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A Cityscape for Urban Reform

SUNNYSIDE GARDENS HAS BEEN an icon of urbanism and planning from its inception in the 1920s. Urban historians, architects, and planners still study this distinctive community, and given the chance, they eagerly make a pilgrimage to experience firsthand its verdant landscaped courts and modest brick row houses.

This garden suburb was both the culmination of a generation of Progressive Era housing reform and an experiment in social engineering. Not the most beautiful planned community, perhaps, nor the most elegant, and certainly not the most perfectly preserved, Sunnyside Gardens nevertheless remains significant both in terms of the planning principles that inspired its creators and in its subsequent history. More than any other garden suburb, its builders were self-consciously following the garden city ideal first expressed in England in the last decade of the nineteenth century and given concrete form in the first decade of the twentieth.

The architects of Sunnyside were motivated by a reformist impulse. They asked how we might reshape our cities to foster more equitable communities and create a more livable urban environment. Remarkably, they also had the confidence to believe that they could do exactly that through enlightened planning and design. To a degree, that motivation continues to animate urban planning a century later, and the persistence of those ideals explains why Sunnyside Gardens remains as relevant today as when it was built.

There is no place quite like Sunnyside Gardens. That statement is not descriptive hyperbole; it is quite literally true. For all the interest in the place among academics and architects over the decades, it is unique. There have been hundreds of garden suburbs, planned communities, and model housing experiments in the United States, but no place follows the Sunnyside plan exactly.¹ What, then, accounts for its enduring appeal, and why is it still held up as an important example of enlightened urban design?

Why this garden suburb was built when and where it was, as well as how it has fared over its first century, is the heart of this book. The story of Sunnyside Gardens is more than a story of housing reform, because the builders sought also to offer an alternative design for urban living. This is a story of planning history, architecture, social history, and historic preservation, all played out within the grand narrative of Greater New York.