The history of Queens public space is encoded in residents’ lives. Talking with them reveals surprising truths.
“I had a kid over the pandemic, and so this became really a very important space for my family. It was a way for us to be able to do social distancing, be able to take my kid [and] put her in a stroller, be able to just walk and really get out of our tiny apartment,” is what Alex Florez told me as we spoke in front of my old middle school.
“It was important, you know? As humans, we’re not meant to be isolated.”
Alex was one of eleven people I interviewed for “The Power of Paseo Park” this past spring, when I was completing my B.A. in Urban Studies at Hunter College. I decided to write my senior thesis on a topic deeply personal to me, and set out to interview others I have met in my home neighborhood of Jackson Heights whose stories I just had to include as part of this capstone.
Growing up, I was one of the many young students crammed into the narrow sidewalks along the car-centered streets criss-crossing Jackson Heights. Everyday, I would beeline to and from my middle school on 34th Avenue along with thousands of other students eager to get home; I spent virtually no time outdoors with friends. “Candice," a local teacher I interviewed for my senior thesis, for years made the same daily walk that I used to make going to school. Thinking back to when she started her current job a decade ago, she recounted: “back then when I used to walk to work, it was hard. The sidewalks were always super crowded with kids and families, and people trying to hurry up and hussle their kids to school. Walking to work before the Open Streets was actually a little stressful.”
Elementary and middle school students at dismissal walking home, playing, and buying food. Taken before the Paseo Park redesign. | Photo by Henry Mei
Where Alex and I spoke, sitting around one of 34th Avenue’s public tables as birds chirped and people strolled leisurely past us, there used to be parked cars and traffic. But in 2020, neighbors fought for the creation of what is now New York City’s longest Open Street. In the early days of the pandemic, I became one of the many locals who contributed to this community effort and canvassed for the growth of the part-time Open Street into a linear public park. Our advocacy won incremental, yet impactful, design upgrades and the adoption of Paseo Park as 34th Avenue’s official co-name. (We also received a Public Space Award from Open Plans for Most Inspirational Project!) One of the main goals in writing my senior thesis on Paseo Park was to capture the work so many in the neighborhood have put into this unique community hub, which stretches 26 blocks east-west throughout the entirety of Jackson Heights.
Effectively illustrating the ways in which different people have been contributing to this ongoing project, as part of an academic capstone no less, required much thought and care. Though I myself am a lifelong Jackson Heights resident and have contributed to the growth of 34th Avenue in my own ways, 40-plus pages of my own exclusive perspective with APA citations not only would be boring to read – it would have been boring to write. The most crucial portion of the writing process was not the writing itself. It was instead interviewing the eleven individuals, each with different relationships to Jackson Heights. The interviewees had to define their own stories first, before I went to work crafting the larger narrative for my senior thesis.
I went in knowing that a handful of the interviewees grew up in Jackson Heights, just like I did; what I didn’t expect was how different parts of their lives were so deeply intertwined into the larger history of the neighborhood. Both Alex Florez and Demir Purisic grew up in Jackson Heights during the 1990s, Alex being born to Colombian parents and Demir coming as a child from what is today independent Montenegro. As children, public space was scarce and the boys, along with their friends, faced hostility for playing in private courtyards. These private courtyards and the buildings they’re located between, mostly in the area’s historic district, have a fraught and exclusionary history dating back to the neighborhood's founding. During the early twentieth century, real estate speculators and developers thought little of the public sphere when it envisioned a new and racially restricted “garden-city” suburb. This left Jackson Heights, which by the 1990s became a dense and hyper-diverse part of Queens, with only two square feet of public park space per capita; other parts of the borough enjoy over 140 square feet. This left many in the neighborhood, especially kids, without outdoor space that felt like it was theirs in which they could learn, play, and grow.
Alex would go on to fight for local public space projects throughout his adult life, including the ongoing one on Paseo Park. Demir would move out of the neighborhood for grad school, but returned as a practicing architect and professor. He now teaches urban design studios focussed on 34th Avenue, encouraging young designers-in-training to think critically about the spaces we occupy as New Yorkers. Demir passed by the courtyard he played in as a child again decades later, when he led a class tour around Jackson Heights. “I kinda forgot that it was an inner courtyard until I had done a tour with my students here and then passed by it. I was like wait a minute, I remember this place… no way was this a private area when we were kids,” the local architect told me.
In April, when I was in the middle of researching and planning interviews, I was taking a stroll when I bumped into Damaris Chamorro painting one of 34th Avenue’s stone blocks. A young local artist and my old middle school classmate, the two of us hadn’t talked in years. After we caught up on life and discussed the creative process for the public art project she was busy finishing, she agreed to an interview later in the month as part of my senior thesis.
Damaris, who went to the same afterschool art program that I did in the seventh and eighth grade, recently graduated with a BFA in Illustration from the Fashion Institute of Technology. Since its completion in May, her mural has brought more color to the intersection of Paseo Park with 85th Street. Reminiscing about our childhoods together in front of our old middle school, on the same table and chairs where I interviewed Alex the day before, Damaris told me just how little she socialized outside when we were classmates. But reflecting on how the landscape of our neighborhood’s streets have changed over time, Damaris explained that “it’s allowed me to engage more with my community because you see a lot of people outside and I like to take pictures of what I draw most of the time.”
“Sometimes if I see a really interesting person I may come up to them and ask ‘oh, is it okay if I take your picture?’ and they just tell me a little about themselves. It’s just nice to be able to have that connection, even if it's short, and I feel like maybe that wouldn’t happen if we didn’t have this space.”
Damaris painting her mural at 85th Street, a design that includes leaves and flowers she collected on Paseo Park during the autumn, painted to resemble a cyanotype print. | Photo by Henry Mei
This is the same space that pushed Adrian Cepeda to fulfill a longtime dream of his – to open a bookstore in his childhood home of Jackson Heights. Adrian first reached out to me a few years ago, when he sent an email inquiring about 34th Avenue’s pedestrian counts to strengthen his grant applications. In April, the both of us chatted about our shared experiences growing up in the neighborhood as we sat inside of the World’s Borough Bookshop, located on the corner of Paseo Park with 73rd Street. If you were to look out the window from the children’s reading room, you would see the building Adrian was raised in during the 90s.
In between helping a steady flow of customers in a mix of Spanish and English, he explained the significance of his bookstore’s name: “the ‘World’s Borough’ is the name of our borough and it always had such a great ring to it… it’s such a great way to represent not only the community but its people and everything that Queens stands for.” The bookshelves we were sitting around, adorned almost exclusively by nonwhite authors, represents a Jackson Heights that stands against everything its early twentieth century developers had envisioned. What a statement it is to have this humble bookstore, with a mission to amplify writers of color while fronting a 26-block public space, in a place once built exclusively with private courtyards for the exclusively white buildings they served. Adrian is currently celebrating the World’s Borough Bookshop’s first birthday as the only English-language bookstore in Jackson Heights.
73rd to 74th Street pedestrian plaza. The World's Borough Bookshop and Adrian's childhood home is just out of view to the left. | Photo by Henry Mei
Mapping out their experiences throughout different parts of their lives, with the changes Jackson Heights has seen throughout its century of existence, was a huge “ah-ha!” moment for me.
The interviews revealed commonalities I wasn’t anticipating, and showed how universal the desire and need for more public space is.
I am convinced that if I had drafted my senior thesis first and then pigeonholed quotes into the text, the end product would have been an infinitely less compelling piece of writing.
34th Avenue, though one of the most successful, is far from the only location in the City’s Open Streets program. Open Streets are also not the only type of projects with the potential to create impactful change on our roadways, like what I encountered interviewing fellow Jackson Heights residents. But I feel compelled to leave observers of this particular case study with some food for thought about their own neighborhoods, to think about the spaces they both pass through and occupy in their day to day. Picture a walk that you take often:
What is this walk for? Leisure? To walk the dog? To get back home from work or class? Did you just go grocery shopping?
What draws you to this particular route? Why aren’t you walking on the street a block or two over?
What are the streets you take mainly designed for? What takes priority, and how does that shape your own experience?
Is there anyone biking on the sidewalk? Why is that?
Can you walk with friends or family side-by-side? Do you feel pressured to let others pass you, or for you to squeeze past others?
Who else is around you? Are they in a rush? Are they taking their time?
Remember that time during lockdown, when cars were off the streets and New Yorkers found the birds singing to be off-putting? Their chirping has stayed on 34th Avenue – can you hear the birds chirping on your street?
What is stopping you from having the most enjoyable experience possible for you and your neighbors? What changes, big or small, does this make you want to push for in your own home neighborhood?
Picture all the kids pushed onto the sidewalk, with the tables & chairs gone and cyclists forced between parked cars & moving traffic. That is what 34th Ave used to look like. | Photo by Henry Mei
Today, instead of being crammed onto 34th Avenue’s narrow sidewalks at dismissal like I was, I see a new generation of kids in Jackson Heights growing up with something so simple yet so precious: space. They come from no less than seven local schools directly on or just off Paseo Park, wearing the same uniforms I was forced to wear growing up. When the bell rings, they flood the asphalt that cars used to drive down. They’re in groups with smiles on their faces, walking side-by-side, kicking balls around and talking with each other. Some kids even bike home from school, something unthinkable when I was their age. When I see all the people I share my neighborhood with in Paseo Park today, when I see this new generation growing up with the expectation that this public space is theirs, I can’t help but feel immense pride in being from Jackson Heights.
How might the kids of today grow up to shape their home, just as people like Alex, Demir, Damaris or Adrian have done in their own ways? How differently will this new generation in Jackson Heights look back at their childhoods, just as I have reflected on while writing my senior thesis? How can you (yes, you!) secure a safer and more dignified future for the children growing up in your own neighborhood, one they can feel pride in?
Henry Mei recently graduated with a B.A. in Urban Studies from Hunter College. During his studies, he has interned at Open Plans and organized with Friends of 34th Avenue Linear Park (now the nonprofit Alliance for Paseo Park) in his home neighborhood of Jackson Heights, Queens. Having grown up on the road-turned-public space, Henry made 34th Avenue the focus of his senior thesis while centering the perspectives of the passionate and talented people he’s met along the way. You can read “The Power of Paseo Park” here.