All Saints’ Church. His comments are included in the program from the event.
Skillman Avenue from 43rd to 48th Streets carries the honorary name of Lewis Mumford Way.
On the house where he grew up, Martin Skala (Lilia's son) entrusted the unveiling to his two granddaughters, Talia and Sophia Hull. Photo by Steven May.
Lilia Skala made her Broadway, Hollywood, and television débuts while making her home in America at 39-19 49th St. in Harrison Place. See the PDF Download of the program from the plaque dedication
Dancers, dance historians, dance teachers and therapists honored their teacher and colleague Elizabeth Polk. Clockwise from front right, Johanna Climenko, Nana Koch, Debbie George, Eleanora DiPalma, and Emily Hull (Elizabeth Polk's grand niece).
Mary and Tom McKnight's family have been ideal stewards of 39-48 46th St., Washington Court, where their immediate predecessor, dance therapy pioneer Elizabeth Polk, lived for 57 years. See the PDF Download of the program from the plaque dedication.
For our latest honorary street co-naming, a throng filled 45th Street to commemorate our landscape architect, Marjorie Sewell Cautley. To learn about her work, see the full story on our Home page. Photo by Jason Banrey.
