Flushing Meadows and the Battle for the Real New York

The Flushing neighborhood of Queens in New York has endured its share of indignities over the years. That moniker – an unfortunate anglicized version of the Dutch name Vlissengen – was never a great start. For much of the 19th and early 20th centuries, large parts of the area were industrial wasteland, the "valley of ashes" that F. Scott Fitzgerald describes in The Great Gatsby. And as home to the usually hapless New York Mets since 1964, first in the dismal Shea Stadium and now at Citi Field, Flushing has been the scene of much heartbreak.

But Flushing and the adjacent neighborhoods of Eastern Queens have also been, for generations now, home to a variety of immigrant groups who have made the neighborhood a launching pad for their American dreams, and created a humming economic engine for the city in the process (not to mention serving a lot of great food). There are Chinese, and Latin Americans, and Greeks, and Italians, and Bangladeshis, and Pakistanis, and Indians, and countless others.