Out in Queens’ Richmond Hill, not far from John F. Kennedy International Airport, a branch of the A train comes to its eastern conclusion along Liberty Avenue. Below and beyond its last stretch of tracks is Little Guyana, the name given to a 30-block stretch along the thoroughfare. Home to a large portion of New York City’s sizable Guyanese population—the
Much of Liberty Avenue is taken up by roti joints, Chinese-Guyanese restaurants, sari (spelled “saree” here) emporia, bakeries and other storefronts. Off the main commercial strip, quiet residential streets hold tidy row houses set back behind front gardens.
To travel to Little Guyana by subway, make sure you’re on a Lefferts-bound A rather than the branch that goes to Far Rockaway and get off the train at 104th Street (the western edge), 111th Street or Lefferts Boulevard. There’s no set itinerary; look for what grabs your attention—but do try to stop in for as many snacks as you can while taking in the area’s refreshing, low-lying openness.
Maybe start by poking around the open-air fruit and vegetable stands to see what kind of less-familiar produce they have. You might spot breadfruit, karela (bitter melon), long squash and black spice mangoes. Grocers, meanwhile, like the Little Guyana Bake Shop, offer Guyanese seafood such as buck crabs, all manner of hot sauce varieties and spices such as halwa masala (a gingery blend used for pudding).
Also worth ducking into are the many fabric stores, whose frontages catch the eye with brilliant reds and golds, embroideries and pastels hanging in windows or on outside racks. Well over 50 percent of the residents of South Ozone Park and Richmond Hill are foreign born, and many of the immigrants from Guyana are Indo-Caribbean. One friendly proprietor, of the tidy Indian clothing store
The farther east of Lefferts Boulevard you get, the less like New York City it feels. The train tracks overhead are gone, and there are a few more chain stores sprinkled in. Still, it’s not until you arrive around 130th Street, more or less the eastern limit of the neighborhood, that some of its cornerstones appear. Busy
Close by,
Next door,