We started our mapping of the religions of Sunset Park in 2009, an experiment in mapping that lead to the methodology of A Journey through NYC religions, which was established in 2010. In July of 2009, we went out with missiologist Chris Clayman and a student from Texas A & M University, Heather Bowshier.

We interviewed various religious leaders that day. We started with a visit to Christian Day Care. There, Irene Cheng told us about her immigration from Hong Kong and the changes that had happened in Sunset Park since she arrived. The child care center was established around 1994 and has an association with the New York Church of God on 54th Street and 8th Avenue.

Although the child care center used to have mainly Cantonese and Mandarin language speakers, the newer Chinese arrivals are Fujianese-speakers from the big city of Fuzhao. Cheng said that they had adapted. “We start out talking to them in Mandarin and work with them on their English.” She and the church are worried that the kids don’t have enough guidance to adapt to America and the city’s educational system.

She observed that “their parents work hard and often don’t see the kids for 1-2 weeks.” Then, the kids are separated from deep interaction with the parents for several years. “The kids were born here and are sent back to China at 1 year old. Then they come back when they are 4 or 5 to get ready to enter school,” Cheng said. The parents, too, need help in preparing their kids for school.

Cheng said that they talk with the parents on how to teach their kids. The child care center also encourages the parents to read with their kids a magazine of Jesus Christ. “We also have bible studies for kids.” The parents are pretty responsive, and the number of Fujianese Ameican Christians was been growing rapidly in 2009.

Then, we went down 8th Avenue to visit with the monk at Tin Lan Qi Buddhist Temple. The monk there had just opened the religious site in May 2009. He was a very knowledgeable teacher of a type of popular Buddhism that features Taoist elements. The worshippers are also from the Fuzhou region of Fujian. Most of them lived on the water or at the watersides in China. The temple’s traffic was lower than it should be because the economy in 2008-2009 was depressed by the collapse of the inflated housing market. “The American economy is down, so people can’t afford to offer to Tian Lang Qi Buddha,” the monk observed. He hoped that people would take the opportunity to change their fortunes by coming to worship at his temple. “The Tian Lang Qi Buddha gives a peaceful, easy, prosperous life.”

That day, we also stopped to interview people at Sanctuary Church, Beit Mosque, Southern Heaven’s Gate Taoist Temple, Trinity Lutheran Church, and two restaurants that featured shrines to Our Lady of Guadalupe.

We returned to the area in 2010 and have just started a revisit in 2021. In 2010, we noticed that a local Chinese Evangelical Free church had features of a ship because it was previously attended mainly by Norwegian Americans. Now, we are tracking the history of faith among Norwegian Americans in New York City. It appears that after a long period of declining numbers, that Norwegian Americans are returning to the city, but not to Sunset Park. Rather, they are settling mainly in Manhattan and its outlying areas of the homes of young urban professionals.

The original census was finished in July 2010 and our map was posted on our website on July 28, 2010, one of the first Journey census maps ever published.