Phipps Playground (Lt. Michael R. Davidson Playground)
50-02 39th Avenue | Sunnyside | built 1930
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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.
- 2007
Landmarks Commission takes in the Phipps tenants' playground at 39th Avenue and 50th Street
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When the Sunnyside Gardens Historic District was designated in 2007, it included the roughly quarter-acre playground Phipps Houses had made for its tenants on the southeast corner of 39th Avenue and 50th Street, across from the Phipps Garden Apartments. The commission found a blacktop yard ringed by chain-link fence, with a sandbox, swing sets, a slide, an open pavilion on wood posts and a small one-story building with aluminum siding and old multi-light wood doors.
“…an approximately quarter-acre playground was created by the Phipps Houses at the southeast corner of 39th Avenue and 50th Street, across the street from the apartments…”
- 2007
Phipps Houses sells its closed children's playground to a developer
Phipps Houses had bought this lot across 39th Avenue from its apartments, and landscape architect Marjorie Sewell Cautley designed a play area for children there, with a wading pool and a pavilion over a sandbox. It shut in the 1990s, and in 2007 Phipps sold the lot to a developer.
“The playground was later closed in the 1990s, and Phipps sold the lot to a developer in 2007.”
Source: Wikipedia
- 2013
Plan to rebuild the Aluminaire House on the old Phipps playground fails
In 2013 a developer proposed an eight-unit apartment building on the former playground that would have incorporated the Aluminaire House, a prefabricated aluminum-clad model house from 1931. Local residents and preservationists objected that it did not fit the historic district, and the plan did not go forward.
Source: Wikipedia
- 2019
City buys the lot to reopen it as the Lt. Michael R. Davidson Playground
In 2019 New York City acquired the former Phipps playground lot to turn it back into a public playground. It was named the Lt. Michael R. Davidson Playground and opened in 2026.
“In 2019 the city acquired the lot for a public playground, named the Lt. Michael R. Davidson Playground. The playground opened in 2026.”
Source: Wikipedia
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