South Asian Queens
From Little India on 74th Street to Little Guyana on Liberty Avenue.
Scattered, 1980
In 1980 about 40,000 New Yorkers had roots in India, spread thinly across the city. The quotas that had kept them out had ended only fifteen years earlier.
Little India, 1990
By 1990 Indian shops, sari stores and restaurants lined 74th Street in Jackson Heights, soon known as Little India. About 10,000 people of Indian origin lived in Jackson Heights, Elmhurst and Corona.
Richmond Hill, 2010
In Richmond Hill and Ozone Park about 37,000 people of Indian origin lived by 2010, one in five mapped, alongside about 21,000 of Caribbean ancestry. Many families here came from Guyana and Trinidad, and Liberty Avenue is co-named Little Guyana Avenue.
South Asian New York, today
Today about 211,000 New Yorkers report Indian ancestry, five times the 1980 number, and about 168,000 more have roots elsewhere in South Asia, from Bangladesh to Pakistan.
Where New York Came From: a map of NYC immigration and ancestry, 1910 to today
All stories
- Harlem and the Great Migration
- From Italian Harlem to El Barrio
- Brooklyn's Nordic waterfront
- Finns, Lithuanians and Estonians
- New York's three Chinatowns
- The Lower East Side
- Jewish New York
- Little Odessa
- Redlining's long shadow
- Italian New York
- Washington Heights and Dominican New York
- German New York
- South Asian Queens
- Greek Astoria
- A century in seven stops