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Queens is the queen of cultures


Manhattan seen from Queens – a visit to the largest New York borough enables new views of the city. Photo: Michelle Rick / NYC & Company / dpa-tmn (Image: dpa)
(Photo: Michelle Rick / NYC & Company / dpa-tmn)

New York – When the yogis slide into the “looking down dog” and look upside down over the East River, they see the Manhattan skyline as a reward. The skyscrapers on the Upper East Side then seem to hang in the sky.

As a visitor, too, it is refreshing to change your perspective and focus on something that is still rather unknown: the New Yorker
Borough Queens.

On weekends, there are free yoga classes in the
Socrates Sculpture Park in Astoria, the district in the northwesternmost corner of Queens. Midtown Manhattan, with its noise, hustle and bustle and streets clogged with yellow taxis, seems like a distant world here. And something else is missing: the flood of tourists.

Queens is huge and diverse

After Manhattan, the Bronx, Staten Island and Brooklyn, Queens is the largest borough in New York with around 280 square kilometers. Around 2.3 million people live here. It’s more than twenty kilometers as the crow flies from La Guardia Airport in the north to the surfers at wild Rockaway Beach in the south. How can we best understand the ethnically highly diverse Queens and its quarters?

Lori Lustig is the right address. The 64-year-old New Yorker is one of the more than 300 Big Apple Greeters, ambassadors for the city, who regularly accompany tourists on a voluntary basis. Lori grew up in Flushing, the goal of today’s foray from west to east.

Queens is pure multiculturalism

First it is relaxed along the East River. Then Lori turns into a street full of street art. Colorful, shrill works of art glisten on countless house walls, walls and garage doors.
Welling Court Mural Project is the name of the place. In the open-air art museum that stretches across several streets, sprayers have been creative for ten years. Hours could be spent in this place alone.

Today half of the people in Queens were born in another country, says Lori. “I count to the other half.” Her grandparents immigrated from a region in what is now Ukraine. Her husband is from Belarus. The family name “Lustik” became “Lustig”. Therefore, Lori is often mistaken for German. The retired teacher works three days a week at a school in Astoria. Retirement was too boring for her.

“When children are new to school, they can choose between 162 languages ​​on a form to indicate their mother tongue,” reports Lori. According to the Endangered Language Alliance, 800 languages ​​are spoken in Queens, more than anywhere else in the world.

The city that sleeps

You can see in Queens that New York, with its sea of ​​lights at night, is a city that, contrary to the proverb, sometimes sleeps. In quiet streets, the residents are even woken up by the twittering of birds. It gets more colorful and lively the closer the Ditmars Boulevard station gets. Blue domes flash: a Greek Orthodox church. A foretaste of the multitude of temples, mosques, churches and synagogues in the Flushing district.

Time for a breather. The choice falls on the
Bohemian Hall & Beer Garden. It is considered the oldest beer garden in New York. The restaurant dates back to Bohemian immigrants, and so pierogi, goulash and Jägerschnitzel are on the menu.

How the Steinway Family came to Queens

A wave of German immigrants also ended up in the melting pot Astoria, at that time still a rural suburb, which, however, promised work. More and more entrepreneurs bought farmland here. One of them was the legendary grand piano and piano maker Steinway. The family came under the name Steinweg. Son William Steinway had a new factory built in 1870 – and an entire Steinway Village for the 400 employees, including a school, post office, kindergarten and recreation park. To this day, grand pianos and upright pianos are manufactured at Bowery Bay in Astoria.

Steinway Street leads over three kilometers south through Astoria to the metro station of the same name. The M Line trains travel east to Forest Hill terminus. “We have to go to line 7,” says Lori. “It’ll be cozy.”

In Asian-influenced queens

The metro rattles through Little India and Little Bangladesh in Jackson Heights, then through the Latin American Corona until it completely discharges at its eastern terminus, Flushing. If you are spat out from the escalator at the top, you think you are on another continent: Colorful Chinese or Korean characters shine from the house facades. The last census in 2010 showed that around 70 percent of the people in Flushing are from Asia. Ascending trend. In Chinatown, dried sea cucumbers, black chickens, snails, mussels and other seafood are sold as delicacies – dead or alive.

A house with a great history

Walking distance to Flushing Main Street is the historic one
Bowne House an important memorial for religious tolerance. The British John Bowne built the house in 1661. Because Bowne held regular Quaker meetings here, he was arrested in 1662 by the then governor. But Bowne struggled successfully and set a precedent for religious freedom.

Flushing’s landmark, the 40-meter-high Unisphere globe, couldn’t be a better match. The steel globe in Flushing Meadows Park, built for the 1964 World’s Fair, is a reminder of the diversity and cosmopolitanism in Queens. Only a much smaller, yellow ball competes with the Unisphere every summer when the neighboring Arthur Ashe Stadium fills up for the US Open tennis tournament. Of course, the audience comes from all over the world.

Queens

Arrival and entry: There are direct flights to New York from various German airports. JFK and La Guardia airports are both in Queens. German vacationers in the USA must obtain an Esta permit in good time before departure. It is valid for two years.

Information: NYC & Company c / o Aviareps Tourism, Josephspitalstraße 15, 80331 Munich (email: [email protected], nycgo.com).

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