The Sunnyside community is located in the borough of Queens, Queens County, just a few minutes from the Queensborough Bridge and the Queens Midtown Tunnel. More cars pass through our commercial district of Queens Boulevard (one of Sunnyside’s restaurant rows) each day than most neighborhoods see in a normal week. Located between the long-established communities of the Blissville, Long Island City and Woodside, our unique location makes us easily accessible to Manhattan and only 17 minutes by train to Grand Central Station or the Empire State Building.

People in our area can often reach the theater district faster then those living in some parts of Manhattan. Sunnyside is convenient, centrally located, and a great place to live, as long-time residents are quick to tell you. 
It’s believed Sunnyside got its name back in 1850 when the railroad built a station across from the Sunnyside Roadhouse Hotel.

Sunnyside is 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 1850's and 1860's. A small hamlet was built between Northern and Queens boulevards and became known as Sunnyside.   

(at left) Rural Sunnyside farmland (circa 1900), Photo from the Van Riper Collection

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. Even today, a persistent gardener digging deep will find the odd car part or railroad tie segment.

The Queensborough 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 basements and attics, front and rear gardens, and a landscaped central court, was one of the nation's first planned communities. Hailed for its innovative design by such scholars as Lewis Mumford (a onetime resident, whose name is part of Skillman Avenue street dual name at 46th Bliss, and who has a commemorative plaque on his former house in 44th Street), the area is a subject of study among architecture students worldwide. During the following years, the neighborhood became middle class, and largely Irish. During the 1940's and 1950's, 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." Some saw it as a communist hotbed, with "Little Red Schoolhouse" the private Manhattan elementary school choice for some residents. 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.

There was a hotly contested battle pro and con to landmark Sunnyside Gardens, which was resolved with a win for the landmark group in 2008 when the area was formally designated as such by the NYC Landsmark Preservation. The anti-landmark group claimed that gentrifying the once low-income housing was against the original goal, and the pro-landmark group felt that the original physical plans would soon be lost if a legal sanction did not occur. The area now is more in harmony with a squirmish every now and then. The value of house sales in Sunnyside Gardens and the surrounding area has not seen the stronger decreases noted in Manhattan. 

 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."

The German, Irish, Czech, Dutch and other Europeans were among the first groups to establish themselves in our area. However, as their children grew up, they moved to Long Island and upstate New York looking for more rural areas that were more like the early beginnings of the neighborhood they grew up in. Meanwhile, Sunnyside continues to grow and thrive and change. Today, we are a melting pot of people contentedly living together - Turkish, Roumanian, South American, Chinese, Korean, Filopino and once again the Irish are relocating here. Today, while still mixed, there has been an influx of white middle class, many of whom push strollers and shop and dine in the more upscale retails outlets which begin to dot the area.

The official flag of Queens

If anyone has any old photographs of Sunnyside please contact our office, we would like to save some of our history before it is lost.  Next time you go through your old pictures remember our office! We are looking for pictures of the John F. Kennedy's picture at the Sunnyside Garden Arena, Mayor Jimmy J. Walker opening the Sunnyside Gardens Park on May 18, 1926, Gleason Centennial Hotel, Miller Hotel, (to mention just a few) and any additional pictures of Sunnyside Pool, Sunnyside Theatre, 43 St. Theater, Knockbocker Laundry Building and anything else you may have of interest. If there are family members in the photographs, so much the better!

(Apologies to the scholar Vincent Seyfried, Encyclopedia of New York City, Edited by Kenneth T. Jackson. New Haven , Yale University Press. 1995, from whom much of this