Sunnyside Gardens' Fate Up To Landmarks Commission
BY THOMAS COGAN

The Landmarks Preservation Commission hearing on Sunnyside Gardens, held Tuesday, April 17, was the meeting that would at last lead to a decision by the commission, either to confer landmark status on the neighborhood and make it a historic district or decline to and let it remain the Special Planned Community Preservation District it has been since 1974. Previously, there were three meetings in Sunnyside (in November, January and February), at which parties favoring landmark status or opposed to it debated to a standoff. There was a request that this final meeting be held in Sunnyside also, but the commission wanted to exert hegemony at its offices on the ninth floor of the Municipal Building in Manhattan, so there the speakers for and against landmarking gathered for a session that began at 2 p.m.

It was close to 6:30 before LPC Chairman Robert B. Tierney called the last speaker- who failed to come to the rostrum, causing groans of relief among those still present. The number of speakers had certainly exceeded 50 people. A great deal that had been heard at the previous three meetings was heard again, including accusations by the anti-landmark people that landmark proponents had lied about the number of real signatures on a petition they had compiled or had informed on their adversaries to the Department of Buildings about illegal changes the anti-landmark people allegedly had made to their houses; while the landmark proponents accused their opponents of indifference or hostility to the ideal that Sunnyside Gardens is supposed to represent. "Landmarking is a noble thing," said one of the anti-landmarkers, though she believed it could not apply to a whole neighborhood- not this one, anyway. Many speakers invoked the sainted name of Lewis Mumford, the chronicler of urban life everywhere, who lived on 44th Street in Sunnyside Gardens from 1927 to 1936. Landmarking proponents imagined him as an unwavering defender of the original Stein and Wright plan for Sunnyside, therefore favoring landmark status; opponents cited him as favoring people before architecture, therefore likely to disparage landmarking.

Architecture was sacred to those seeking landmark status but mattered less or not at all to those opposed to it. Of the latter, John Ward frequently waved an AIA Guide in the air, saying that this bible of the American Institute of Architecture had adjudged Sunnyside's houses, made of Hudson River brick, to be undistinguished as architecture, though the neighborhood was praised. Ward's apparent conclusion was that a big fuss was being made over something mediocre, but as a local resident it was his mediocrity and he wanted to be left to do with it as he wished. Warren Lehrer, a local resident, a professor of design at State University of New York (SUNY) Purchase and an opponent of landmarking, called Sunnyside "an engaged and active community" that had no need of these putative protectors. He suggested that many of the proponents, who he called "professional preservationists", were not even residents of Sunnyside. He said that the LPC had been scouting the boroughs for something or someplace to landmark, but that didn't justify picking out Sunnyside Gardens. "We don't want to be your trophy neighborhood," he said, adding in conclusion that Mumford loved the community of Sunnyside Gardens but didn't find it an architectural masterpiece.

The debate went back and forth. One of the anti-landmark advocates became sectional, designating the houses and apartments south of Skillman Avenue, where he lives, as SOSA and seeming to fancy its residents as proletarian and struggling, in contrast to the complacent bourgeoisie on the other side of the street. The argument was inexact; dedicated landmark opponents could be found on the north side (which, happily, nobody called NOSA) and proponents could be found in SOSA, but the attempt to make a face-off of the conflict was interesting- and was aided in effect by another SOSA resident and landmark opponent who called herself and her neighbors "Sunnyside's stepchildren".

The pro-landmark forces had a triumphant moment when Fiona Lowenstein, a 13-year-old great-great granddaughter of Henry Wright, cocreator of Sunnyside Gardens, spoke. She surveyed Wright's achievement of building a neighborhood of different-sized homes for people of varying incomes, then said that that particular neighborhood, Sunnyside Gardens, could best be preserved by making it a historic district. She left to wild applause. Speakers from Redburn, New Jersey and Colonial Terraces in Newburgh, New York, two other neighborhoods created by Henry Wright, declared for landmarking, saying landmarking or similar programs where they live, are best for the preservation of the community. Sometimes, similar arguments came to opposite conclusions. A woman in local residence for nearly half a century said if she had to sell her house, buyers would be discouraged by regulations, but Fred Tosi, one of the final speakers, said he and his wife have had lots of offers and would probably have more if the landmark regulations he favored were implemented. A woman said she didn't want to become trapped in a historic district with "little brown street signs", but another responded that she couldn't wait for Sunnyside Gardens to become a historic district, finishing with, "Give us those brown street signs!"

Further comments in writing are welcomed by the Landmarks Preservation Commission until Tuesday, May 1. If the commission declares in favor of making Sunnyside Gardens a landmark historic district, that decision will then go to the Department of City Planning for further review.