Sunnyside Landmarking Meets With Opposition
BY THOMAS COGAN

The people in opposition to landmarking are a broad coalition, ranging from the working class to those who, though perhaps affluent, are allied with those of modest means against what they declare are persons intent on making Sunnyside Gardens an enclave of well-to-do professionals and prosperous business people, favoring fine old buildings and grounds over human aspirations.

Following the meetings of November 29 and January 17, the third Sunnyside landmark meeting, held February 27, would seem to have been the last, and additionally would seem to put interested parties at the threshold of the final decision to make Sunnyside Gardens a historic district, or landmark area. This is not to say that deeming the matter a calendar item, as the Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) said it would do on Tuesday, March 6, would make landmark status an all-but-accomplished fact. With a months-long process ahead, involving a public hearing and the judgment of the Department of City Planning and the City Council, landmarking could still be rejected. At least half of those present at the February meeting were hoping it would be.

The November meeting seemed to put Sunnyside on the march to landmark status. LPC Chairman Robert B. Tierney told an enthusiastic audience at Sunnyside Community Services that the matter could be an item on the commission calendar by late winter, and so it has turned out to be. But there were a few dissenting attendees at that time, and their dissent became more apparent, beginning with the Community Board 2 meeting in January, a build-up to the second landmarks meeting that occurred two weeks later. At that meeting, opposition to landmarking was strong, and it seemed the anti-landmark forces had pulled even. At last Tuesday's meeting they seemed to pull ahead, if only because several new members of the opposition, many of them foreign-born and asserting their rights as neighborhood residents also, populated the forward rows of chairs set up at the SCS center.

The people in opposition to landmarking are a broad coalition, ranging from the working class to those who, though perhaps affluent, are allied with those of modest means against what they declare are persons intent on making Sunnyside Gardens an enclave of well-to-do professionals and prosperous business people, favoring fine old buildings and grounds over human aspirations. To hear them talk at meetings, the anti-landmarkers see their opponents as people who would use landmark status as one tactic to achieve their goal of expelling those they deem their economic inferiors. To look at those in favor of landmarking and hear what they have to say might quickly weaken that indictment, but feelings are strong. Some of the landmark adherents believe that without the protection supposedly guaranteed in a landmark area, pastel aluminum siding, huge shed dormers and wide concrete parking strips would soon replace the Hudson River brick walls, slate roofs and greenery that have made Sunnyside Gardens attractive for more than three-quarters of a century.

Community Board 2 Chairman Joseph Conley conducted the February meeting. He asked Tierney what he could expect if he were living in Sunnyside Gardens and it "went landmark tomorrow". He was alluding to the popular fear that LPC operatives would come around to pester residents about architectural correctness and how they were probably in violation of it. Tierney said the commission had no such roving inspectors; for one thing, it couldn't begin to afford them. A Bengali man was not mollified by such an assurance, saying he had met persons photographing his and his neighbors' houses in the Gardens. One of them told him these buildings were not in compliance with local standards. The Bengali man said he asked the photographer who or what he represented and the man refused to tell him. Tierney said he couldn't have been anybody from the commission. Others spoke of a thousand or so J-peg photos of community residences and wondered why. These antilandmark people have also complained that they were informed of the landmark movement at such a late date they have had little time to muster their opposition to it.

At the meeting, many of those opposed to landmarking said that Sunnyside Gardens was already a Special Planned Community Preservation District, or PC. Within that status, they said, new standards for the community could be developed more democratically than they could be by a small commission in Downtown Manhattan. Landmark advocates scoffed that since Sunnyside became a PC district in 1974, deplorable distortions have repeatedly been committed in the community in spite of it. In 1974, the Planning Commission and the Board of Estimate instituted the PC designation after the 40-year restrictive covenants, signed by the original owners in 1920s Sunnyside, had largely expired. These covenants protected Sunnyside Gardens in its entirety, stipulating that any attempts to alter dwellings or yards had to be approved by a committee of elected trustees. (Some covenants still exist within individual sections of the Gardens.) After July 1974, Article X, Chapter 3, Section 103- 00 of the New York City Zoning Resolution directed those Sunnyside Gardens residents wishing to alter their properties to the City Planning Commission for review and approval. Anti-landmarkers apparently want to depend on this system despite its spotty record of compliance; pro-landmarkers would shift it to the Landmarks Preservation Commission.

In the public commentary period, Nina Tang, a 44th Street resident, said that few if any people go through the PC-Planning Commission process because it is considered a waste of time when so many in the neighborhood simply flout the commission by altering their properties just as they please. She favored landmark status to deliver Sunnyside Gardens from 30 and more years of such futility. Kieran Staunton, a 46th Street resident, said he played by the rules when altering his property, enduring a ULURP (Uniform Land Use Review Procedure) that expended "two years and thousands and thousands of dollars". He told the meeting he believes landmark status would be better, because "most people would agree this system doesn't work". Mary Chang of Harrison Court in the Gardens said that 75 percent of her neighbors favored landmarking and she read some of their letters. Dorothy Morehead, a resident since 1968, said standards of preservation with which she was familiar have disappeared, and now, "it's a free-forall" that must be corrected by landmarking. Others similarly lamented what they saw as a breakdown of standards and called for landmark status. But Alex Ortiz found the landmarking drive disruptive and feared the expense. He said his wife persuaded him to move to Sunnyside because it had a "placid environment", but now he finds that's no longer true. Miriam Allen, who lives on 44th Street, in a house next to the one owned in the 1920s and '30s by Lewis Mumford, said she currently has to answer to her homeowners' association and does not favor accepting the additional bureaucracy of a landmarks commission. Warren Lehrer, a resident for about 20 years, said he would like to "split the difference" between careless freedom and landmark regulation. He also favored residential voting, not decisions by LPC elitists, in matters of standards and preservation. Also speaking of a "third way" was John Ward, a resident who boasted that no one has done more to beautify Sunnyside Gardens in recent years by gardening and landscaping than he has, but who also declared against landmarking and deplored the "ratting out" of neighbors seen to be deviating from traditional norms.

As the third Sunnyside Gardens landmark meeting was coming to an end, Alex Meiklejohn, an anti-landmark resident (whose equally opposed wife Susan, a Hunter professor, produced a study of Sunnyside, both Gardens and non-Gardens areas, in 2005) called it "a meeting about how to landmark" and further described it as "a closed deal" and not "a process" or "a discussion". The Landmarks Preservation Commission, having decided that March 6 is the day the Sunnyside Gardens historic district issue becomes a calendar item, gave him a reason to believe that even before the meeting began. He is one of those in opposition who seem to believe they are waging a good fight but a losing one.

The outcome will be some time in coming and is bound to include an LPC-conducted public hearing. Conley requested that the hearing be held not in Manhattan, but again in Sunnyside. Meiklejohn countered that it wouldn't make any difference. Both, however, are likely to be at that meeting, along with many others, and it is likely to be lively.