There’s much to love in Aaron Timms’s peripheric wander through Sunnyside Yard (“Avant-Yard,” NYRA #41). Like any great critic, Timms is equal parts describer and reorienter: The impressive range of underloved bridges and half-hidden ghost kitchens and iconically situated strip clubs he assesses in his essay contributes to the sense that for over a century all of us in northwestern Queens have been secretly living along a single shore, with prehistoric Lake Sunnyside at the center of our edgelander consciousness.
Timms is brilliant on Sunnyside Yard as “disconnector”—one of the major frustrations of life in Sunnyside/Woodside is that one is hemmed in by disconnectors on all sides, and sometimes the disconnectors double or even quadruple up, as with Calvary Cemetery, the BQE, the LIE, and the Maspeth IBZ to the south—and his extremely niche joke about Parrot Coffee is better than Parrot Coffee’s coffee. I don’t understand why Timms perceives “a persistent sense of unease” in Sunnyside Gardens, a lovely and mysterious neighborhood that continues to project modesty in spite of its overdetermined origin story. But maybe he’s right and my daughter and I are actually experiencing our own form of “muffled horror, Zone of Interest–style” every morning on our walk to school. Sometimes it takes an urban critic to point these things out.
Does it matter—to the essay, to northwestern Queens, to New York City—that Sunnyside Yards will never be built? Timms argues that “an underloved plot this vast won’t stay unromanced forever,” but I feel pretty confident that the love affair won’t make it past first base. East Side Access cost $11 billion and the MTA didn’t even have to tunnel under the river. After that folly, and after Kathy Hochul’s catastrophic about-face on congestion pricing, is anyone in America really willing to deck 192 acres? Never mind that Amtrak, the MTA, and New Jersey Transit are always arguing with one another about the most stupid shit. In New York, as in the rest of the world, the triumph of real estate interests is a safe wager, but in this instance I trust my daughter’s classmate’s father, an engineer who has told me—with an engineer’s finality—that Sunnyside Yards isn’t happening. (If it does happen, however, the next round of okra is on me.)
In any case, Timms’s essay is most valuable not for its speculative urban criticism, but for what it delivers in the present tense. The closing sections, about the ways the area has been quietly transformed by our new migrant neighbors, are a reminder that massive changes to the built environment can obscure more meaningful and salutary shifts. While other countries have found ways to build, revamp, and renew their cities and their infrastructure quickly and efficiently, in recent years the timescale of American development seems to have surpassed the human lifespan. We may not get Sunnyside Yards, or the Second Avenue Subway to Hanover Square—or perhaps my daughter will, but I certainly won’t—and still this city’s dynamism is unshakeable. Or maybe it only seems that way because of Timms’s contagious, hard-fought, historically informed hopefulness.