Staging Neighborhood: Making Queens in the Construction of New York's Last Great Park

Abstract

Flushing Meadows-Corona Park was central to urban planning in 20th century Queens, New York. Numerous projects in the park, including two World’s Fairs in 1939 and 1964, entertainment venues, professional sport facilities and recreation spaces produced material and ideological impacts on the surrounding residential areas. Staging Neighborhood merges urban and cultural histories to reveal the contested constructions of neighborhood alongside the park, as part of the urban landscape and as a category of analysis. To best demonstrate the dynamic and transitional character of “neighborhood,” I apply the concept of “staging” to the park’s five border neighborhoods – Corona, Forest Hills, Kew Gardens, Kew Gardens Hills, and Flushing. The staging process occurred first in the built environment, second in the meaning derived from staged events and performances, and third in the representations of neighborhood through media and memory. From developers building and branding city blocks as part of the 1939 World’s Fair to neighbors fostering a uniform block appearance, a manipulated neighborhood aesthetic drove commercial interests, collective identity formation and access to public and residential space. Military staging grounds and cultural performances coded park space and thus the surrounding neighborhoods as distinctly urban, suburban, or part of a larger national project. Finally, neighborhood representations through media and memory highlight the way fluid imaginings of neighborhood become reality, setting political and social boundaries, driving housing costs, and determining city planning initiatives.

Staging Neighborhood reverses the relationship between park and neighborhood in traditional historical analyses of urban parks, stressing the role of green space in driving neighborhood histories. Each occupation of Flushing Meadows at the state and local level positioned the park as an agent of urban development. Staging Neighborhood places local narratives of the park-neighborhood relationship at the center of urban and transnational historical processes. This method reveals the shared role of neighborhood builder between powerful city planners and ordinary citizens. Just as the city’s elite businessmen and politicians brokered exclusive, commercially-driven residential plans based on park activity and projections for the future, the average neighborhood resident often challenged regulations and predetermined uses of park space and neighborhood. The park as meeting place enabled a collective self-fashioning beyond its borders.

These changes show that the neighborhood is always temporary. Whether by immigration and changing demographics, gentrification, urban renewal projects or commercial intervention, transformation is an inherent characteristic of neighborhood. Staging Neighborhood is a story that tracks developments in central Queens over five decades, yet at the same time reveals a cyclical story in how New York City space is remade indefinitely. Constructions of racial and ethnic identity were critical to every community and every actor in the story, functioning in both prominent and discreet ways. Key characters such as homeowners, renters, city planners, real estate agents, performers and park visitors exerted immense power in defining neighborhood, often through asserting distinct racial and ethnic categories tied to place. While circumstances varied by generation, neighborhood actors utilized the same spaces to affirm different versions of neighborhood identities that facilitated social and political action.