Brick rows around shared garden courts, the 7 train above Queens Boulevard and a working rail yard along the northern edge.
What Sunnyside looks like
covers most of sixteen blocks in the northeast of the neighborhood, between and Barnett Avenue, laid out between 1924 and 1928. Clarence Stein and Henry Wright planned each block as a single unit, with two story brick rows around a planted court shared across the interior. Buildings cover 28 percent of the land.
The district has been on the National Register since 1984 and became a city historic district in 2007. The , a larger pair of courtyard complexes Stein designed in the 1930s, stand at the northeast corner.
South of the Gardens the blocks run to prewar apartment buildings and rowhouses. The 7 train runs above on a concrete viaduct opened in 1917, with local stops at 33rd, 40th and 46th Streets.
Queens Boulevard is the main commercial strip, and the stands over 46th Street just off it. has shops between 39th and 49th Streets. Skillman Avenue and 43rd Avenue, the two avenues between the boulevard and the Gardens, have more.
Along the northern edge is , 192 acres of working tracks the Pennsylvania Railroad opened in 1910. Amtrak owns it now and shares it with NJ Transit. The 39th Street bridge crosses the yard, with the Long Island City towers on the far side.
The CBS series Person of Interest shot night scenes on 43rd, 44th, 45th and 46th Streets between 43rd Avenue and Queens Boulevard in October 2014. The Good Wife, another CBS series, had filmed on Skillman Avenue and on 48th and 49th Streets a few days earlier. At the community board meeting that week, a member said the filming had become excessive.
Shot in Sunnyside
Two Spider-Man films have shot in Sunnyside. Homecoming worked on the north side of Queens Boulevard in September 2016, and No Way Home posted street closures on Greenpoint Avenue between 45th and 46th Streets in October 2020 under the working title Serenity Now.
Spider-Man: Homecoming, 2017
Played Queens Boulevard, present day
The production spent a Tuesday in September 2016 shooting against the buildings on the north side of Queens Boulevard between 44th and 45th Streets, with more filming on 43rd Street between 43rd Avenue and the boulevard. No parking signs went up across a large piece of northern Sunnyside for the day.
What Sunnyside can double for
Radburn in Radburn, New Jersey
Clarence Stein and Henry Wright designed Radburn too, starting in 1929, a year after Sunnyside Gardens was laid out. Its brick rows sit around shared parks in the same period and at a similar scale. Radburn's houses turn their fronts to the interior parks rather than the street, with garages on the looping roads behind them, so a street level shot needs the park side rather than the roadway. Try searching brick rows around shared parks now.
Chatham Village in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Stein and Wright designed Chatham Village as well, built between 1932 and 1936, with brick rowhouses arranged around five shared interior courtyards instead of facing the street. The scale and brick construction are close to Sunnyside Gardens, laid out a few years earlier. Chatham Village sits on a hillside with slate roofs and ivy covering the brick, so a wide shot would need to stay tight on a courtyard to hold the match. Try searching brick rowhouses around a courtyard now.
Baldwin Hills Village in Los Angeles, California
Clarence Stein returned as consulting architect for Baldwin Hills Village a decade later, again keeping cars to the perimeter and putting shared gardens at the center of each block. It was built in stucco rather than brick, in a plainer modern style. The white stucco walls and flat rooflines belong to Southern California rather than Queens, so the match holds for the layout of courts and pathways rather than for the buildings themselves. Try searching shared gardens and courts now.
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