Phipps Garden Apartments is an apartment complex in

Sunnyside Gardens Sunnyside Gardens is a community within Sunnyside, a neighborhood in the New York City borough of Queens. The area was the first development in the United States patterned after the ideas of the garden city movement initiated in England in the f ...

Queens Queens is a borough of New York City, coextensive with Queens County, in the U.S. state of New York. Located on Long Island, it is the largest New York City borough by area. It is bordered by the borough of Brooklyn at the western tip of Long ...

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the most densely populated major city in the Un ...

. It was built in by Phipps Houses, a philanthropic organization of the

Phipps family The Phipps family of the United States is a prominent American family that descends from Henry Phipps Jr. (1839–1930), a businessman and philanthropist. His father was an English shoemaker who immigrated in the early part of the 19th century t ...

to build

model A model is an informative representation of an object, person or system. The term originally denoted the plans of a building in late 16th-century English, and derived via French and Italian ultimately from Latin ''modulus'', a measure. Models c ...

tenement A tenement is a type of building shared by multiple dwellings, typically with flats or apartments on each floor and with shared entrance stairway access. They are common on the British Isles, particularly in Scotland. In the medieval Old Town, i ...

s for working-class families, along with Henry Wright of Sunnyside Gardens. It is located on 39th Avenue between 50th and 52nd Streets, adjacent to Sunnyside Gardens Park and

Sunnyside Yard Sunnyside Yard is a large coach yard, a railroad yard for passenger cars, in Sunnyside, Queens in New York City. Description The yard is owned by Amtrak and is also used by New Jersey Transit. The shared tracks of the Long Island Rail Road (LIR ...

. Designed by Clarence Stein, The brick buildings feature intricate brick work and curved steel fire escapes. The buildings enclose a landscaped courtyard by landscape architect Marjorie Sewell Cautley. A second, northern group of buildings was built between the first units and the Sunnyside Yard railroad tracks to the north in the late 1930s. Originally, there was a children's playground across the street, also designed by Cautley, but Phipps closed it by the 1990s. In 2007, the

New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) is the New York City agency charged with administering the city's Landmarks Preservation Law. The LPC is responsible for protecting New York City's architecturally, historically, and cu ...

designated the Phipps Garden Apartments as part of the Sunnyside Gardens Historic District.

References

Historic district contributing properties in New York City Residential buildings in Queens, New York National Register of Historic Places in Queens, New York {{QueensNY-struct-stub