Monday, October 19, 2009

Where does Steve Suffet come from?


Sunnyside is a neighborhood in the western portion of the New York City borough of Queens, in New York state, in the United States. It shares borders with Hunters Point and Long Island City to the west, Astoria to the north, Woodside to the east and Maspeth to the south.
Sunnyside's residents are of various ethnic backgrounds including Albanian, Armenian, Bangladeshi, Chinese, Colombian, Dominican, Ecuadorian, Filipino, Hungarian, Indian, Irish, Eastern European Jews, Greek, Japanese, Korean, Mexican, Nepali, Romanian, and Turkish.
Sunnyside developed after the Queensboro Bridge was completed in 1909. Before that, the neighborhood was mostly small farms and marshland. A large portion of the neighborhood is six-story apartment buildings constructed during the 1920s and '30s. The land was originally owned by French settlers in the 1800s. Sunnyside is derived from Sunnyside Hill Farms, so named by the Bragraws family who owned the land.
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 only two private parks in New York City, Gramercy Park being the other (read more...)

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