Urban Archive

In the 1920s, Jay Gould II, champion tennis player and grandson of infamous robber baron Jay Gould, built a private tennis club at the intersection of Queens Boulevard and 45th Street, then still farmland. In 1947, the red brick building with its large roof gables was sold and began its second life as a boxing and wrestling arena. Back before live television brought boxing to people’s living rooms, Sunnyside Gardens Arena was one of dozens of smaller arenas in the city offering fans a night at the fights.

Boxers like Floyd Patterson, Emile Griffith, and Gerry Cooney all fought there on their way to becoming world champions. Before he became Judith Light's live-in housekeeper on Who's the Boss, Tony Danza also sparred in the arena.

The dingy 2,500-seat venue, thick with cigar smoke and rowdy fans, was described as boxing's minor leagues, a "boxing emporium for fighters on the way up and on the way down," and, if you were lucky, a stepping stone to Madison Square Garden. It also hosted wrestling bouts with future hall of famers like Bruno Sammartino and "Nature Boy" Buddy Rogers.

The last fight at Sunnyside Gardens Arena, a boxing match between Ramon Ranquello and Bob Smith, occurred on June 24, 1977. The building was demolished later that year and has been home to a Wendy's ever since.

The Neighborhoods

Sunnyside

Sunnyside in Queens, between the Sunnyside Rail Yard and the LIE/BQE interchange, is bisected by Queens Boulevard, with the great, curving vaults of the elevated train tracks running above. To the south, the buildings are a mix of five- and six-story co-ops and freestanding homes, while the north is dominated by the historic district of Sunnyside Gardens, a leafy enclave of red-brick Colonial Revival homes and apartment buildings. The neighborhood's eastern border is made up of Woodside and Calvary Cemetery, while its western border is (by most accounts) 39th Street. Not to be confused with 39th Place, which, in true Queens fashion, runs one block parallel. The neighborhood got its name from the Broucard family, French Huguenots who arrived in the U.S. in 1675 aboard the Gilded Otter. Bourgon Broucard initially settled in Bushwick, but, perhaps growing weary of all the bespoke cooperages and farm-to-table johnnycake pop-ups, he bought a large estate in what is now Sunnyside from the fantastically named Burger Jorizz. In 1713, Broucard, or one of his sons, named their estate "Sunnyside Hill." One of the homes that Bourgon built stood for over 200 years before it was finally torn down around 1900. By then the farmland was giving way to the city: the Queensboro Bridge was completed in 1909, and the IRT Flushing Line, connecting Queens with Manhattan, was finished by 1915.