Sunnyside, Queens

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Sunnyside is a neighborhood in the western portion of the New York City borough of Queens.The area's residents are of various ethnic backgrounds including Albanian, Armenian, Bangladeshi, Chinese, Colombian, Dominican, Ecuadorian, Filipino, Indian, Irish, Japanese, Korean, Mexican, Romanian, and Turkish. Sunnyside, and neighboring Woodside to the east, are still known for attracting recent Irish immigrants and being that European nation's springboard into the larger American community.

Sunnyside has easy access to Manhattan via the Long Island Expressway and Brooklyn via the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. This small area is surrounded by Woodside to the east and south and Long Island City to the west. The area is served by the 7 Train and the B24, Q32, Q39, Q60, and Q104 buses. PS 199, PS 150, PS 11 and IS 125 are some of the public schools serving the area.

The area developed after the Queensboro Bridge was completed in 1909. Before that, the neighborhood was mostly small farms and marshland. Most of its buildings were put up during the 1920s and '30s. The area is particularly known for one of America's first planned communities: Sunnyside Gardens, constructed from 1924 to 1929. Sunnyside Gardens was one of the first developments to incorporate the "superblock" model in the United States. The residential area has brick row houses of two and a half stories, with front and rear gardens and a landscaped central court shared by all. This model allowed for denser residential development, while also providing ample open/green-space amenities. Clarence Stein and Henry Wright served as the architects and planners for this development, and the landscape architect was Marjorie Sewell Cautley. These well-planned garden homes are now listed as a historic district, and are also home to one of the only two private parks in New York City.

Sunnyside has produced an array of talent, including the entertainers Ethel Merman, Perry Como, Nancy Walker, KJ, Judy Holliday, James Caan and Rudy Vallee; jazz great Bix Biederbecke, artist Raphael Soyer, and writers and social activists such as Lewis Mumford, Mark Starr, Jazz de la Cuevas and A.H. Raskin journalist Elvira Romay , Designer and Artist Javier Arevalo . The Queens-grown punk-rock group "The Ramones" played some of their earliest gigs in Sunnyside pubs during the 1970's. In the years before World War II New York Football Giants star Hap Moran coached a youth football team, the Mustangs, in Sunnyside Park. Also, the famous wrestler Andre the Giant used to fight matches at the neighborhood's now long-gone arena, known as "Sunnyside Garden."

Sunnyside is also the neighborhood in New York where Peter Parker lived with his Aunt May and Uncle Ben in the new Spiderman films. The neighborhood was used for those location shots during filming; in one scene, for example, the 7 Train is clearly visible in the background.

Sunnyside is also host to New York City's only Saint Patrick's Day Parade that allows members of New York City's Gay and Lesbian Irish community to march - the St. Pat's for all Parade [1]. The parade attracts not only important local politicians, such as former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and current Mayor Michael Bloomberg, but also politicians from the larger state and national levels, such as Mayor Jason West of New Paltz, New York, and New York State's junior senator, Hillary Clinton.

Sunnyside is also known for the former Pennsylvania Railroad (now Amtrak) railyard known as Sunnyside Yard. These are a staging area for both Amtrak and New Jersey Transit trains leaving from Penn Station.

As part of the East Side Access project, a new Long Island Rail Road train station will be constructed in Sunnyside at Queens Boulevard along the LIRR’s Main Line (into Penn Station) and will provide one-stop access for area residents to Midtown Manhattan.