February 17, 2020
We had to be at JFK Airport by early afternoon for our flight home. Andrew was at work and we had the morning to kill, so we decided to go grazing in one of our favorite neighborhoods--Flushing, which is located in the borough of Queens.
The more I learn about Flushing, the more I wonder why I had never heard of it before Andrew introduced us to it in 2018. For example, it has the third busiest intersection in NYC, behind Times Square and Herald Square. Even now that I know about it, I never hear of anyone else who has been there.
Until about 1970, the population of Flushing was mostly white with a smattering of Japanese and South Koreans, but in 1970 a wave of Mandarin-speaking Taiwanese arrived in NYC and started to settle in Flushing. At the time, Manhattan's Chinatown was inhabited by primarily Cantonese speakers, so it makes sense that a separate neighborhood was formed. Flushing is now substantially larger than Manhattan's Chinatown (72,000 and 48,000, respectively), and is in fact the world's largest Chinatown. By the way, there actually are several other smaller Chinese neighborhoods in New York City, where 6% of the overall population is Chinese-American.
On our first trip to Flushing two years prior, Andrew took us to his favorite dumpling spot, White Bear, a little hole in the wall on Roosevelt Avenue.
