Sunnyside Gardens' Status Gets Mixed Reaction
BY THOMAS COGAN

The Landmarks Preservation Commission unanimously voted in late June to designate Sunnyside Gardens as a historic district after conducting four public meetings, from November to April, on the issue of landmark status. With final approval by the City Council a near certainty, Sunnyside should find itself officially historic within a few months. The issue of landmarking, however, was divisive. In the wake of the LPC's decision, those in agreement see it as a preventive to the breakdown of the original planned community, while those in disagreement see it as too much official concentration on the neighborhood and not enough on the neighbors therein.

"This is not a quiet country lane," said a woman as she looked out the window of her house on 47th Street between Skillman Avenue and 43rd Avenue. She was indicating that the promise of city living without city noise that Sunnyside Gardens offered 80 years ago could no longer be offered and could not be recaptured by granting landmark status to the neighborhood or designated houses therein.

On the other hand, "People who are for landmarking are just for it, not battling some opposing agenda," Laura Heim, a Sunnyside resident and architect with an office on 46th Street near Skillman with a sign in its window proclaiming Sunnyside as New York's latest landmark community, said.

"The landmark designation will make living in Sunnyside a lot more expensive and have a gentrifying effect," said Susan Meiklejohn, who teaches who teaches urban affairs and planning at Hunter College. What's more, she believes, it has come at a time when Sunnyside "was looking better anyway".

The resident of 47th Street, who requested anonymity, said she and her neighbors in the so-called SOSA or "south of Skillman Avenue" part of Sunnyside Gardens, have felt excluded from the time the landmark issue was first considered. "This is somebody's cash cow," she said, believing that such a person or persons want an "elitist neighborhood". As for herself and her neighbors: "We didn't have a fighting chance," she said, and thus now have to deal with a commission that presents each homeowner with "a new set of rules about the house you bought and paid for". She observed also that the ethnic mix she finds on her street is something "you can't landmark", and summarized: "The things that make Sunnyside a pleasure are not things you can landmark." In her neighborhood's ethnic mix are Hans Rotzoll and Leo Navarro, Middle European and Mexican, respectively. The former said he was on a fixed income and in no position to carry out the changes requested by the LPC in a letter sent to him months ago; the latter pointed out that if he tried to repair a leakage problem in his front doorway he would be doing something illegal in the eyes of the LPC.

Laura Heim said landmark designation should mean fewer changes in Sunnyside Gardens houses from now on, but otherwise they are likely to retain the look they have at present, their alterations allowed through grandfathering. The planned community (PC) designation assigned the neighborhood by City Planning in 1974 now must be altered by that bureau and the LPC to reflect the new status, she said. She observed that the matter may not be as complicated as others imply it is; that costs of aligning Sunnyside to historic district standards are "minimal" by comparison with other historic areas, such as Douglaston, since there is great uniformity in Sunnyside buildings (Hudson River brick, roofs mainly of slate,). This is true, she said, because, "We're a planned community."

Meiklejohn, in contrast, said the LPC's decision was not democratic on a neighborhood level and deals more with architecture than with social goals. "It's bricks and mortar regulation," she said. She added with annoyance that the planned community designation from the Planning Commission that had been working will now be rescinded.