A Queens Sampler

We will subway to Elmhurst, Queens, and learn of the neighborhood's early 17th and 18th Century Dutch and English settlement, transitioning to Irish, German, Italian, and Jewish immigration in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, and then transitioning again to East Asian and South American immigration in the 1970s. Along the way, we will visit the “Boulevard of Death;” the former Macy’s “Sendek Notch;” the still extant oldest Anglican Church structure in New York City; the homestead site of Clement Clarke Moore, author of the “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas” poem; architect C.B.J. Snyder’s Flemish Renaissance Revival Newtown High School; and City Hospital Center/Elmhurst, “ground zero” during the COVID pandemic in New York.

We’ll then walk to nearby Jackson Heights, which, thanks to bridge construction and elevated trains, developed from marshlands in the early 20th Century to an exclusive middle- and upper-middle class neighborhood of English-style garden homes and apartment complexes for families seeking to escape the recently arrived immigrant masses in Manhattan. Jackson Heights is now a residential neighborhood of mostly South American and South Asian New Yorkers. We will experience the cacophony of trains passing over Roosevelt Avenue, the commercial bustle along 82nd St. and 37th Avenue, the surprising tranquility of nearby 35th and 34th Avenues, ending at Diversity Plaza in the micro neighborhood of Little India. We will return to Manhattan on the No. 7 elevated "subway" line.