The Queen's Outskirts
New York's least celebrated borough has long been a borderland
I may be a product of suburbia, but I am literally a child of the great metropolis: I was born in New York City. However—and this is crucial—I came into the world on its periphery. I hail from Queens, which sits on the western edge of Long Island, or “Paumanok,” as it was known by the Munsee people living there at the time when Dutch and English settlers began colonizing it in the seventeenth century. There is a broad tendency for insiders and outsiders alike to conflate “New York” with Manhattan. Most of us know that in fact the city consists of five boroughs, and that, technically speaking, “New York City” can refer to any and all of them. But usually the outer boroughs, as they’re known, tend to get referred to by name as separate entities. Most have a distinct identity, even a cache, of sorts: Brooklyn was a separate city for most of its history, and has retained a distinctness comparable to the relationship between Cambridge and Boston, or Oakland and San Francisco (it also has a savoir faire that has made it downright chic in recent decades). The Bronx, the largest and poorest of the boroughs, has a gritty reputation whose very anti-glamorousness has appeal in its own right. Staten Island is a relatively remote, even insular, enclave notable these days for the persistence of its white working-class flavor in a city otherwise known for its diversity.
While Queens—the monarch in question is Henrietta, wife of the doomed Charles I—is the most ethnically diverse place on the planet, it has long been regarded as the most prosaic of the boroughs, lacking the rich historical lore associated with Manhattan, Brooklyn, or even the Bronx. Queens joined New York City along with the other four boroughs, annexed in 1898, though its easternmost portion broke off to become Long Island’s Nassau County, whose name has Dutch roots (specifically the Orange-Nassau dynasty). Ironically, Brooklyn and Queens are usually considered separate from Long Island, even though both sit on it. But it’s Queens, much more than Brooklyn, that has a neither fish-nor-fowl quality to it: unquestionably urban in some places, proto-suburban in others, it’s the place where you’ll often find the cheapest housing and the longest commutes into “the city,” meaning Manhattan. There are exceptions to this rule (Astoria, for example, is a mere subway stop away from Midtown), and the rising tide of gentrification has lapped into Queens as well. But no one, even those who love it most, think of Queens as the urban heartland of New York City. Queens was the home of the “valley of ashes” between Manhattan and the baronial mansions of Long Island in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel The Great Gatsby.
By the time I was born there in 1962, Queens had become a borderland between the city and the rapidly expanding suburbs to the east. Queens and Long Island fit under the larger conceptual umbrella of the metropolitan, which includes an urban core and its wider periphery. So it was that after the Brooklyn Dodgers decamped for greater Los Angeles, and the New York (Manhattan) Giants went to San Francisco, leaving behind the (Bronx) Yankees as the only Gotham baseball team, civic leaders formed a new club, the Metropolitans, a.k.a. the Mets, in the year of my birth, whose team colors borrow from both the Giants (orange, another faint Dutch echo) and the Dodgers (blue). I’ve been a fan ever since.
I spent the first seven years of my life in Queens, more specifically in its northwest neighborhood of Jackson Heights. Developed around the time of the First World War as a haven for professionals and their families seeking an easy commute to Manhattan, Jackson Heights ca. 1960 had become a white working-class enclave consisting of the children of European immigrants—Irish, Italians, Poles—with Jews and African Americans largely excluded. That began to change at the end of the sixties, as the migration of new ethnic groups spurred a surge of white flight. Today, Jackson Heights is more than fifty percent Latino, and Asians outnumber whites.
Meanwhile, a different, a demographic process—suburbanization—transformed the eastern half Long Island in these decades. The first tendrils had reached into Nassau County in the decades following the First World War, following the tracks laid down by the Long Island Railroad. The LIRR, as it is known, had been built in the 1830s as means, with the aid of a ferry at the Island’s eastern edge, to facilitate travel between New York and Boston. Always struggling financially, it received a second lease on life—ironically, just as rail travel was collapsing in most of the rest of the country—as a commuter rail system, thanks in part to an infusion of state money that allowed its electrification. But the explosion of Long Island’s suburbs began in earnest in the decades following the Second World War. The new engine of its development was the automobile, facilitated by a string of highways—notably the Long Island Expressway—that pushed eastward beyond Nassau into Suffolk County, pulling what had been the largest agricultural county in New York State into the greater metropolitan area. Potato fields gave way to a new crop: mass-manufactured houses, typified by those of developer Abraham Levitt, whose fabled Levittown became a byword for suburbanization. And for a great many people, my childhood self among them, Queens got left behind.
Next: My island sanctuary.