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Ticket To The World

By Tribune Staff

The 7 train bursts from the subway tunnel onto the elevated tracks in Queens, on its way from Times Square to Flushing, and rumbles into a seemingly unremarkable industrial urban scene. But it is beneath those tracks, in the streets below, that cultures from around the world form a wealth of nations in neighborhoods. The 7 train passes above so many ethnic and immigrant communities on its seven-mile route through northwest Queens, it was dubbed “The International Express” by the Department of City Planning.

Experience it for yourself. Get off in Sunnyside and spend an evening at a Spanish theater or a Romanian nightclub. Get off in Woodside and rent a Thai video or hear traditional music at an Irish pub. Or stop at Jackson Heights to visit an Indian sari shop or dance at a Colombian nightclub. Or Corona for an Italian game of bocce or to buy fresh tortillas at a Mexican bakery, or Flushing for classes in Korean drumming.
What makes The International Express so international?

The 7 train and immigrant settlement patterns are historically linked. Its tracks, built mostly by immigrant laborers in the early 1900s, were intended in part to redistribute the large number of immigrants living in Manhattan more evenly throughout the City. Although Queens is the largest of New York City’s boroughs, and the City’s geographic center, in 1900 it was home to only a tiny percent of the population. It was a rural borough of meadows and marshes, colonial estates and small villages, such as Flushing, inaccessible to most Manhattanites. The IRT (Interborough Rapid Transit) 7 train, which began running to Queensboro Plaza in 1915, was extended to 103rd Street, Corona in 1917, and finally reached Flushing in 1928.

Although ferry boats, and eventually the Queensborough bridge, linked Manhattan and Queens, it was the train that provided the quickest and most inexpensive mode of transport. Without this expansion of the New York City subway system, the neighborhoods in Queens would not be as diverse as they are. Many immigrants who had moved out of crowded tenements on the Lower East Side of Manhattan for a better quality of life in Queens, actually settled along the route of the train. Today, a high percentage of immigrants to Queens still settle in the northwest section of the borough. The IRT was also responsible for the urbanization of Queens since it prompted the development of businesses to serve the borough’s increasing population.

Now, many of those who live alongside the 7 line also work near it. Some immigrants eventually relocate in pursuit of the more suburban lifestyle that led immigrants living in Manhattan to move to Queens in the early 1900s. They often return, however, for the specialty shops and restaurants of their old neighborhoods.

Queens is the most ethnically diverse place in the world. The International Express is simultaneously a trip around the world and a voyage to quintessential Queens. People from approximately 150 nations have immigrated to Queens and established communities here. Communal memories permeate the streets: store and restaurant names, as well as their architecture and patrons, recall a variety of native lands. Community is a sense of ‘us’-ness, a collective identity as a group, which arises from shared experience, traditions and values. Community members gather in social clubs and in restaurants to be with others who share their culture and history.

As a lonely Irish immigrant put it as he sat in an Irish pub in Woodside, talking against the sounds of clanking glasses and hearty laughter, he had come to the pub to be comforted by “Irish accents and familiar sounds.” The train route is dotted with cultural oases such as Turkish grocery stores, Korean calligraphy associations and Hindu temples, which provide similar social and cultural fortification.

Community institutions like ethnic restaurants, parades and festivals serve the needs of their members; they also provide outsiders with opportunities to experience cultures beyond their own, since they are ways in which communities can present their cultures to others.

As the owner of one of the first Mexican restaurants in Jackson Heights expressed it, when he arrived in Queens he saw that “a lot of other communities had their own restaurants and there was no Mexican restaurant at all. There was only one…but it wasn’t a real Mexico place. People think Mexican food is only tacos. Mexican food has a lot of things. And that’s how we decided to open a restaurant – for our community – not just for the money. It was to put a special name for the community. People could come and see the things that we really have.”

When immigrants arrive in the United States they must decide which parts of mainstream American culture to adopt as their own, which of their traditions to maintain, and which to adapt to their new home. Many parents send their American born children to Saturday schools where they learn the language and culture of their heritage; Afghan, Armenian, Korean, Thai, Turkish and Uruguayan schools are among those which exist along the 7 line.

People keep connected to their communities at the broadest level through the media, foreign and ethnic newspapers, radio and television programs which inform them of relevant news and social events both in the United States and their homelands. Some people keep connected to their communities at a more intimate level by forming cultural associations with fellow immigrants from their native regions or cities. Many such groups hold annual dinner dances, as well as organize cultural and charitable events.

Communities exist in shared social space, not necessarily shared physical space. We become members of New York City’s multicultural community not just by virtue of living here, but by choosing to participate in it; by interacting with our neighbors, learning about their lives and traditions and by sharing our lives and traditions with them.

In 1999, the Queens Council on the Arts successfully nominated The International Express for the designation of National Millennium Trail. It was selected as representative of the American immigrant experience by the White House Millennium Council, the United States Department of Transportation, and the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy. Indeed, the relationship between transportation, immigrant settlement patterns, and commerce, evident along The International Express is a present-day echo of similar, albeit grander-scale, schemes that built our nation, like the Trans-Continental Railroad. And the immigrants who opened the first Mexican bakery or Indian sari shop, for example, were certainly pioneers of sorts. The International Express is a living heritage trail. Its route may be set in steel but its destinations are ever changing. New sites of interest are constantly emerging as new New Yorkers settle alongside it.

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