|
Sunnyside
Sunnyside is a neighborhood in northwestern Queens, lying within
Long Island City and bounded to the north by the Sunnyside Yards,
to the east by Calvary Cemetery and 51st Street, to the south
by the Long Island Expressway, and to the west by Van Dam Street.
The area is named for a roadhouse built on Jackson Avenue to accommodate
visitors to the Fashion Race Course in Corona during the 1850s
and 1860s. A small hamlet was built between Northern and Queens
boulevards and became known as Sunnyside.
Most of the land was low-lying and therefore cheap; from 1902
to 1905 the Pennsylvania Railroad gradually bought up all the
land south of Northern Boulevard between 21st and 43rd Streets.
The entire area was leveled and the swamps filled in by 1908 and
the yards opened in 1910. The Queensboro Bridge opened in 1909
and from it was built Queens Boulevard, which ran to the center
of the borough through Sunnyside, where streets were built along
the boulevard. Sunnyside Gardens (1924-29), a complex of attached
houses of two and a half stories, with front and rear gardens
and a landscaped central court, was on e of the nation's
first planned communities, hailed for its innovative design by
such scholars of urban life as Lewis Mumford (a onetime resident).
During the following years the neighborhood became middle class,
and largely Irish. During the 1940s and 1950s its large apartments
enticed many artists and writers and their families to leave their
cramped quarters in lower Manhattan, and the area became known
as the "maternity ward of Greenwich Village." Sunnyside
during the 1980s attracted immigrants from Korea, Colombia, Romania,
and China, though on the whole fewer immigrants than some of the
surrounding neighborhoods in northeastern Queens.
The Sunnyside Railyards are used by the Long Island Rail Road,
Conrail, and Amtrak. The Knickerbocker Laundry nearby is a striking
example of art moderne architecture.
Vincent Seyfried, Encyclopedia of New York City, Edited by
Kenneth T. Jackson. New Haven, Yale University Press. 1995.
|
