November 4, 2012, Sunday, 308

User:Aahmed

From The Peopling of New York City

An interview with Sanjeev Varma of Kunal Jewelers: He said the neighborhood around his store used to be Punjabi but is now more Bengalis. His favorite place to go to was Asoka restaurant, and he only ate at Asian restaurants. He said "I'm Asian so I stick with Asians." He avoids the Latino area of Jackson Heights, and says there is more crime and drugs toward Junction Boulevard. Otherwise, 74 st to him is pretty safe. He recommends more security and more police patrolling the neighborhood. Parking to him was a problem but said a parking space was easily found in the morning. He noticed that most people come to Jackson Heights for the food but they usually stick to their own communities. When asked where he considered the affluent area of Jackson Heights to be, he said 74st because of the jewelry stores, even though some apartment buildings from 72ndst to 80st, 37th to 35th avenue were pretty expensive. Many store owners we found would not want to talk and said they were busy. 
   The real estate ads in newspapers that Leora, Jenn and me worked on have already been put up       by Jenn.


     The 325 acres of land that Edward McDougall purchased in 1908 and later called Jackson Heights is today an area of land where a diverse group of ethnicities reside both together and separately. This separate togetherness has caused a certain “struggle over space” in Jackson Heights. This struggle can be divided into two kinds of struggles: a struggle over actual concrete space in Jackson Heights, and a struggle over psychological and personal space.
     The first kind, a struggle over physical space, is apparent in the clash involving the booming success of Indian businesses along 74th street in Jackson Heights, businesses of Indian owners who do not live in Jackson Heights. These owners are seen as intruders of the physical space on which Whites and Latinos have resided. A major complaint that even a New York Times article addresses is the limited amount of parking spaces in Little India and the increasing amount of cars. 1
     Another example of this struggle over physical space is seen in the Jackson Heights Beautification Group’s attempt to landmark a specific section of the neighborhood, protect architectural and historical buildings and set a positive image of the neighborhood. Others saw this attempt as racist, aimed at keeping Jackson Heights “white” and targeting stores owned by immigrants.2 A question that erupts from this conflict is who decides what to do with public space, merchants or middle-aged white professionals who make up most of JHBG?
     A major component of spatial struggle involves Roosevelt Avenue as a boundary.  To whites living in the neighborhood, only the north side of Roosevelt Avenue is included in Jackson Heights, not the south side. For other groups, the border of Jackson Heights is vague. Both sides of Roosevelt Avenue are vibrant of Latin American culture. Whites though would rather not enter this space and regard it as a “completely different lifestyle.” Where exactly Jackson Heights bounds can never be exactly determined due to Jones-Correa’s idea that different people experience “neighborhoods in different ways”.3
     This leads to the idea that space is not just territorial and/or physical because people have different ways of viewing a certain space. A community is also a space “distanced from the rest of the world” but like Jones-Correa says, it cannot be only thought of in territorial terms. Latin Americans, who don’t view themselves as being apart of a physical community in Jackson Height, are instead apart of a community of memory with political and social ties back home.
     For whites though, community is space that relies only on physical boundaries. In order to belong to a certain community, one must not only live in it but also abide by traditional neighborhood ways, such as speaking English. There is a constant struggle between whites and other ethnicities, the former having a different experience of space than the latter because as Jones-Correa says, the “history of the place colors the experience of it.” Immigrants are most likely to abide by their own, not neighborhood, rules which causes spatial struggle between and the whites, who wont accept them into their “space” until they are assimilated.4
     Space is also defined to be one’s freedom and opportunity to express oneself. This kind of personal space was attacked in the aftermath of 911. The people who once expressed themselves by their exotic clothes or religious attire were subjected to public scrutiny in Jackson Heights. Their personal space was invaded when, out of fear of hate groups, they were forced to give up their individuality by wearing jeans and T-shirts.5
     Jackson Heights has clashes involving “intruding” Indian businesses that take up parking spaces and change the look of a physical space. There is a struggle over who decides the usage of public space and who defines boundaries of an area. More complex than that is the struggle over intangible space, space that defines one’s social and political ties. For most immigrants, their community space is back home and whites challenge this, requiring them to assimilate into their residential space. Jackson Heights also consists of struggles over personal space as immigrants are subjected to external pressures of limiting their right to expression.