Читать книгу Sunnyside Gardens - Jeffrey A. Kroessler - Страница 23

The opening of the Williamsburg Bridge in 1903 and the Queensboro Bridge in 1909 forged essential physical links with the city and made possible a migration from the tenements to new housing in Brooklyn and Queens. In 1913, the Dual Subway System combined the Interborough Rapid Transit Company and the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company and made possible the extension of service into Queens. Completion of the Flushing line along Queens Boulevard (1917) and the Astoria line (1917) sparked a decade of unprecedented growth. New transit links also opened up the outer sections of Brooklyn and the Bronx, as well as upper Manhattan, lowering the city’s population density overall.⁶

Between the end of the First World War, during which housing construction had been limited, and the onset of the Great Depression in 1929, the city’s demographic profile changed dramatically. Manhattan lost nearly half a million residents during those years, while Brooklyn grew by almost a million and the Bronx by more than 800,000. Queens, the largest of the five boroughs in area, saw its population explode from barely 150,000 in 1900 to 1.1 million in 1930, with more than 600,000 arriving during the 1920s alone. Only eight cities in the country—Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, Cleveland, St. Louis, Boston, Baltimore, and Pittsburgh—had a population greater than the number of residents Queens gained in the twenties. In a remarkably brief time, previously distant rural and suburban precincts were integrated into a modern metropolis. Between 1924 and 1929, the city issued 73,656 permits for one- and two-family homes in Queens, providing housing for 93,000 families, or an estimated 400,000 persons. The erection of 4,400 apartment buildings provided homes for another 53,464 families, or an estimated 213,000 persons. The assessed valuation in the borough had also skyrocketed in the decade after 1918.⁷

Manhattan may have been losing population, but during those decades it gained its distinctive skyline, with skyscrapers rising downtown in the Financial District and in the new midtown business district around Grand Central Terminal. In Brooklyn and Queens, much of the new development was characterized by low-rise, low-density neighborhoods, some with attached row houses, others where one-family homes predominated. Those fleeing the tenements found new homes with indoor plumbing, central heating, hot water, electricity, and generous light and air—all within walking distance of transit lines.

Table 1. Population Change in New York City, 1890–1930

High demand, easy credit for builders and buyers, and tax incentives spurred the building boom in Queens. Much of the new construction was speculative, with homes and apartments fitting into the regular blocks of the street grid imposed over the western half of the borough. Whether free-standing one-family homes, as in Rego Park, or attached one- and two-family homes, as in Astoria, or modest apartment buildings or larger apartment blocks, all were built to a uniformly high standard. And with demand outpacing supply, new units were occupied as soon as the paint was dry.

Beyond providing quality housing, this surge also contributed to an increase in home ownership. More than any other municipality, New York was a city of renters, with only 12.7 percent of its inhabitants owning their homes. Noting a downward trend in home ownership nationwide, Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover commented, “Nothing is worse than increased tenancy and landlordism.” Reversing that trend would improve the health of the body politic. Writing in the Times, J. Charles Laue pointed out that “simple, modest dwellings suitable for the man of average earnings can be bought for rent money.” At Sunnyside Gardens, for example, an $8,630 home could be had for only a 10 percent down payment and total monthly payments of $66.75.⁸ Laue himself purchased a home in Sunnyside on those terms, and ironically, lost it to foreclosure ten years later during the Great Depression.

While much of the new housing was speculative and conventional, Queens was also the site of several important housing experiments, ranging from garden suburbs to model tenements. More than merely offering modern amenities, each of these places was specifically designed so as to prevent the possibility that they would deteriorate into slums.

From 1904 into the 1930s, the G. X. Mathews Company erected hundreds of three-story multi-unit buildings in Ridgewood, Astoria, Woodside, Elmhurst, and Sunnyside. With their distinctive yellow and orange brick facades (the brick came from the Kreischer brickworks on Staten Island), Mathews Model Flats provided new apartments at affordable rents. In 1915, the company exhibited their model flats at the Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco to great acclaim.⁹ The six-unit buildings were attractive and solidly built, but they were still railroad flats, and lacked any connection to open space or greenery.

Queens offered an opportunity to remake the city, not only by reducing density, but also by demonstrating an alternative vision of urban living. These exemplary developments included Forest Hills Gardens (1909), arguably the finest expression of the suburban ideal, Jackson Heights (1911–1920s), the first garden apartment community, and Sunnyside Gardens.¹⁰ Forest Hills Gardens was conceived as a railroad suburb, while Jackson Heights and Sunnyside Gardens were built along the new subway lines, a difference reflected in the overall design and density of each community.