Dunolly Gardens
34-20 79th Street | Jackson Heights | built 1939
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The city photographed every building for its tax records around 1940 and again in the 1980s. NYC Municipal Archives.
Written with AI from the source each entry cites, then fact-checked.
- 1938
Andrew J. Thomas designs this Dunolly Gardens building in the Moderne style
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Garden Housing Corp. filed permit NB 7666-1938 for this six-story-and-basement building, one of six nearly identical U-shaped brick buildings Andrew J. Thomas designed around a shared garden. A broad landscaped entrance court, stepped bays, corner windows, brick banding and a vertical brick channel ending in an angled parapet mark it as Moderne. The commission contrasted this spare look with the historical styles of Thomas's earlier nearby complexes, the Chateau and the Towers.
- 1939
Dunolly Gardens is completed as the district's last garden apartment complex
Built in 1938-39, Dunolly Gardens was the final garden apartment complex put up within what is now the Jackson Heights Historic District, and the only one there to take a whole block, avenue ends included. Its architect, Andrew J. Thomas, had pioneered the neighborhood's garden apartments about twenty years earlier. Of its six buildings, two stand on each street and one on each avenue, with passageways between them giving views from the street into the garden.
“Dunolly Gardens was the last such project built within the historic district…”