Pre-1909 The area was farmed in colonial times by the Bragaw family, French Huguenot settlers who acquired land at Dutch Kills in 1690. During the
Revolution, British forces occupied the Sunnyside area from 1776 to 1783, billeting troops in the colonial farmhouses along old Middleburgh Avenue (now 39th Avenue) to control the strategic "Narrow Passage" at the junction of present-day Northern Boulevard, Woodside Avenue, and Newtown Avenue. According to the local historian Vincent F. Seyfried, Richard Bragaw built a gambrel-roofed house "in the English style atop Sunnyside Hill" in 1790, on the line of present-day 32nd Place between Northern Boulevard and Skillman Avenue; the house was demolished in July 1903 after the
Pennsylvania Railroad acquired the property as part of the land assembly for the
Sunnyside Yards. South of Jackson Avenue, the Fitting, Gosman, Heiser, Lowery, and Van Buren families owned farms that were subdivided in the 1880s and 1890s, and a small hamlet built between Northern and Queens Boulevards came to be known as Sunnyside. The
Pennsylvania Railroad adopted a plan in 1901 for a large rail yard in the area, and between 1902 and 1905 it acquired the land south of Northern Boulevard between 21st and 43rd Streets, much of which was low-lying marshland. In 1922 the
Metropolitan Life Insurance Company broke ground on the Metropolitan Houses, an early Sunnyside multi-family apartment complex on the blocks bounded by Queens Boulevard, 48th Avenue, 48th Street, and 49th Street; the complex was later renamed Cosmopolitan Houses after Met Life sold the property, and portions remain federally subsidized. In 1901, the
Irish-American Athletic Club established Celtic Park near 48th Avenue and 43rd Street as a venue for
Gaelic games and other Irish-American sporting events. The athletic field closed in the 1930s and the Celtic Park Apartments were built on the site. The athletic club's symbol, the Winged Fist, is commemorated in the city's co-naming of the intersection of 43rd Street and 48th Avenue as "Winged Fist Way".
1924–1928 Between 1924 and 1928, the City Housing Corporation, a limited-dividend organization led by developer
Alexander Bing, built
Sunnyside Gardens on a 77-acre site of about 16 blocks north of Queens Boulevard, between 43rd and 51st Streets. Architects
Clarence Stein,
Henry Wright, and
Frederick L. Ackerman, working with landscape architect
Marjorie Sewell Cautley, designed the development as a
garden city–inspired community of low-rise attached brick houses arranged around shared interior courts. The development comprised 1,202 housing units and was the first major American application of the principles of
Ebenezer Howard and
Raymond Unwin. It was promoted by the
Regional Planning Association of America, whose members included
Lewis Mumford.
1929–1960 In 1931, the philanthropic Phipps Houses organization, founded by the family of steel industrialist
Henry Phipps Jr., opened the
Phipps Garden Apartments at 39th Avenue and 50th Street, on land adjoining Sunnyside Gardens. Designed by Clarence Stein, the original 1931 complex consisted of 22 connected four- and six-story buildings housing 344 families, arranged around a landscaped interior courtyard. A second group of thirteen four-story buildings was added on the northern portion of the superblock in 1935. The Depression brought heavy losses to the new homeowners of Sunnyside Gardens; about half lost their homes to foreclosure during the 1930s, and marshals attempting evictions were sometimes met with organized resistance. and the
DuMont Television Network broadcast a weekly program,
Boxing From Sunnyside Gardens, from the venue from 1949 to 1950. The arena was demolished in late 1977; a memorial monument was installed at the former site (now a Wendy's restaurant) in October 2012, and a portion of 45th Street was co-named in its honor in 2014. On August 6, 1931, the jazz cornetist
Bix Beiderbecke died in his apartment at 43-30 46th Street.
1960s–1990s Beginning in the 1960s and accelerating after the
Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, successive waves of immigrants settled in Sunnyside. In July 1977,
The New York Times reported that Armenian refugees fleeing the
civil war in Lebanon were resettling in the neighborhood, describing how "the exotic sounds of spoken Armenian have been spreading in the homey sidestreets of Sunnyside, Queens." Korean, Turkish, and Romanian immigrants arrived in the 1980s, and Mexican immigrants in growing numbers in the 1990s and 2000s. Through the 1990s, Sunnyside also saw a resurgence of its Irish community alongside the existing Korean, Spanish, Romanian, German, and Greek populations, with several Irish pubs opening on or near Queens Boulevard as gathering places for a younger generation of Irish residents. Subsequent immigration also drew significant numbers of arrivals from the
Andean countries of
Ecuador,
Colombia,
Peru, and
Bolivia, and from
Bangladesh and
Nepal, joining established Irish, Italian, Greek, German, and Polish residents. In 1974 the
New York City Department of City Planning designated Sunnyside Gardens a Special Planned Community Preservation District (together with
Fresh Meadows,
Parkchester, and the
Harlem River Houses) to protect the original design. A further preservation campaign by neighborhood residents culminated in the
New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission's designation of Sunnyside Gardens (including Phipps Garden Apartments) as a New York City historic district on June 26, 2007. In 2018, after several years of debate touched off by the death of cyclist Gelacio Reyes the previous year, the
New York City Department of Transportation installed parking-protected bicycle lanes on Skillman and 43rd Avenues. The project was opposed by some local merchants and by
Queens Community Board 2, which voted against it, but was directed to proceed by Mayor
Bill de Blasio and Council Member
Jimmy Van Bramer. In 2017 the
New York City Economic Development Corporation and Amtrak began a feasibility study for residential development above
Sunnyside Yard. A master plan released in March 2020 proposed a 12,000-unit deck of
affordable housing above the active rail yard along with 60 acres of new public open space; the plan was not advanced to construction during the
de Blasio administration. Mayor
Zohran Mamdani revived the proposal in March 2026. In December 2020,
Queens Community Board 2 voted 28 to 12 to support a Phipps Houses application to rezone a parking lot at 50-25 Barnett Avenue, on the campus of the existing Phipps Garden Apartments, to permit a seven-story, 167-unit
affordable housing building. Twenty-five units were reserved for formerly homeless families at 40 percent of the area median income, with the balance offered at 90 percent of AMI. The proposal drew opposition from some Phipps Garden Apartments tenants and from State Senator
Michael Gianaris and Assembly Member
Brian Barnwell, who cited concerns about Phipps Houses's management of its existing properties and the affordability of the proposed rents. The completed building's housing lottery launched in April 2026. ==Architecture and housing==