Run to Sunnyside Gardens, Queens... via the Brooklyn Navy Yard, Williamsburg, Greenpoint, Blissville and Sunnyside

To best view the slideshow, click on the black border first, then the blue play button. If you click the green play button or the photo first, you will be redirected to my Picasa page. It's a bug I hope Google fixes soon.

There was a time when reformist urban planners embraced the suburb. Sunnyside Gardens remains an example of suburbanism at its best. Here's how the AIA Guide to New York City describes it:

Seventy-seven acres of barren, mosquito-infested land were transformed into a great and successful experiment in urban housing design by the City Housing Corporation... Forced into using the preordained street grid, architects Stein and Wright arranged row housing to face both the street and the interior garden spaces. Walk under umbrellas of London plane trees along the paths that penetrate each block, where the architecture is unimportant, but the urban arrangements a source of urbane delight. Lewis Mumford lived here from 1925 to 1936.

Sunnyside Gardens is part of the larger community of Sunnyside, which is known for it's large populations of Asian, Latin American and Irish immigrants.

This run was about 13.5 miles. Along the way, it passes through the sparsely populated area (unless you count 3 million dead people) along the Newtown Creek, a body of water most New Yorkers couldn't name even if they've crossed it a thousand times. I found an interesting blog about this placeless place, by a much, much better photographer: Newtown Pentacle. The next run will be a one-way down the entire length of Flatbush, to Rockaway and the island neighborhood of Broad Channel.

Here's my GPS unit's map of the run.