Читать книгу Sunnyside Gardens - Jeffrey A. Kroessler - Страница 25

While Forest Hills Gardens represented the highest expression of the railroad suburb, Jackson Heights set a standard for urban housing along new rapid transit lines. The Queensboro Corporation, named for the recently completed Queensboro Bridge, was founded in August 1909. William F. Wyckoff, descendant of one of Brooklyn’s oldest families and president of the Homestead Bank and the Woodhaven Bank, headed the enterprise, but the driving force was the thirty-five-year-old general manager, Edward Archibald MacDougall, an experienced real estate man who had already been involved in several other suburban developments in Queens—Kissena Park North and Kissena Park South, Terminal Heights in Woodside, and Elmhurst Square.¹⁹ The Queensboro Corporation dwarfed those earlier ventures, both in scale and execution.

In 1914, the Queensboro Corporation commenced construction of blocks of elegant apartment buildings for middle-class families. The early ones went up near Northern Boulevard, which had trolley lines running to the bridge. Plans for the new Dual Subway System were well advanced, though it would be three years before the elevated line was in operation. Even so, the corporation’s advertisements touted the subway as a prime attraction. Until then, the buses of the Fifth Avenue Coach Company provided a direct commute over the bridge into Manhattan.

The architects of Forest Hills Gardens planned their suburb to be set apart from the city and consciously rejected all urban forms. The curving streets, the spacious lawns, the emphasis on privacy, and the restrictive covenants combined to reinforce the distinctiveness of the place. Jackson Heights, on the other hand, fit comfortably into the urban grid, and the buildings seemingly embraced those constraints. Although the Queensboro Corporation would erect a few blocks of one-family homes, the predominant form was the apartment building. Unlike Manhattan, where the buildings went up without any consistent design, covering as much as 80 percent of the lot and crowded together to utilize every inch of street front, the apartment buildings in Jackson Heights adapted some of the most innovative features of the English garden cities and pioneered the concept of the garden apartment in the United States. The buildings were set back from the street to create a small garden in front, and the rear yards were treated as landscaped parks for residents. This arrangement guaranteed ample light and air, far more, in fact, than the tenement laws mandated.

The Queensboro Corporation erected only a few buildings before the war, which brought most residential construction to a halt. Construction resumed in 1919, and a year later the Newtown Register estimated that one tenth of the 3,862 apartments then under construction in the city were being built in Jackson Heights.²⁰ Jackson Heights was soon recognized as offering the most innovative residences in the city, with extraordinarily high standards of design and materials.

Interior garden of The Towers, Jackson Heights (Andrew Thomas, architect, 1924), circa 1940. The Chateau is visible beyond. (Courtesy of the Queens Borough Public Library, Archives, Thomas Langan Collection.)

Nothing articulated the distinction between Jackson Heights and Manhattan more than the introduction of free-standing apartment buildings and the generously landscaped inner courtyards extending the entire length of the block. Even the most expensive new buildings along Fifth Avenue or Park Avenue lacked such features. To further enhance the appeal of Jackson Heights for the urban middle class, the corporation built tennis courts and set aside eight square blocks for a golf course; residents could even putter in their own garden plots. This was a creative exercise in land-banking, as each of these amenities was eliminated over time to make way for new construction. Integral to the success of Jackson Heights was the introduction of a co-operative ownership plan, presenting families with the opportunity to own rather than rent, and thus combining a defining feature of suburbia with urban living. These were among the first co-ops in the city. During the Great Depression, however, many apartment owners fell into foreclosure and the units became rentals; they remained rentals until the first wave of co-op conversions began in the 1970s.²¹