This map of the population changes of Elmhurst, Queens in 2021-2022 shows the renewal of one of the key frontier areas of New York City. This community has always been a frontier area, from the days of New Amsterdam to today.
The conditions of the urban frontier have changed, but its essential function as an entrepot for new peoples and a site of religious innovation continues.
Back in the 17th century, some Dutch immigrants to New Amsterdam found that city life (produced by just a couple of hundred people!) was just too much. So, they ventured from the East River along Newtown Creek, which became the border between Queens and Brooklyn. They created a small settlement called Mespeth (Maspeth). The Dutch got into a losing fight with the Mohawk Indians, which caused the Dutch to withdraw from Maspeth and ended badly for a local Queens–Brooklyn tribe that had allied with the Dutch. The Mohawk alliance decimated them.
After the war, a group of about 250 English settlers came across the Long Island Sound and established nearby “the New Town,” whose name was variously Middleburgh, Newtown, and, eventually, Elmhurst. As far as the Dutch Reformed Church was concerned, the English brought unwanted religious innovations, a phenomenon also noticed in most of the frontier towns of Queens, Bronx, and Brooklyn.
Early Elmhurst (Newtown), was typical of city neighborhoods where immigrants, ideas, and goods entered. These areas are called “entrepôts.” What is usually overlooked about entrepots like Hong Kong and New York is that new arrivals don’t just land to be re-exported (the specific definition of an “entrepot” city), but also create vast socio-economic and religious changes.
There was a lot of disruption caused by the new arrivals. One response was the invention of new exports, ideas, and, even new religions. A new gristmill was built in early Elmhurst (Newtown) to produce flour for the local and international markets. Such production and re-export activities also generated new products and religions. The “Newtown Pippin” apple grew up with the introduction of English Anglicanism, “evangelicalism,” Quakerism, and Baptists.
The apple was first grown on the Moore estate which was started in 1641 by the first minister in Newtown (Elmhurst), Reverend John Moore of the Anglican church. The Newtown Pippin with its pale green skin and sweet, tangy aroma became the most popular variety in America after endorsements from George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. (Today, pick up some Martinelli apple cider, whose flavor is balanced between sweet and tart with juice from Newtown Pippins.)
The arrival of a group called “the Evangelicals” in Manhattan was noticed due to their street preaching, but they quickly moved along into the relative obscurity and safety of the frontier area of Long Island, Brooklyn and Queens, though at this time it is not precisely known if any of them landed in Newtown (Elmhurst). Quakers and Baptists also made their way into Elmhurst.
The ripples of Elmhurst religious innovation washed through time. The great, great-grandson of Moore, Clement Clarke Moore wrote on Christmas Eve in 1822, the famous opening lines of a poem “’Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse…”
Elmhurst, urban frontier neighborhood
A large city on major trade routes, New York City has had many entrepot areas. Urbanologist Robert Park called these “urban frontiers.” In his analysis of Chicago, he called the entrepot area, “Zone 2.” Some of the most interesting studies of the Chicago school of sociology were produced on this Zone.
Park, who himself had been a New York tabloid reporter, was also inspired by the social geographer Frederick J. Teggart, who spent some time in the city during World War !, and founded what became the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. Teggart developed a “catastrophe theory” of social change, which meant that change comes in relatively quick moments from places like Zone 2 when outside forces disrupt the status quo. The responses are typically one of four types: reassertion of the status quo; innovations and synthesis with the old into a new status quo of institutions and culture; a fleeing; or a social dissolution. Religious innovations can play a key role in this process.
The paradigm has roots in Teggart’s scholarship on the impact of the Hebrew prophets like Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Jesus. When those guys came along with their prophetic intrusions, the message was something like, “They, the establishment, tell you to do it this way, but I say unto you that there is a better way.” The “but” is the hinge of history, according to the catastrophe theorists. Each small entrepot like Elmhurst is a “but” — we do it differently here. One common theme of some Queens religious networks is that their leaders say that they do things differently from those leaders in Manhattan. Well, that is at least what they claim, and is their mentality.
It is interesting that one of Teggart’s disciples Margaret Hodgen in Berkeley, the first woman to head what became a major sociology department in the United States, made part of her fame through a study of the rise of Methodist churches where new water mills were installed around the country in England. These mills attracted migrants, new businesses, and new religions. At the time, the Methodists were considered as a somewhat disreputable group dealing in emotion, itinerant preachers, and the low lifes of society. New York City church planter guide Abraham Cho calls these areas the “Margins” of Manhattan’s “Center City.” He recommends church planters pay attention to these areas first.
Elmhurst, Queens certainly fits this pattern. Many of the new religions in New York City got started in Elmhurst, Flushing, or other outlying areas of the city. Old-time residents in Queens disgustingly remarked on the strangeness of the new groups and, unsuccessfully, tried to repel them as disruptions of the status quo.
Now, the sons and daughters of the original disrupters are trying to create another new status quo that is neither old Queens nor post-1965 immigrant Queens. You see this emerging in the fusion types of restaurants, services, literary and artistic products, and religious start-ups. One such group is Queens Connexus, which was started just a few years ago.
We have charted these religious changes in Elmhurst and are correlating them with changes in the populations. It appears that places of high population increase and turnover are also the sites of religious innovations.
The population changes in Elmhurst
Every year, the United States Census includes Elmhurst, Queens in its national American Community Survey (ACS), which draws its interviews from a sample of about 3.5 million people found in the decennial Census and updates. Because the number of interviews every year from Queens is relatively small, the Census aggregates 5-years of interviews into a more robust statistical finding about the population. So, we are comparing the 2021 5-year sample to the 2022 5-year sample as a statistically more accurate way of finding out what are the growing, fast turnover, and shrinking areas of Elmhurst. These should be the areas where there is a higher level of religious innovation.
A rule of thumb for religious leaders is that if you don’t reach a new resident within six months to a year, the new arrival would have already made his place in the status quo and is a relatively unreachable prospect for attending their congregation unless some other disruption happens in life. Of course, the disruption can be as simple as moving from one place in the city to another, a marriage, or a life crisis.
The 5-Year ACS surveys, however, don’t fully capture the population dynamics of a place like Elmhurst. The fast-growth areas indicated on the map are more likely to be new gentrifiers because their housing options are firmly on the books of the city registers. However, all of the areas that show little or decreasing growth may not reveal that many migrants and immigrants to Elmhurst are living in unregistered doubling-, tripling- and more-up in houses.
We visited one house in which the basement was divided up into eight small cubicles for sleeping. Another had 4 families on the first floor, one family per room, surrounding a meticulously neat common space for cooking, dining, and sitting. Earlier this year, the city discovered over seventy people living in an unregistered space in the basement of a commercial building in South Richmond Hill, Queens.
One estimate by the Basement Apartments Safe for Everyone (SAFE) coalition is that there are tens of thousands of people in Queens living in these sorts of arrangements. The Pratt Center for Community Development estimates that there are over 9,000 apartments not in the city building records. So, the actual population increase in different areas of Elmhurst is undoubtedly underestimated.
For example, West of Broadway toward Elmhurst Hospital there are many students renting rooms. Elsewhere along both sides of Broadway, there are Buddhist monasteries that are unlisted except in our database. Each one has a number of residents per room.
Nor does the Census capture the homeless, the park, automobile, and train sleepers. None of these population groups would probably want to talk to the Census surveyors. (Further, the fast-rising number of temporary residents at Elmhurst Hospital, is not counted. There are also a couple of senior centers in Elmhurst, though their populations are probably counted)
We have been preparing our maps of religious sites over the last ten years, and it is obvious that there are quite a few congregations that double-, triple- or more-up in one building. One Korean American visionary hopes to eventually build his building into a skyscraper to accommodate religious groups of different languages on each floor. So far, his building, which was converted legally from a housing residence, has five or six different congregations meeting in it. Will he ever build his Empire State Religion Building in Elmhurst?
So, what can the ACS map of population change show us?
First, it shows us for sure that Elmhurst, Queens is one of the fastest growing areas of the city. So, attention to this area is highly important for discerning the future of the city and its religions.
Second, the dark blue areas on the map represent areas of high gentrification. There are a number of new condo buildings and the like. However, we should also note that the old Pan American Hotel building’s residential population skyrocketed when the building was changed from a hotel to a homeless residence. There are a few other homeless residences (through Section 8 housing) in Elmhurst.
The newly arrived urban professionals will likely want places like Starbucks but also worship places and activities that appeal to their educated, upscale sensibilities. However, all the new gentrified innovations could be adapted to serve beyond their status groups.
So, the synthesis of the older residents and their sensibilities with those of the newer residents will coalesce into different forms. Religious groups will likely try to figure out how to combine the interests of the urban professionals with those of the new lower class new residents, usually new immigrants. For example, several religious groups have arisen to support anti-sex trafficking efforts among poorer immigrants. There is much more effort that needs to be done into connecting and helping the new illegal immigrants.
The young gentrifiers, the college students, and the new immigrants all have an interest in winning a place on the ladder of social mobility in the city and protecting lives and property from crime. These common interests will bring them together to innovate in areas like social justice movements to improve education and vocational training programs, crime prevention, economic growth, and health care. It is desirable but politically difficult to address the housing crisis.
A key issue will be the retention of the upwardly mobile poor once they arrive at the gates of the blue-collar and lower-middle classes. On our map, we might call this the key issue for the official “no-growth” white spaces.
The city has done an abysmal job in retaining the lower middling classes as an example and option for the hopeful poor. This affects religious communities, too.
Can Elmhurst’s worship sites be holistic communities in their class structure, or are they doomed to becoming divided into a barbell distribution: a lot of new well-off congregations surrounded by those poor workers who facilitate the wealthy? This will happen unless the city can figure out how to retain its working and lower middle classes. Can there be stable working and lower middle class in the future of Elmhurst and its religions? Or will we lose them to migration out of the city? We already see this happening in religious groups: many that were once made up of Elmhurst residents have become the loci of commuters from the suburbs.
Thanks!
Excellent analysis and insight!