Nowhere else in New York are they biting off more than in Queens. Deluged with newcomers like Mungroo, Queens grew by 278,000 people during the past decade to more than 2.2 million, the biggest jump of any New York borough. While non-Hispanic whites dropped from 48 percent to 33 percent of Queens’s population during that time, Asians jumped from 12 percent to 18 percent and Hispanics from 20 percent to 25 percent. The borough also has the largest proportion of residents–6.1 percent–who identified themselves on their Census forms as belonging to two or more races. All of which has confirmed Queens–once scorned as a soulless yawn of a suburb–as a bustling and kaleidoscopic borough of strivers. Home to 167 nationalities and 116 languages, it’s considered the nation’s most diverse county–and it’s becoming only more so. Says Marie Nahikian of the Queens County Overall Economic Development Corporation: “We got refueled and restocked with a whole new level of energy.”
That’s on vivid display in Richmond Hill. One of the fastest-growing areas of Queens during the past decade–its Census tracts typically showed 35 percent to 50 percent population growth–the influx there has been remarkable for one feature in particular: new immigrant groups have been displacing older ones rather than squeezing in beside them. Back in the early part of the 20th century, the streets teemed with European immigrants: Irish, Italians, Germans. Then in the 1970s and ’80s, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans and other Latino groups arrived. In the 1990s came the Guyanese and Trinidadians, and most recently, it’s been Sikhs from India, their bright turbans emblazoning the landscape. Yet there’s almost no trace of the Italian delis and German sweet shops that used to scent Liberty Avenue, the main commercial drag in South Richmond Hill; today the area is known as Little Guyana. The old Lutheran church on 118th Street? It’s now a Sikh Gurdwara, or temple, touted as one of the largest in the Northeast.
Beyond adding color, the Indo-Caribbean community has recharged the local economy. Look at the 500 merchants packed into 30 clamorous, congested, garbage-strewn blocks of Liberty Avenue. Walk their length and your senses hit overdrive: brilliant saris hang from store awnings; Trinidadian roti restaurants and Guyanese markets spice the air; calypso, salsa and hip-hop blare from cars and shops. Fifteen years ago the strip was dotted with empty storefronts. Today there’s not a vacancy in sight and rents have tripled to $50 and $60 per square foot.
The dollars come from folks like Darrel Sukhdeo. An immigrant from Trinidad who landed in Richmond Hill three years ago, he patronizes mostly West Indian businesses–buying Trinidadian delicacies at the markets, drinking Carib beer at the sports bars while he watches the Trinidadian national soccer team compete in the World Cup qualifiers, entertaining the ladies at the Calypso City club. Sukhdeo, 33, is a budding businessman himself, working with a partner in his spare time (he has a day job as a painter) to get a computer-training company off the ground. Its clients so far: all fellow Indo-Caribbeans. The community is tremendously entrepreneurial–a quality, Sukhdeo says, that has been bred in his people ever since they were first brought to the Caribbean from India as indentured laborers 150 years ago. And they arrive in the United States with a head start on many immigrants from other countries: they speak English and are often well educated.
Little surprise, then, that Liberty Avenue has a nascent merchants’ association. Four years ago Raymond Ally and Jamal Baksh, both Guyanese natives, formed Agenda 21 (as in 21st century) to strengthen the community and bolster the economy in Richmond Hill. They’re an impressive pair: Ally, a bespectacled financial economist who used to work at the International Monetary Fund and now manages small-business relations at local bank branches; Baksh, an impassioned activist who does community outreach for Sterling Bank. “I looked at this as my little country that I could work on,” says Ally. The group’s accomplishments so far: securing $1 million to revive a local park, publishing a Liberty Avenue merchant directory and conducting a market study of the area. Eventually, they hope to form a business-improvement district to qualify for a cut of tax revenues. “We’ve been absorbing people for 500 years,” says Thomas Kearns, a white director of Agenda 21 whose family has been in the funeral-home business in Queens for 100 years. “And it just gets better.”
Not everyone agrees. “The better-quality stores are disappearing” and being replaced with 99-cent shops, grouses Martin Molbegott, a Jew whose family has run the True Value hardware store on Liberty Avenue for 75 years. The area has gotten dirtier, he adds, and “the cleanup for merchants has become tremendous.”
Some neighborhoods are also suffering from serious overcrowding. Up in northern Richmond Hill, Nancy Cataldi, president of the Richmond Hill Historical Society, points at a single-family house with three doorbells and three electric meters. “There’s three or four families in there,” she says. Homes like that are common throughout the area–as immigrant owners rent out rooms to help pay their mortgages–and they’ve prompted a host of gripes from longtime residents: overflowing garbage, ugly additions, parking hell. Cataldi doesn’t cast the problem in ethnic or racial terms. It’s a housing and infrastructure issue, after all–too many newcomers in too little space.
Yet the human torrent has recharged this patch of Queens. Like Puerto Ricans before them, or Italians earlier still, the Caribbean arrivals have breathed life into the economy. And, as they erect their trademark wrought-iron fences and plant Hindu prayer flags in the yard, they’ve also remade the face of Richmond Hill. Their history has been wedded to that of Queens, a borough whose identity continues to be forged in its flux and rediscovery. “This place is a starting point,” says Mungroo, the real-estate manager. And, he adds, “a gold mine.” His fellow immigrants certainly hope so.
title: “Changing Of The Guard” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-11” author: “Arthur Fuller”
But the magazine–along with the swanky soirees for which it became notorious–lives on. Earlier this month, The Paris Review announced that Brigid Hughes, who had been serving as interim editor since Plimpton’s death, will run the magazine. Hughes, 30, majored in English at Northwestern University and joined The Paris Review as an intern in 1995. She became an editor later that year and was named managing editor in 2000. With a new young editor in charge and flush with cash from donations in the wake of Plimpton’s death and a big anniversary (In 2001, Plimpton had said the magazine’s bank account had dropped to $1.16), the 50-year-old literary quarterly enters a new era. Hughes recently spoke with NEWSWEEK’s Brian Braiker about taking the reins from the magazine’s famous founder, and her own vision for its future. Excerpts:
NEWSWEEK: You were basically doing this job for a few months prior to Plimpton’s death. What does it entail?
Brigid Hughes: Right. It entails a lot of reading. And the way it works is we have a small group of editors and everyone brings work into the magazine, so it’s really just a question of selecting what we’re going to publish and then putting an issue together.
When is the next issue due out?
The next issue is the winter issue, which will be out any week–this week or next. The spring issue will be out in April.
Will this be the first issue of The Paris Review ever to have zero input from George Plimpton?
The summer issue will actually be the first issue with no input. We had sort of casual conversations about the spring issue with George.
How far in advance do you close each issue?
Oh, gosh, it’s something we’re trying to get better at. We probably close about a month to two months before the magazine comes out.
Do you have anything you’re particularly excited about in the upcoming winter issue?
We have an excellent story by Andrea Barrett along with an interview by her. They’re both wonderful. She’s a writer we haven’t had in the magazine before. She won the National Book award several years ago for a collection of stories. She has another novel and a couple collections of stories.
Do you have any favorite writers right now?
Well, we’re working on an interview with Haruki Murakami so I’ve been rereading his stuff and really enjoying that. An interview with Paul Muldoon. Those are the two authors I’ve been spending the most time with lately.
You declined to take Plimpton’s title of editor in chief.
That was a decision made by I think everyone on the board and the staff. It was just decided we would make up a new title in part also because George actually shared the title of editor with a long list of people.
Plimpton made a name for himself training with the Detroit Lions and trying his hand at the circus trapeze. You’re not going to be boxing Mike Tyson any time soon?
[Laughs] If someone extended an invitation, I would consider it. But no. That is not part of the job description. Thankfully.
Unlike The New Yorker, The Paris Review has more of a reputation of publishing unknown writers–any discoveries of yours you’re particularly proud of recently?
I think the favorite recently is a story by Yiyun Li, which came out of the slush pile and received the Plimpton Prize for new writers this year. We’ve long given a prize for the best fiction or poetry to appear in the magazine by an unpublished writer. We decided this year we would rename the prize after George. She is the first recipient of the new Plimpton Prize. [Her story] is called “Immortality.”
What does the prize entail? Will it be published in an anthology?
No, it’s awarded to somebody that appears in the magazine in the last year and it comes with a cash prize. We bring them to New York for a reading. So she’ll be here on March 8th, along with Michael Chabon who received the Aga Khan Prize for Fiction for a wonderful novella we did over the summer. That’s for the best [overall] piece of fiction in the magazine in the past year.
It must be amazing for someone who has a love of reading and writing to have a job where you regularly rub elbows with the likes of Michael Chabon or Andrea Barrett or Paul Auster or whoever else you’re publishing.
Well, yeah, it’s wonderful to see the enthusiasm and the interest people have in writing–whether it’s authors or the readers, whether it’s Paul Auster or Yiyun Li. It’s equally exciting to talk to both.
How are things on the money front?
The state of our finances is strong. We had a big benefit in the fall to celebrate the 50th anniversary, and George passed away a few weeks before it so it grew into this absolutely enormous event. George, as he always did, found a way to contribute something to the magazine. It ended up raising a lot of money for us and really secured our future.
How about the parties, are those going to continue?
I think so. It’s just as much a part of the magazine as other things. It’s a tradition, so I think those will continue.
How does your youth affect how you do your job if at all?
My youth? I don’t feel all that young. I mean, look, the magazine was started by a group of people my age and the age of the other editors. So it seemed quite fitting we start a new era with a similar group of people.
What do you make of what McSweeney’s is doing–it seems to be in some ways inheriting the mantle of what The Paris Review was when it was starting out, working to publish new authors in interesting ways.
I think there are a lot of magazines that are publishing interesting work, McSweeney’s among them. I think Granta’s excellent. Poetry, they have a new editor there, and I think he’s doing some interesting things.
Tell me about the anthology you have coming out in the spring.
It is called “The Paris Review Book for Planes, Trains, Elevators and Waiting Rooms.” As I hope the title suggests, it’s fiction and poetry organized according to length–the idea being that if you happen to be in an elevator with a book, you can open up to the elevator chapter and find a short poem that will take you 30 seconds to read while you go up to the 20th floor. Or if you’re in the waiting room, we have a novella for you to read while you sit and wait.
Do you have a long-term vision for the magazine? Any grand plans?
There’s not really too much that hasn’t been done before. The magazine has really always been open to anything. So I just hope to continue that tradition and to find new writers in fiction, poetry or whatever form it takes–
nonfiction, art.
