Sunnyside Garden’s couple showcase home in NY Times
NY TIMES REAL ESTATE
Accessorized With Stroller and Rake
JULIE SIMONSON, a research pharmacist whose flat accent reveals her Chicago-area roots, grew up in a forest. Her childhood home was surrounded as far as the eye could see by towering deciduous trees whose names and characteristics she knew so well that she could identify virtually every one by its leaf.
Although Ms. Simonson eventually moved to New York, she yearned to live near trees the way some people long to live near a Starbucks. So it is fitting that she, along with her husband, Jesse Nover, and their year-old daughter, Maya, have ended up in Sunnyside Gardens, Queens. Though not in a forest, their two-story attached house is surrounded by considerably more in the way of trees and other greenery than many New York dwellings of its type.
To people interested in cities, Sunnyside Gardens, a collection of redbrick buildings, nearly all of them row houses set along landscaped courtyards, is hallowed ground of a sort. The complex, which opened in 1924, is one of the nation’s best-known planned communities, and for 11 years the celebrated architecture critic Lewis Mumford lived not in some spiffy apartment house in Manhattan but in this leafy outpost well east of the city’s heart.
It was the presence of trees that drew Ms. Simonson to this part of the city. Her journey began in late 2003, when she met her future husband, who works as what he describes as an “information architect” for a technology company with offices in Manhattan.
For the rest of the story: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/29/realestate/29habi.html
