From The Peopling of New York City
Neighborhood Project # 1
Historically, the commercial character of Jackson Heights has evolved around five main roads: “82nd Street, 37th Avenue, Roosevelt Avenue, Northern Boulevard, and Junction Boulevard”. The early Jackson Heights mainly consisted of rural farmland. A small agricultural industry catered to the Manhattan population. Indeed the only main commercial attraction in those days was a huge racetrack built by the Barclays between 72nd and 74th Streets. It was only after the opening of the Queensboro (59th St) Bridge in 1909 that real estate speculators fully realized the prospects for residential housing in the farmlands of Queens County. In 1919, Queensboro Corporation’s Edward A. MacDougall began to build his European-influenced Garden apartments along with plans for a quaint market “district along Thirty-seventh Avenue and Eighty-second Street” (Maly). The goal was to create a serene, upper-class utopia away from the humdrum of crowded, immigrant city life.
Between 1910 and 1930, the population of Jackson Heights had increased to about 40,000 people (Sánchez). Jackson Heights’ proximity to Manhattan also attracted many gays and lesbians from Times Square who soon found employment on 37th Avenue (Sánchez). Indeed, they created many flourishing entertainment businesses in the area until the advent of the Great Depression and World War II. After the crash of the stockmarket in 1929, “ the quality of the neighborhood's retail and other services” began to decline despite developments in transportation (Sánchez). In a last ditch effort, the Queensboro Corporation formed “the Jackson Heights’ Merchants Association to organize and consolidate business interests to shift responsibility for neighborhood business to private business” (Shukla). It was the economic downturn and the large-scale withdrawal of Queensboro Corporation from neighborhood activities that allowed for the current composition of the Jackson Heights community.
In the wake of the Second World War, certain groups experience upward social mobility into the middle class. Many Jews and Irish Catholics moved away from the working class sections of Manhattan and Brooklyn and into Jackson Heights. By the late 1950s, these clustering resulted in a string of new commercial districts. Some examples of which include a kosher butcher shop/deli on Northern Boulevard between 89th and 90th Streets that served as a site for informal socializing (Sánchez) and Jeanette Miller’s Sample Dress Shop on 37th Avenue (Koh). A new sense of a small-town community had developed in the area. Indeed, “while the earlier corporate construction of community was a self-conscious marketing project, the post war version of community emerged from the bottom-up everyday lived experience of the residents” (Sánchez). However, one major component of present-day Jackson Heights had yet to be placed in motion. In 1965, the relaxing of exclusionary immigration laws resulted in a new dynamic of “ethnic hyperdiversity” in Jackson Heights (Miyares). An influx of immigrants from South America and Asia pervaded the area and resulted in a new chapter in the commercial history of Jackson Heights.
Today, Jackson Heights is home to many major successful commercial centers. One such center is Little India. The center of Little India is found on 74th Street between Roosevelt Avenue and 37th Avenue. The district is an explosion of South Asian culture – apparel, food, media, and small trinkets. Tourists and residents alike gawk at large window displays of colorful ethnic clothing and women, young and old, barter and bargain viciously. Just a few blocks away, another commercial center serves the vast Latino population of this city. It is a metropolis of “Mexican clothing shops, Colombian bakeries, Guatemalan handicraft stores and Argentinean restaurants” (Next Stop NYC). Jackson Heights is the home to the biggest Latino gay population in New York City and is still generally known as the 2nd largest gay neighborhood. Several gay bars dot the area. The area is exceedingly diverse. In fact, as one traverses Roosevelt Avenue, “the businesses become increasingly Filipino, then Irish, and Korean in the direction of Woodside and Sunnyside” (Miyares). And critical to Jackson Heights’s success is its embodiment of a small-town, community while commanding a sprawling mass of distinct ethnic businesses.
Neighborhood Project #2
The romanticization of Jackson Heights severely ignores the continued competition over space among racial groups. The notion of an ethnically diverse neighborhood should hardly suggest integration beyond common use of public space. Moreover, the struggle for space is not one about territorial domination alone. The debate extends into one of maintaining the cultural workings, and infrastructure of the former majority – the white ethnics. Conceived as a haven for the middle-class from the humdrum of city life, Jackson Heights was from its outset a model of exclusivity. Indeed, even now, “in white ethnics’ imaginations neighborhood frontiers are forever fixed” (Jones-Correa 25). Ethnic groups that do no integrate are marginalized. Consequently, Whites draw physical boundaries near areas that predominantly hold certain groups such as Latinos or Asians. As Jones-Correa argues, immigrants must conform to “standard” rules of “respectability” and speak the English language (27). Failure to do so results in exclusion, stereotyping and sometimes labeling of predominantly ethnic areas as unsafe and conducive to crime (Kasinitz 166). The white ethnic community’s definition of community is near impalpable since it refuses to consider those who do not reside in Jackson Heights or who do not act or speak a certain way into the community (Jones-Correa 25). As a result, the equivalent considerations between community and the neighborhood once present in Edward MacDougall’s garden apartments have been eliminated. There are now several communities within the neighborhood of Jackson Heights.
Jackson Heights is representative of host-guest principle in which “in the eyes of established residents newcomers to America are construed as guests and established residents as hosts” (Jones-Correa 33). Ethnic food and culture are merely indulged and given an exotic status. Even K.C. Williams’ description of the first day in an adult ESOL class depicts intolerance for the foreign: “In class, (pointing to the floor again), English Only. At home, (pointing out the window) speak Spanish, speak [etc.]” (7). Whites dominate community organizations (Kasinitz 168) such as the Jackson Heights Beautification Group (JHBG) and Community Board 3, which serve as vehicles to preserve White influence. For example, the JHBG successfully transformed a section of Jackson Heights into a historical district, which “many saw as an effort… to protect the old Jackson Heights, interpreted by at least some newer residents as ‘White’ Jackson Heights” (Kasinitz 173). Considering the tensions between communities in Jackson Heights, it is noteworthy that for the most part, there have been no serious altercations between groups in the neighborhood. The neighborhood of Jackson Heights is laid out in such a way that different ethnic groups can live parallel to each other in enclaves successfully and still provide for a vibrant area (Jones-Correa 32) with its dense and frequented streets. However, Jackson Heights is not simply a tourist attraction but a lively and bubbling melting pot.
Neighborhood Project # 3
Jackson Heights is certainly diverse. However, Jackson is also, to some extent, a segregated neighborhood sectioning off people of different classes and different races. I did not realize the severity of the situation until I watched four Caucasian policemen arresting a Hispanic man for a petty crime Friday morning. The policemen had double-parked in the middle of the crowded Roosevelt Avenue. Two of them were trying furiously tried to cram the arrested man’s bicycle, perhaps his only mode of transportation, into the trunk of their car. The other policemen nonchalantly stood at the side comparing notes. They were the only Caucasians around and I could feel a sense a kind of irreverence emanating from them. The arrested man, his jaw set, sat in the car staring straight ahead.
I visited two stores in the area. The clothes were all in the same price range. Yet, despite having security cameras, the Famous Brands on Roosevelt Avenue requested that I leave my bags at the counter. The shoppers at the Mandee store on Northern Boulevard were also less ethnically diverse and all the advertisements were only of young Caucasian women. A conscious effort seemed to be made to target a certain clientele in both stores. Similarly, St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Jackson Heights had signs and banners only in English unlike the United Methodist Church a few blocks away. As Jones-Correa acknowledged in “Intimate Strangers: Immigration to Queens,” White ethnics’ use certain roads to create and delineate boundaries in the neighborhood.
Jones-Correa indicated two factors that separate certain groups from White ethnics. First, there is intolerance in Jackson Heights of those that do not speak English (Jones-Correa 27). A large banner in the United Methodist Church proclaimed, “Aprendan Ingles.” All the newsletters in the Church were in English despite the fact that supposedly there are services held in four other languages. Second, there is intolerance for those who do not follow neighborhood codes of behavior as shown in the example of the arrest above (Jones-Correa 38). Indeed, I had spent only half an hour walking through Little Colombia (Kasinitz 166) and other parts of Jackson Heights and I was feeling generally discouraged at the state of affairs.
That’s when I glimpsed a couple walking down Roosevelt Avenue holding hands. They were of different races, but not of different classes. They made me smile. Maybe Jackson Heights was not as completely divisive as I thought. And just perhaps some factors transcend some social and physical boundaries.
