Touring Queens nabes and taking notes

As the giant tour bus turned the corner from Northern Boulevard onto Union Street, the group of 15 professors from New York City College of Technology (NYCCT) audibly gasped.
The cause of their excitement - a block crammed with tiny Korean and Chinese shops and billboards taking up almost every available inch of brick space.
The tour was a four-hour drive through some of Queens' most ethically diverse neighborhoods - Flushing, Jackson Heights, Corona, Elmhurst, and Woodside. Jack Eichenbaum, the guide, is an urban geographer who has given tours for over 20 years and teaches a geography course of the borough at Queens College.
Although the NYCCT project, aimed at creating a more diverse curriculum within the Brooklyn College, will also explore East Flatbush/Crown Heights, Sunset Park, and Harlem, last week the group toured only Queens.
&#8220This project has encouraged me to look around at every space,” said Marta Effinger-Crichlow, director of the National Endowment for the Humanities-funded (NEH) project and an assistant professor at the College, at a stop in Corona on the corner of 104th Street and Corona Avenue, more commonly known as &#8220Spaghetti Park.” Although the weather was too damp for participants to enjoy ices from The Lemon Ice King of Corona, the group walked several blocks to the northeast to view the Congregation Tifereth Israel of Corona, a synagogue built in 1911 on what is now 54th Avenue.
Corona, particularly Corona Heights by &#8220Spaghetti Park,” Eichenbaum explained, was once home to mostly Italian and other European immigrants, but in the last half century, several different ethnic groups have moved in - including Argentines, Dominicans, Mexicans, and Ecuadorians. As the bus lumbered down Corona Avenue, following the twists and turns that had been built around creeks and rivers in Colonial times, the teachers spotted a homeowner growing corn in the backyard, towering over their three-foot-high picket fence.
The local architecture in Corona also demonstrates a century-long timeline of building styles because in the 1970s, Corona and most of Queens was not &#8220redlined” by banks and lenders, which caused other city neighborhoods to fall into ruin and disrepair.
Eichenbaum explained that in the 20th Century, immigrants from around the world moved to Queens along the F train line when the UN's first headquarters was located in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park from 1946 to 1950, before it moved to its current Manhattan location, which is also accessible by the F train.
In Elmhurst, where many immigrants are Peruvian and Colombian, there is a strong Hindu presence - with the Geeta Temple, located at 92-09 Corona Avenue, a large white building adorned with ornately carved orange pillars and reliefs.
In Flushing, the proliferation of churches and other houses of worship continue where zoning allows for them. As the tour bus slowly rolled by the mosque for Afghan immigrants on 33rd Avenue, which was transformed from a one-family home in 1987, the teachers snapped photos of the building's two-story tower topped by a crescent moon.
Just blocks away, the bus passed by what is commonly considered the first strip mall in the city - built in the 1930s on Northern Boulevard between 145th and 144th Streets in &#8220Koreatown.”
The teachers were then taken to see the house where Nancy Reagan was born, a diminutive yellow three-story building on Roosevelt Avenue in Flushing, then to Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, to see the Unisphere, &#8220the unofficial symbol of Queens,” as Eichenbaum called it.
&#8220This is international space,” he said to the teachers, adding that the park, which is often used on the weekends for sporting events, reminded him of Chapultepec Park in Mexico City.
Next on the tour, the bus returned west, past Willets Point and Shea Stadium, past the expensive co-op apartments on 34th Avenue in Jackson Heights, past the Philippine corner of Roosevelt Avenue, on 69th Street, and finally back to NYCCT.
Over several months, the group will continue to explore the neighborhoods in Queens, Brooklyn, and Manhattan, and then work on creating a new curriculum at the College. For more information on tours of Queens, contact Eichenbaum at jaconet@aol.com.