On a Sunday afternoon on Cross Bay Boulevard, the line outside New Park Pizza spills onto the pavement, the bakery cases at La Torre fog with the heat of fresh sfogliatelle, and a free glass of wine waits at Lenny’s Clam Bar for anyone who knows to ask for Joe. This is the everyday rhythm of the Italians in Howard Beach, a waterfront pocket of southern Queens that an entire generation of Brooklyn families chose, deliberately and proudly, as the place to start again.
The Place
Howard Beach sits at the southern edge of Queens, hard against Jamaica Bay and the marshlands of the Gateway National Recreation Area. Cross Bay Boulevard runs through the centre of it like a spine, carrying traffic down toward the Joseph P. Addabbo Memorial Bridge and on to the Rockaways. The neighbourhood is not one place but several stitched together: Old Howard Beach east of the boulevard, then Rockwood Park, Lindenwood, Hamilton Beach and tiny Ramblersville.
It is, by New York standards, quiet and green and unmistakably suburban, a place of single-family homes on numbered streets where the water is never more than a few blocks away. The neighbourhood’s history and demographics are well documented. By the 2020 census it counted roughly 27,320 residents, with a median household income of about 91,000 dollars, figures that mark it as one of the more comfortable corners of the borough.
How It Became Italian
Howard Beach did not begin as an Italian neighbourhood. It began, improbably, as a goat farm.
A glove manufacturer’s meadow
In 1897 William J. Howard, a Brooklyn glove manufacturer, established himself on 150 acres of meadowland near the Aqueduct Racetrack, raising goats for the kidskin his trade demanded. He bought more land and filled it in, accumulating some 500 acres by 1914 and building modest homes priced between 2,500 and 5,000 dollars. The settlement that grew up around him was officially renamed Howard Beach on 6 April 1916.
For its first half-century the area remained sparsely built, a fringe of cottages and meadow on the way to the beaches. The land that would later fill with Italian families was, as late as the 1940s, still largely marsh.
The move from Brooklyn
The transformation came after the Second World War. As the marshland west of Cross Bay Boulevard was drained and filled, builders threw up Cape Cod and high-ranch houses on 50-by-100 and 60-by-100-foot lots, and a particular kind of family came to buy them. Many were Italian-Americans leaving Brooklyn behind, looking, as residents put it plainly, for a better life for their children.
They came from the older Italian quarters of the city: from Brooklyn neighbourhoods like East New York, Canarsie and Williamsburg, from Manhattan’s Little Italy, and from the Queens districts of Corona, Ridgewood and Ozone Park, the last of which had long been nicknamed the Little Italy of Queens. The path mirrored the one Italian families traced across the city’s other enclaves, from Bensonhurst to the suburban reaches of Massapequa on Long Island. The early 1950s brought apartment construction to the section that became Lindenwood, and through the 1950s and 1960s New Howard Beach rose north of the Belt Parkway on newly filled land.
Parish, pork store and pride
What the families built once they arrived followed a familiar template. The parish came first as an anchor: the Diocese of Brooklyn established St Helen on 24 June 1960 to serve the Catholics settling west of the boulevard, beginning in a house on 157th Avenue before raising its own church and school. Around it grew the bakeries, the pork stores, the pizzerias and the social clubs that gave the neighbourhood its texture.
By the 1950s and 1960s Old Howard Beach had settled into an identity that would hold for decades: a stable, predominantly Italian- and Irish-American community defined by parish life, family-owned businesses and multigenerational continuity. Children grew up, married, and bought houses a few streets from their parents. The neighbourhood became, in the truest sense, a village inside the city.
It is impossible to write honestly about Howard Beach without noting the harder chapters too. The neighbourhood drew national attention in December 1986, when the killing of Michael Griffith, a young Black man, following a racial attack, exposed an ugly insularity and prompted soul-searching that residents and the wider city carried for years. Howard Beach also became known, in tabloid shorthand, as the home of organised-crime figures including John Gotti, a reputation the overwhelmingly law-abiding community spent decades trying to outrun. The fuller story of the place is one of ordinary families, not headlines.
The Landmarks
New Park Pizza, 156-71 Cross Bay Boulevard. Opened in 1956 and run by the same family ever since, New Park is the neighbourhood’s secular cathedral. Its squat building and grand neon sign, complete with a steaming slice, date from the start, and its trick of scattering salt on the oven floor gives the crust a crackle that draws pilgrims from across the city.
Lenny’s Clam Bar, 161-03 Cross Bay Boulevard. A fixture since 1974 and now in its second generation under the DeCandia family, Lenny’s is the place for a seafood feast and the source of a beloved local tradition: ask for Joe and a free glass of wine appears. In 2024 the city co-named the stretch of boulevard outside it Lenny’s Clam Bar Way.
St Helen Roman Catholic Church, 157-10 83rd Street. Established in 1960, St Helen has been the spiritual centre of Italian Howard Beach for more than sixty years, its parish school and feast-day calendar shaping the lives of generations of families who arrived from Brooklyn.
La Torre Bakery, 158-12 Cross Bay Boulevard. Serving the neighbourhood since 1986, La Torre is where Sunday mornings begin, its cases lined with cannoli, sfogliatelle and the bread that feeds the long family lunches Howard Beach still keeps faith with.
Brother’s Ravioli, 158-14 Cross Bay Boulevard. Founded in 1986 as a maker of fresh ravioli and now a full Italian specialty shop, this is the kind of pasta-and-provisions store that lets home cooks set a table that tastes of the old neighbourhood without leaving the new one.
Cross Bay Boulevard. The boulevard itself, completed as a through-route in 1923 and bridged over Jamaica Bay, is the neighbourhood’s commercial and cultural axis. To walk its Howard Beach stretch is to read the community in storefronts: bakery, pizzeria, pork store, club, and the newer international eateries that mark the changing face of Queens.
Jamaica Bay and the Addabbo Bridge. The water defines Howard Beach as surely as the boulevard does. The Gateway marshlands at the neighbourhood’s edge and the Addabbo Memorial Bridge carrying Cross Bay Boulevard south give the place its rare, almost coastal calm within the five boroughs.
Where They Came From
The Italians of Howard Beach are, for the most part, a Brooklyn diaspora a second time over. Their grandparents and great-grandparents had crossed from the Mezzogiorno, the south of Italy, in the great migrations around the turn of the twentieth century, settling first in the dense Italian quarters of Brooklyn and lower Manhattan.
It was their children and grandchildren, American-born and upwardly mobile, who made the second journey out to the marsh-edge of Queens after the war. Many Howard Beach families today are third- or fourth-generation, and the imprint remains: roughly 57 percent of residents have identified Italian ancestry, and a striking share of the neighbourhood, around a fifth, has reported speaking Italian at home.
That continuity is why the neighbourhood feels less like a settlement and more like a transplant. The families did not assimilate away from Italian Brooklyn so much as carry it across the city and replant it on better ground.
Howard Beach Today
Howard Beach in the 2020s is changing, as every New York neighbourhood does, but more slowly than most. The 2020 census put the non-Hispanic white share at about 63 percent, with a Hispanic or Latino population of roughly a quarter and growing Asian and Black communities. The original Cape Cods are giving way, here and there, to larger houses, and the storefronts on the boulevard now include Latin American and Asian restaurants alongside the bakeries and clam bars.
Yet the Italian character endures more stubbornly here than in the Brooklyn neighbourhoods these families left, in much the way the food markets of Arthur Avenue in the Bronx have outlasted the tenements around them. The parish calendar still organises the year, New Park still draws its crowds, and Lenny’s still pours for anyone who asks for Joe. Many of the people behind the counters and in the pews are the grandchildren of the Brooklyn arrivals, and a fair number speak the language of their great-grandparents at the dinner table.
It is a community that has weathered hard headlines and demographic change without losing its core. For now, Howard Beach remains what those postwar families set out to build: a quiet, comfortable, deeply Italian corner of Queens with the bay at the end of every street.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why are there so many Italians in Howard Beach?
The Italians in Howard Beach are largely descendants of families who moved out of Brooklyn’s older Italian neighbourhoods after the Second World War, when the marshland west of Cross Bay Boulevard was filled and built up with affordable single-family homes. They came from East New York, Canarsie, Williamsburg, Little Italy and the Queens district of Ozone Park seeking more space and a quieter life.
What percentage of Howard Beach is Italian?
Surveys of ancestry have found roughly 57 percent of Howard Beach residents identify as being of Italian descent, by far the largest group. A notable share of the neighbourhood, around a fifth, has reported speaking Italian at home, an unusually high figure for a third- and fourth-generation American community.
What is the main street in Howard Beach?
Cross Bay Boulevard is the commercial and cultural axis of Howard Beach. Completed as a through-route in 1923 and carried over Jamaica Bay by the Joseph P. Addabbo Memorial Bridge, it is lined with the Italian bakeries, pizzerias, pork stores and restaurants that give the neighbourhood its character.
What is the best-known restaurant in Howard Beach?
New Park Pizza, open since 1956 and run by the same family throughout, is the neighbourhood’s most famous institution, known for a crust crisped by salt scattered on the oven floor. Lenny’s Clam Bar, a fixture since 1974, is the local destination for seafood and gave its name to a co-named stretch of Cross Bay Boulevard in 2024.
Which Catholic parish serves Howard Beach?
St Helen Roman Catholic Church, established by the Diocese of Brooklyn in 1960 and located at 157-10 83rd Street, is the spiritual centre of Italian Howard Beach. Its parish and school have anchored community life for the families who settled west of Cross Bay Boulevard.
How does Howard Beach compare to other Italian-American neighbourhoods?
Howard Beach shares its roots with Italian enclaves like Bensonhurst in Brooklyn and Staten Island, many of whose families followed similar paths out of older Brooklyn neighbourhoods. It is smaller and more waterfront than those communities but has held onto its Italian identity unusually well.
If your family’s story passed through Howard Beach, or any of the places Italians have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a village in the Italian south, to a tenement in Brooklyn, to a house with the bay at the end of the street, to wherever you are now.