GLOBAL QUEENS: An Urban Mosaic, nostalgia for the ex-New Yorker or inspiration for the aspiring New Yorker

GLOBAL QUEENS: An Urban Mosaic
JOSEPH HEATHCOTT
Empire State Editions/Fordham University Press
$34.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: A vibrant exploration of the everyday life of one of the most diverse places in the world: Queens, New York.

Remade by decades of immigration, Queens, New York, has emerged as an emblematic space of social mixing and encounters across multiple lines of difference. With its expansive subdivisions, tangled highways, and centerless form, it is also New York’s most enigmatic borough. It can feel alternately like a big city, a tight-knit village, a featureless industrial zone, or a sprawling suburban community. Through more than 200 contemporary photographs, Joseph Heathcott captures this multifaceted borough and one of the most diverse places in the United States.

Drawn from more than a decade of roaming around Queens and snapping photos, Heathcott conveys the juxtaposition of the ordinary and the extraordinary, the mundane and the surprising, and the staggering social diversity that best characterizes Queens. At the heart of the story are two separate but entwined histories: the rapid expansion of the borough’s built environment through the twentieth century, and the millions of people who have traveled from near and far to call Queens home. Newcomers have had to confront discrimination, white racial hostility, legal challenges, and language barriers. They have had to struggle to find adequate housing, places to worship, and jobs that pay enough to survive. And they have done all of this in the borough’s jumbled collection of neighborhoods, housing types, civic and religious institutions, factories and warehouses, commercial streets, and strip malls.

Heathcott makes primary use of documentary photography to bring these social and spatial realities of everyday life into relief. He also draws on demographic data, archival sources, planning documents, news stories, and reports. The result is a visual meditation on Queens that provides clues about an urban future where notions of citizenship and belonging are negotiated across multiple lines of difference, but where a sense of ”getting along”—however roughly textured and unfinished—has taken hold in the everyday life of the streets.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: The city I've lived in, or longed to return to, since the 1980s is always entered via the Borough of Queens: Both airports are there, and we're not going to count Newark as it is its own major city and port of entry for all of New Jersey's international flyers. It's the biggest borough, it's got the most oceanfront exposure, it's always been a huge part of the immigrant experience of New York City for many, possibly most, ethnic minorities getting a foothold in the Land of Opportunity.

The side of New York City that most who visit, and many who live in, it just don't think about...lots of natural areas still exist that aren't carefully manicured parks.

To those who live here in the city, or as I do now, mere meters from Queens (Nassau County WAS Queens until it seceded in 1901 for depressingly racist reasons), think of it as the borough of homes:

...I think gemütlich is a great word, and one that pretty much *is* Queens.

The place is an educational hub, having numerous university campuses, and a separate public library system that serves a tremendously large (2.4 million people) and diverse population:

...as well as being very close and convenient to the employment and entertainment hub that is Manhattan:

...so it's no wonder so very many people who come here end up in the already-established immigrant communities, and the comparatively affordable housing, that this global city offers.

One of the unappealing human characteristics is the need to Other people with slighting nicknames. A common one, from the Manhattan of my youth, was to call the people who came to our home patch (as we saw it) "Bridge and Tunnel Kids" regardless of their age. The bridges and tunnels referenced here are part of the astoundingly efficient and well-designed transportation infrastructure of the borough. It's all a lot prettier than you've been led to believe, too:

...and works a lot better than many cities with much smaller populations can manage. After all, the bridges and tunnels don't just bring the millions of Queens residents to and from different destinations...they serve millions from Long Island, millions from Brooklyn, a million-plus from Manhattan, and a few hundred thousand from Staten Island.

New York City is a place so many aspire to live, for so many reasons; a gift to one of them that you know wouldn't come amiss. The sad soul who left, but would like to come home, is also an apt recipient. The stories about Queens, the social history aspects of the book, also make it a good gift idea for your scholarly pal who talks a lot about how we live in these weird constructs called "cities" without thinking about how they work. Not for nothing did this book win The David R. Coffin Publication Grant.

Beautiful and educational, informative and entertaining...a great package.