Rego Park

From Decoding New York

Rego Park: “Sunflower,” a neighborhood grocery store offering gourmet goods, sells Turkish, Greek, Israeli, and Russian products. Photos by KF.

Rego Park is defined as a neighborhood in the central portion of the New York City borough of Queens. It is bordered to the north by Elmhurst and Corona, the east and south by Forest Hills and the west by Middle Village. Queens is one of the five boroughs of New York City and is geographically the largest borough. It is believed that by the year 2010 the majority of its population will be foreign born.

The vast numbers of Irish and German immigrants that entered the East coast cities during the mid-nineteenth century, engulfed Queens, as well. The Irish who had been displaced by the potato famine, settled in Astoria, and in parts of Jamaica and Flushing. Middle Village, which had been English in the 1840s, became mostly German by 1860. Nowadays, Queens is known for being multiethnic, and is the home of Japanese, Chinese, Koreans, Italians, Puerto Ricans, Greeks, and other groups. The influx of various ethnic groups was helped by immigration acts like the National Immigration Act of 1965.

Although Rego Park is currently known for its great Bukharian Jewish population, other groups are well-represented as well, such as Israeli, Romanian, Iranian, Indian, Colombian, and South Korean groups. Some areas inhabited by large immigrant groups fall prey to crime and poverty, but Rego Park, despite its diverse immigrant community continues to be one of the safer and more “desirable” neighborhoods to live in. Bukharian Jewish immigrants are considered to be Central Asian but because these immigrants come from the former Soviet Union the neighborhood has a certain Russian “aura” to it, as evidenced by the large number of shop signs written in Russian.

Rego Park. Map. Courtesy Google Maps.

This section on Washington Heights and Rego Park developed by Irina Mullokandova, Karina Fatova, Quinn Marston.