Sunnyside - Queens
Winged Fists, Golden Gloves and a Utopia Deferred.
Not to be confused with Staten Island's Sunnyside, where 9th-degree black belt and actor Grandmaster Kim once ran afoul of the NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission, this week's newsletter looks at Sunnyside, Queens. As far as I know, the dual Sunnysides are one of only two pairs of neighborhoods in the city that share the same name, the other being Manhattan’s Murray Hill and its lesser-known Queens sibling.
The Sunnyside in Queens, between the Sunnyside Rail Yard and the LIE/BQE interchange, is bisected by Queens Boulevard, with the great, curving vaults of the elevated train tracks running above. To the south, the buildings are a mix of five- and six-story co-ops and freestanding homes, while the north is dominated by the historic district of Sunnyside Gardens, a leafy enclave of red-brick Colonial Revival homes and apartment buildings.
The neighborhood's eastern border is made up of Woodside and Calvary Cemetery, while its western border is (by most accounts) 39th Street. Not to be confused with 39th Place, which, in true Queens fashion, runs one block parallel.
The neighborhood got its name from the Broucard family, French Huguenots who arrived in the U.S. in 1675 aboard the Gilded Otter. Bourgon Broucard initially settled in Bushwick, but, perhaps growing weary of all the bespoke cooperages and farm-to-table johnnycake pop-ups, he bought a large estate in what is now Sunnyside from the fantastically named Burger Jorizz. In 1713, Broucard, or one of his sons, named their estate "Sunnyside Hill."
One of the homes that Bourgon built stood for over 200 years before it was finally torn down around 1900. By then the farmland was giving way to the city: the Queensboro Bridge was completed in 1909, and the IRT Flushing Line, connecting Queens with Manhattan, was finished by 1915. Queens had become a viable residential option for people who worked in Manhattan, though, as this photo from 1917 shows, it still had a long way to go.
WINGED FISTS
On the cusp of this change, a group of Irish immigrants and their allies founded the Greater New York Irish Athletic Association, a progressive alternative to the exclusive New York Athletic Club. In 1898 they purchased farmland near Calvary Cemetery and built Celtic Park, a sprawling athletic complex that for the next three decades was home to some of the world’s best athletes.
Renamed the Irish-American Athletic Club, it quickly gained fame not just for its champions but for its inclusivity. In an era when many athletic organizations barred Catholics, Jews, and African-Americans, Celtic Park welcomed them. Its members went on to win more than fifty Olympic medals. Among them were Joseph Flanagan, the first Irish athlete to win gold for the U.S.; Myer Prinstein, the first Jewish-American Olympic champion; and Dr. John Baxter Taylor Jr., the first African-American to claim gold for the U.S.
Besides training and hosting sporting events, the grounds were a popular gathering spot for labor unions, fraternal lodges, and neighborhood families. On a warm Sunday afternoon in July 1922, more than 5,000 people gathered in the park for the 23rd annual picnic of the International Union of Steam and Operating Engineers. There was a baseball game with nearly a thousand fans surrounding the field. Nearby, a hurling match was just underway.
Hurling is a 3,000-year-old mix of field hockey, lacrosse, and violence which involves two teams of 15 sprinting up and down a field alternately bouncing, catching, and hitting a ball off a wooden paddle called a hurley and clotheslining each other.
Those not involved in playing or spectating that afternoon lazed in the grass, polishing off the remnants of their corned beef and cabbage sandwiches.
At 5:30 in the afternoon, just as the baseball game was entering the bottom of the ninth inning, Police Lieutenant Robert McCarthy witnessed James Sullivan of 113 East 75th Street take a flask out of his pocket and pass it to another man who took a long swig before handing it back. McCarthy, who was working undercover along with three other plainclothes policemen after complaints that the park was a hotbed of bootlegging activity, moved in to make an arrest. He was immediately surrounded by hundreds of parkgoers who abandoned their sandwiches and their games to see what the commotion was about. One of the hurley players took his paddle and hit McCarthy on the head. He also hit someone standing next to McCarthy for good measure. Then all hell broke loose.
Sullivan and McCarthy fell to the ground and the mob started kicking the officer's head, though just as many blows landed on his captive. It was a free-for-all and "anybody who happened to be near anybody else received at least one punch in the jaw.”1
Mounted patrolman Robert Farrell arrived as backup but was promptly knocked off his horse by a flying brick. It was at this point that someone started shooting. One of the officers took a bullet in his lower back. Three other civilians were caught in the crossfire, including 18-year-old Ruth Curley, who was shot in the abdomen and barely survived. She had arrived from Ireland just two months earlier.
By the 1930s, Celtic Park's glory days were behind it. After a brief stint as a greyhound track, an unwelcome development for the rapidly growing residential neighborhood, the land was sold off to developers.
Today, the former oval track is home to two blocks of apartment buildings and a massive solar-roofed parking lot. The half-block-long diagonal street, Celtic Ave, is the only evidence of the storied facility.
SUNNYSIDE GARDENS
Between 1924 and 1929, sixteen blocks of Hudson Brick row houses and co-op apartments rose along the edge of the Sunnyside train yards. The development, called Sunnyside Gardens, was inspired by the Garden City movement, the brainchild of English planner Ebenezer Howard.
Howard’s ideas were themselves shaped by Edward Bellamy’s 1888 utopian novel Looking Backward: 2000–1887. In Bellamy’s story, the protagonist falls asleep in 1887 Boston and wakes in the year 2000 to a socialist utopia with no war, no garbage, no advertisements, no money, no political parties and no inequality. The book became a bestseller, and Howard was particularly struck by Bellamy’s vision of collective ownership and shared prosperity. In his own treatise, Garden Cities of To-Morrow, Howard proposed building satellite towns ringed by permanent greenbelts, a perfect harmony of city and nature.
Sunnyside Gardens adapted Howard’s ideas on a smaller scale. It emerged from the Regional Planning Association of America, an urban reform association founded in 1923, and was realized by developer Alexander Bing and architects Clarence Stein, Henry Wright, and Frederick Lee Ackerman. After purchasing 77 acres of land from the Pennsylvania Railroad for roughly 50 cents an acre, the City Housing Corporation, presided over by Bing, began to build its own garden city.
Only 30 percent of the land was developed, the rest was reserved as shared green space. Instead of private yards, residents enjoyed communal courtyards running between rows of houses.
Garages were located on the neighborhood’s periphery. At its border, they built Sunnyside Gardens Park, still the largest private park in New York City.
Sunnyside resident and architectural critic Lewis Mumford wrote about the neighborhood:
What the houses themselves lacked in imaginative design, the community as a whole made up for in open spaces, carefully reserved for public use, in playgrounds and gardens on a scale then unheard of anywhere else in the city, and in opportunities for spontaneous neighborliness. Something more than our isolation, something more than the fact that the rear gardens and lawns were not choked with asphalt pavements and garages, gave us the sense of a common purpose. Even those who were only grasping at a ‘good buy’ found themselves enjoying a good life….
A socialist utopia, however, is no match for a capitalist society, especially one in the midst of a depression.
By 1932, half of New York’s factories had closed and one in three residents was unemployed. Homeowners in Sunnyside Gardens suddenly found themselves underwater on their mortgages. Ironically, the strong sense of community the founders had envisioned reached its full potential during the ensuing mortgage strike. More than 300 of the 563 homeowners joined in, refusing to pay fees or make mortgage payments. Even Lewis Mumford joined the protest.
Because the CHC had capped its profits at six percent, it had no reserves to support residents and declared bankruptcy in 1935. Neighbors fought the evictions. Furniture carried out the front door and placed on the sidewalk was carried back in through the rear. Women refused to leave their chairs as marshals tried to haul them away. Doors were barricaded with sandbags and barbed wire, while sacks of flour and pepper rained down on officials from above. Protesters even gathered on the courthouse steps in Long Island City, broomsticks in hand, singing parodies of The Battle Hymn of the Republic.
Glory to the six-percenters, / Who are out to make us renters, / What a pity we’re dissenters, / We’ll stay in Sunnyside.
In the end, nearly 60 percent of residents lost their homes to foreclosure.
When the 40-year deed covenants expired in the mid-1960s, some owners rushed to add driveways, decks, fences, and even swimming pools. To preserve its character, the city designated Sunnyside Gardens a Special Planned Community Preservation District, one of only four in New York, along with Fresh Meadows, the Harlem River Houses, and Parkchester, making new alterations illegal without a special permit.
Finally, in 2007, after years of contentious back-and-forth among residents, the neighborhood was officially landmarked.
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FROM WHO'S THE BOSS TO WHERE'S THE BEEF
On the other side of the neighborhood, Jay Gould II, champion tennis player and grandson of infamous robber baron Jay Gould, built a private tennis club at the intersection of Queens Boulevard and 45th Street, then still farmland. In 1947, the red brick building with its large roof gables was sold and began its second life as a boxing and wrestling arena. Back before live television brought boxing to people’s living rooms, Sunnyside Gardens Arena was one of dozens of smaller arenas in the city offering fans a night at the fights.
Boxers like Floyd Patterson, Emile Griffith, and Gerry Cooney all fought there on their way to becoming world champions. Before he became Judith Light's live-in housekeeper on Who's the Boss, Tony Danza also sparred in the arena.
The dingy 2,500-seat venue, thick with cigar smoke and rowdy fans, was described as boxing's minor leagues, a "boxing emporium for fighters on the way up and on the way down," and, if you were lucky, a stepping stone to Madison Square Garden. It also hosted wrestling bouts with future hall of famers like Bruno Sammartino and "Nature Boy" Buddy Rogers.
Abe Coleman, the "Hebrew Hercules" from Forest Hills, who was just 5'4" but weighed 220 pounds, was a regular. Dubbed a “master of the art of grunts, groans and grimaces," he is credited with introducing the dropkick into wrestling, inspired, he claimed, after observing some kangaroos while on a tour of Australia.
On the other end of the spectrum was Haystacks Calhoun, who stood a full foot taller than Coleman and outweighed him by nearly 400 pounds. The dropkick was not in Haystacks' arsenal, so his finishing move was the Big Splash, essentially a slow-motion belly flop on top of his supine opponent.
While Haystacks’ massive size undoubtedly contributed to his early death at just 55, Abe Coleman made it to 101 years old!
The last fight at Sunnyside Gardens Arena, a boxing match between Ramon Ranquello and Bob Smith, occurred on June 24, 1977. The building was demolished later that year and has been home to a Wendy's ever since.
SIGHTS AND SOUNDS
This week’s audio features some parakeets, some trains and a little bit of meditative flute inside Sunnyside’s Spicy Nepal.
FEATURED PHOTOGRAPHER
I first became familiar with photographer Bryan Formhals’ work through his LPV podcast which covered photographers and photobooks. I knew at some point he lived in Sunnyside, so I reached out to him about using some of his photographs for this week’s feature. Walking is a big part of Bryan’s photography practice and several of the photobooks he has made document his walks around the city.
I use photography as a learning tool to help me understand how we navigate the geography of American cities. My projects focus on the public realm, transit networks, and urban green spaces. Creating photographs sparks further research into urbanism, design, and infrastructure, which in turn shapes how my projects evolve over time. Walking is central to the practice—a cinematic, ritualistic experience that slows me down and sharpens observation.
To see more of Bryan’s work, visit his website: photography.bryanformhals.com
ODDS AND END
Though Sunnyside Gardens Park is private, it opens to the public for several events throughout the year. The 8th annual Queens United International Party (QUIP) returns to the park on September 20th, and it looks like a great line up.
Photographer Arthur Nager spent a day documenting wrestlers at the Sunnyside Gardens Arena in 1971. His book from that day, straightforwardly titled Wrestling at Sunnyside Garden Arena, is being reprinted.
Scenes of Sunnyside features a ton of before and after pictures of the neighborhood.
There is no shortage of good food options in the neighborhood. Restaurants like Bolivian Llama Party and I Love Paraguay are local favorites. I had a great meal at Spicy Nepal, which features, uh, spicy Nepalese food.
On January 30, 1973, a makeup-free KISS played their first show at the Popcorn Pub on Queens Boulevard to roughly 10 people. The club was soon renamed the Coventry and hosted bands like the Ramones, Blondie and the New York Dolls before shutting down in the late ‘70s.
New York Herald, New York, New York · Monday, July 24, 1922
"I want to fight in an epic championship boxing match! Where's my opponent?"
"Sir, this is a Wendy's."
If I recall correctly, one of the climactic boxing matches in the movie Cinderella Man took place at the Sunnyside Garden Arena.
Great piece - loved it. I lived in Sunnyside for 12 years. Appropriately, my stop on the 7 train was 46th Bliss Street. Even though my apartment wasn't exactly blissful, it always gave me a smile to come home to Bliss.