Urban Matters: You write in the introduction: ‘I did not set out to make a book about Queens.’ Why did you start journeying through Queens with camera in hand?  

Joseph Heathcott: Well, my wife and I moved to New York from St. Louis in 2007 when I was offered a job at The New School, and we chose to live in Queens – in Jackson Heights, specifically. I am an urbanist, meaning that I study cities and urban life. And one of the main ways that I learn about cities is through photography, so over the past 10 or 15 years I've accumulated thousands of photographs from around the borough.  The process of taking photographs, walking around neighborhoods, talking with people in the streets and shops and diners allowed me to start to get at least some sense of this borough.

UM: How did you go about assembling these photos? Did you say, ‘This week, I’m shooting Elmhurst?’  Did you have certain events or places in mind? Or how much was it shooting from the hip?

Heathcott: All the above, really. Many times, I would just be out and about somewhere in the borough for one reason or another, and I'd take a stroll down some random street.  You never know what you are going to see or who you will meet.  That's how I encountered the lovely scene of parishioners streaming out of Our Lady of Sorrows church in Corona [pictured above]. Other times I set out on 'photo shoots' to study a specific place or see an event, like the amazing Holi [also called Phagwah] parade in Richmond Hill [pictured below].

UM: Queens is notoriously a patchwork, seams showing, of villages, subdivisions, and industrial zones that grew up in a pretty higgledy-piggledy fashion. How is that reflected in day-to-day neighborhood life – and in your book? 

Heathcott: That's a great description of Queens, and I hope that the book conveys that sense.  I think that this mash-up of 19th century settlements and 20th century subdivisions, all crisscrossed by thoroughfares and highways, has created hundreds of little pockets, almost like islands. This has contributed to the strong sense of neighborhood identity that Queens is known for.  After all, we're the only borough that uses neighborhood names for our postal addresses – like my mail comes to Jackson Heights, NY.    

To organize the photographs, I tried all kinds of ways, like grouping them chronologically or by neighborhood or theme, but these didn't capture what I was after. Then one day I was looking at the photos in a Flickr album, and I hit 'random sort,' and that is pretty much how they now appear in the book.  The senselessness suddenly made sense!

UM: The people in those island-pocket neighborhoods come from every corner of the world; almost half are foreign-born. Do you see communities that are inward- or outward-looking?

Heathcott: I think most communities do both, depending on circumstances and needs. Some immigrant groups have created strong ethnic enclaves, like the Chinese in Flushing [see banquet hall photo, below].  

Of course, these groups are themselves diverse. Flushing's ‘Chinatown’ is home to Mandarin speakers, immigrants from Fujian province, Taiwanese, and more and more from Hong Kong. The Mexican community of Corona is heavily dominated by immigrants from Puebla state, especially from around Cholula. But they mix in the streets and churches with families from Ecuador, Colombia, and Guatemala.  People turn inward to their ethnic and linguistic groups for some things, and outward to broader communities for other things. Urban cultures are made through these constant processes of defining and then crossing boundaries of belonging.

UM: Beachfront high-rises; rowhouses; garden apartments; single-family homes with yards and front porches: The whole dizzying variety of Queens housing arrangements really comes through in your book. What are you trying to say by focusing on that?

Heathcott:  Part of this is just my own proclivity for stories about architecture and built environments.  Queens is in so many ways defined by its ordinariness, like the row of houses you see in this photo.

But I am also interested in how such an incredibly diverse array of people have settled into this otherwise mundane landscape, and how they have adapted it to suit their needs – how they use their houses and yards to express or negotiate their identities in a new land. The many typologies you see – the apartments and rowhouses and tower blocks – reflect wide variation in ways of living, as people sort themselves out across the borough.  

UM: You’ve taken more than a dozen years of photos. How has Queens – and your understanding of Queens – evolved over that time? What’s stayed the same and what’s changed? 

Heathcott:  It is a great question, and it makes me think of a line from Baudelaire's poem ‘The Swan,’ where he laments that ‘cities change, alas, faster than a lover's heart.’ And certainly, Queens has changed over the last dozen years. Long Island City now bristles with bland luxury skybox towers. The great chop shop landscape of the Iron Triangle at Willetts Point has been demolished and cleared. Along Queens Boulevard, dozens of low-rise commercial blocks from the 1910s and 1920s have fallen to high-rise apartment construction. 

But what I've learned is that neighborhoods change at very different rates, and new relationships continuously emerge and take hold. For now, at least, Queens remains a place of multitudes, with people from all over the world, and those people are constantly working out how to live with each other in this unfathomably diverse borough.

Joseph Heathcott is chair of Urban and Environmental Studies at The New School. His work creating Global Queens: An Urban Mosaic was supported by the Zolberg Institute for Migration and Mobility at The New School and by a David Coffin Publication Award from the Center for Landscape Studies. Use here of copyrighted photos from the book is with his permission and that of the publisher, Fordham University Press.

Photos by: Joseph Heathcott