Global Queens

An Urban Mosaic

Winner, The David R. Coffin Publication Grant

A vibrant exploration of the everyday life of one of the most diverse places in the world: Queens, New York.

Remade by decades of immigration, Queens, New York, has emerged as an emblematic space of social mixing and encounters across multiple lines of difference. With its expansive subdivisions, tangled highways, and centerless form, it is also New York’s most enigmatic borough. It can feel alternately like a big city, a tight-knit village, a featureless industrial zone, or a sprawling suburban community. Through more than 200 contemporary photographs, Joseph Heathcott captures this multifaceted borough and one of the most diverse places in the United States.

Drawn from more than a decade of roaming around Queens and snapping photos, Heathcott conveys the juxtaposition of the ordinary and the extraordinary, the mundane and the surprising, and the staggering social diversity that best characterizes Queens. At the heart of the story are two separate but entwined histories: the rapid expansion of the borough’s built environment through the twentieth century, and the millions of people who have traveled from near and far to call Queens home. Newcomers have had to confront discrimination, white racial hostility, legal challenges, and language barriers. They have had to struggle to find adequate housing, places to worship, and jobs that pay enough to survive. And they have done all of this in the borough’s jumbled collection of neighborhoods, housing types, civic and religious institutions, factories and warehouses, commercial streets, and strip malls.

Heathcott makes primary use of documentary photography to bring these social and spatial realities of everyday life into relief. He also draws on demographic data, archival sources, planning documents, news stories, and reports. The result is a visual meditation on Queens that provides clues about an urban future where notions of citizenship and belonging are negotiated across multiple lines of difference, but where a sense of ”getting along”—however roughly textured and unfinished—has taken hold in the everyday life of the streets.

JOSEPH HEATHCOTT is a writer, photographer, educator, and Chair of Urban and Environmental Studies at The New School. His work has appeared in a wide range of venues, including books, academic journals, magazines, exhibits, and juried art shows. His most recent books include Urban Infrastructure: Historical and Social Dimensions of an Interconnected World; The Routledge Handbook of Infrastructure Design: Global Perspectives from Architectural History; and Capturing the City: Photographs from the Streets of St. Louis, 1900–1930.

“Global Queens gives us a close and intimate look at a world built by immigrant communities over multiple generations. Heathcott's gift is to provide a panoramic view of this dizzyingly expansive and profoundly complex place, showing how diverse landscapes and social relations don't just happen, they are the result of hard work by millions of people adapting the city to suit their lives.”

—HITOMI IWASAKI, HEAD OF EXHIBITIONS AND CURATOR, QUEENS MUSEUM

“In recent decades Queens has emerged one of most diverse and fascinating places on the planet. Joseph Heathcott’s remarkable photographs and rich, evocative descriptions capture the borough’s dense urbanism in all of its vibrancy and layered complexity. For anyone interested in the future of superdiverse cities, this is a must read.”

—PHILIP KASINITZ, PRESIDENTIAL PROFESSOR OF SOCIOLOGY, GRADUATE CENTER OF THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK

“Global Queens is a quotidian elegy to the vast and intricate composition of movement, textures and vocabularies that vitalizes New York. Joseph Heathcott’s poignant images of everyday life capture the fragile and persistent ways we make meaning together. This lively document of Queens neighborhoods offers a nuanced and necessary view of a spirited social mosaic, formed amidst the pervasive politics of racial violence and reactionary nationalism.”

—SUZANNE HALL, PROFESSOR IN SOCIOLOGY, LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS & POLITICAL SCIENCE, UK

“With kaleidoscopic views into the raw and eclectic urban landscapes of Queens, Global Queens takes us on a journey through the making of the most ethnically diverse place in the nation. As an immigrant and a former resident of the borough, the visual journey makes me realize that each of us, past and present, has played a part in its becoming, including its unique sense of multiplicity and belonging.”

—JEFF HOU, UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON, SEATTLE