When Mallika Dutt and Daniel Ghosal moved back to New York City after four years in New Delhi, India, their destination was an apartment on the Upper West Side in Manhattan, where the two had lived before they left for India. But the apartment seemed small, particularly now that they had two dogs with them.
And so began their search for an ideal home. Initially they explored the suburbs, but their heart was set in finding a house in one of the boroughs of New York. Dutt liked a house they saw in Bedford-Stuyvesant in central Brooklyn. But Ghosal was reluctant.
“I thought it was too much of a risk,” says Ghosal, 38, vice president at Credit Suisse bank.
“The neighborhood wasn’t turning around, and we would have to wait a long time before it would actually be gentrified,” adds Dutt, 42, executive director of Breakthrough, a non-governmental organization.
And then the two did something they had never thought they would: They fell in love with a three-story house in the historic part of Jackson Heights, just a few blocks from the famous 74th Street South Asian shopping center – sometimes referred to as a desi ghetto, or Jaikisan Heights, as novelist Suketu Mehta referred to it in his book Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found.
In the 1960s through the 1980s, white middle-class neighborhoods in Queens such as Jackson Heights, Elmhurst and Flushing attracted huge numbers of new arrival Indian immigrants. But once the immigrants managed to save some money, they bought houses in New Jersey, or in upstate New York, like Westchester County and Long Island.
Jackson Heights remained a temporary base for immigrants. In fact, now the apartment housing the 74th Street market attracts more immigrants from Bangladesh. Indian immigrants tend to set their first base in New Jersey, especially in the state’s Middlesex County.
Dutt and Ghosal are new types of immigrants in Jackson Heights. They are the young urban professionals who have lived in Manhattan. But Manhattan’s real estate prices had soured and they also found themselves priced out of the hip neighborhoods of Brooklyn. Eventually they found reasonably priced houses and co-ops in Queens, especially in Jackson Heights.
And since their move, they have fallen in love with Jackson Heights – a relatively safe area, with less expensive grocery stores, ethnic restaurants and bars, and large pockets of new immigrants from Latin America (Colombia, Ecuador, and Venezuela) and Asia (Bangladesh, India, South Korea, and Thailand).
Dutt and Ghosal even encouraged their friends to explore living in Jackson Heights. Friends like Rupal and Ash – an Indian couple who had lived in various parts of the Upper West Side in Manhattan, including Washington Heights. But when it came to buying their first apartment, the couple decided to check out Jackson Heights.
“It is a wonderful neighborhood,” Rupal, 36, says about Jackson Heights, where she and Ash have owned an apartment for two-and-a-half years. “It is a very middle and working-class neighborhood community, which is something we just love.”
The couple was never concerned about what their investment banker friends would say – that they were moving into a neighborhood better known for its new immigrant population.
“We loved the fact that we are living with the immigrants,” says Ash, 39. “We didn’t want to live with the Wall Street crowd.”
Nilay Oza was focused on the coolness factor as he and his wife, Sarah Cohen, set out to look for a place to buy in New York City. If Oza, 35, had his way, he would have continued to live in Harlem, just north of Central Park. But Harlem, like most other neighborhoods in Manhattan, has become hugely expensive. Oza and Cohen also looked in Brooklyn, especially in Bedford-Stuyvesant and Clinton Hill neighborhoods.
Then, by chance they came across an advertisement for an open house in Jackson Heights. And they fell in love with a sunny one-bedroom co-op apartment on 72nd Street.
Oza, an architect, is Rupal’s younger brother and having his sister and brother-in-law in the neighborhood is a big plus.
The notion among some Indians that Jackson Heights is a desi ghetto can dampen the enthusiasm.
“It bothered me more than it bothered Sarah,” says Oza. Sarah, 30, had spent a few years in Brooklyn, so she was looking for a change. And now Oza has also changed his opinion.
“It is not hip like the new Brooklyn neighborhoods,” Oza says about Jackson Heights. “But it is a very down-to-earth place, and I actually value that. It is a real place.”
“I think for some people it is déclassé to live in Queens,” says filmmaker Shashwati Talukdar, who moved to Jackson Heights with her American husband Kerin Friedman in 2001. “All my snobby cousins in India couldn’t believe that I was going to live there. They were like ‘Oh my god! What a ghati place!’”
But Talukdar, 38, did not care. And even though The New York Times declared a couple of years ago that ‘Queens is the new Brooklyn,’ Talukdar preferred hipster-free Jackson Heights.
Talukdar’s neighbors in her building on 81st Street are mostly Latino immigrants from Ecuador and Colombia. But she never feels like an outsider.
“When I had a job on the Upper East Side, I felt like more of an outsider there,” she says. “I think, also, for a mixed race couple, Jackson Heights is the right kind of a place with its diversity. It was actually more convenient with the most train connections.” The 74th Street-Broadway subway stop in Jackson Heights is also the meeting point for the 7, E, F, G, R and V lines.
Ghosal was concerned about the drug-trafficking in the Jackson Heights area in the 1980s. “This used to be the cocaine capital of the world,” hey says. “There were a lot of muggings. Crack and cocaine was all over Roosevelt Avenue. You would have these mass family murders related to cocaine.”
Now the neighborhood has been cleaned up, largely due to huge investments made in the police force by the former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani.
But Ghosal had other doubts, too. “I wanted to live where my colleagues and friends lived, with a nice garden and barbeque at the back.”
“There were a lot of elitism and class issues involved,” Dutt acknowledges. “You are Indian and young, and you are moving to Jackson Heights? I think there was also an element of that in my thinking.”
And Ghosal had one more issue about buying a house in Jackson Heights. As a child and teenager he had lived in the Elmhurst part of Queens, right on the border of Jackson Heights.
“I had a problem that I was regressing in life,” Ghosal says. “But as far as assets are concerned we have moved forward.”
“Daniel felt that he wasn’t moving forward, but backwards,” his wife says. The property the couple bought has nearly doubled in its value since they moved there a few years ago.
The jokes about her moving to Jackson Heights have not escaped S Mitra Kalita, who first began to visit the neighborhood as part of her Columbia University Journalism School assignments. When she became a reporter at Newsday, Jackson Heights was a part of Kalita’s beat. She first rented a studio in Jackson Heights. In 2002, she bought a one-bedroom co-op for under $100,000.
“I was coming from this belief, which I still hold, that the best way to cover a community is to actually live there,” Kalita, 29, adds. “For me it was more than a place to live.”
A few years ago, Kalita moved to Washington D.C., to work for The Washington Post. But she still keeps her apartment and often spends time there with her artist husband Nitin Mukul, 35, and their baby girl, Naya.
“I happened to be in my early 20s and it was also a time in my life when I was trying to form an identity,” Kalita says about her initial years in Jackson Heights. Born in Brooklyn, Kalita grew up on Long Island, in Puerto Rico and New Jersey. “I feel that so many (South Asians) in their 20s who live in Manhattan only use the nightclubs and the South Asian art exhibition experiences as a way to form their identity. But by living in this neighborhood I could find a certain authenticity that I couldn’t find in the night clubs, dancing to bhangra music.”
When Kalita was young, she and her brothers would protest when their parents dragged them to the Indian shopping areas on Oak Tree Road in Edison, New Jersey, or in Jackson Heights. “My friends from high school thought it was the funniest things,” she says about the time when she moved to Jackson Heights. “They thought ‘Wow, she has really changed. Something has happened.’”
Ethnic food is a huge plus for the new arrivals in Jackson Heights. When Oza and Cohen bought their apartment last fall they had their kitchen redone. In the interim Cohen started buying freshly cooked vegetarian Indian food from Raj Bhog Sweets around the corner from her apartment. And Oza recently discovered a small Nepali restaurant where he bought momos and thupas.
Since buying their house in Jackson Heights, Ghosal has discovered three different types of Colombian cuisines. And Dutt can now distinguish between mainland Chinese and Taiwanese food.
Talukdar has a favorite Colombian bar, just down the block from her apartment building, where musicians from the neighborhood perform. “It’s a well-kept secret, and I am not sure if I want it to change,” Talukdar says.
Since Jackson Heights has no bookstores, Dutt and Cohen have become big supporters of the local public library that has sections dedicated to various countries and languages in the world.
“It is this tiny little space and everybody from the globe is in that space,” Dutt says. “Every time I walk in there, it really reminds me of the basis of this country and where we all came from. Especially with everything that is going on with immigration, it is a very heartening reminder.”
Jackson Heights is still missing the up-market retail chains that can be seen all over Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn. But Cohen has no regrets that there isn’t a Starbucks near her home. “I think that would be a turn off for me,” Cohen says.
And Dutt adds: “I really don’t care for Starbucks. That’s not a part of my existence.”
But Rupal and Ash fear that their move into Jackson Heights may be the beginning of the gentrification of the neighborhood.
“Gentrification is more about class,” Rupal says. “I know that in the years to come, this is a place that would lend itself more to our class of people moving in, which unfortunately might drive the other people out. I really hope that doesn’t happen. I really don’t want Jackson Heights to become a hip place.”
