East Elmhurst is a sleepy neighborhood to the north of Jackson Heights and Corona with mostly row houses and partially-attached single and multi-family homes. Like most of north-central Queens, it used to be marsh and farmland. Up until Prohibition, it was also an amusement park area (built by the Steinways), Queens’ answer to Coney Island, long since torn down and reborn as LaGuardia Airport. We roam the streets here on long walks with our dog, Mr. Scruffington, who is very partial to sniffing here. On the border with Jackson Heights are two large nondescript co-ops on either side of Northern Boulevard, called Northridge and Southridge.

East of Jackson Heights is Corona, originally a planned community built by the Crown Building Company. Legend has it that Corona derived its name from its first residents, Italian immigrants, as “corona” means “crown” in Italian. Other people will tell you because it’s supposed to be the “crown” of Queens. Hey, who knows? Both could be true. For decades, Corona was home to a bustling Black and European community, home to the likes of Langston Hughes, Marie Daly, Estée Lauder, Malcolm X, and former Borough President Helen Marshall. Nowadays, it’s a stew of people from all over Latin America, the African diaspora, Asaia, and everywhere else. Take a walk around, and you can see the different layers peeking through—the Langston Hughes Library on Northern Boulevard, the old-school Italian businesses around William F. Moore Park, Congregation Tifereth Israel (Queens’ oldest synagogue), and the rich variety of pan-Latin American businesses. The greatest development in the area is by far the dredging of the former wetland of Flushing Meadows (once home to the ash heaps of Great Gatsby fame) into the World’s Fairs of 1939 and 1964, that made Flushing Meadows-Corona Park the local attraction that it is. The Unisphere is, after all, the symbol of Queens.