You can smell it before you see it. Sate skewers charring on a Whitney Avenue griddle, the sweet caramel of kecap manis hitting hot oil, a rice cooker steaming through an open kitchen door. On a Sunday afternoon in Elmhurst, that smell is a homing signal. It pulls Javanese grandmothers, Sumatran taxi drivers and Chinese-Indonesian asylum kids out of the apartments above the dental clinics, and points them toward the small Indonesian counters that line three blocks of the most crowded zip code in America.
This is the largest Indonesian-American community on the East Coast. New Yorkers call it Little Indonesia. The Indonesians who live here call it kampung Indonesia, the Indonesian village, and they mean it.
Elmhurst, The Place
Elmhurst sits in central Queens, wedged between Jackson Heights to the north, Corona to the east, Rego Park to the south, and Woodside to the west. Its zip code, 11373, is regularly cited as one of the most ethnically diverse in the United States, with residents from well over a hundred countries packed into roughly a square mile. The 7, M, R, E and F trains all stop within walking distance, and the Q53, Q58 and Q60 buses fan out from Broadway and Queens Boulevard.
The housing stock is the same as the rest of central Queens. Brick six-storey apartment blocks from the 1940s and 1950s. Frame Victorian houses left over from when this was a freestanding village called Newtown. Tudor co-ops with leaded windows. A handful of newer condo towers near the hospital.
The Indonesian community concentrates along a narrow corridor where Whitney Avenue, Justice Avenue, Broadway and Woodside Avenue meet. It is not a Chinatown gateway with arches and lion statues. You have to know to look.
How Elmhurst Became Indonesian
Before the Indonesians
Elmhurst is older than New York. It was founded in 1652 as the Dutch village of Middelburgh by English Puritans from Connecticut, renamed Newtown by the British, and then renamed again to Elmhurst in 1897 when developers wanted to escape the smell of the polluted Newtown Creek. For most of its first three centuries, the population was Dutch, English, German and Irish.
By the early twentieth century the neighbourhood was overwhelmingly Italian and Jewish, lower-middle-class, with a heavy Catholic parish life and a tight grid of family-run shops. As late as 1960, Elmhurst was 98 percent white.
Then the bottom fell out of that demographic, fast. By 1970 it was 67 percent white. By 1980, 34 percent. By 1990, 18 percent. The Italian and Jewish families that had defined the place were retiring to Long Island or Florida, and the apartments they vacated were affordable and well served by the subway, which made Elmhurst one of the great landing pads for the post-1965 immigration wave.
The Indonesians Arrive
The Hart-Celler Act of 1965 abolished the national-origin quotas that had shut out most Asian migration since the 1920s. Indonesia, a country almost invisible in American immigration statistics, suddenly had a legal route in. The first arrivals were small in number. Students at NYU and Columbia, a few diplomats from the Indonesian Consulate, a trickle of Chinese-Indonesian families uneasy about life under General Suharto’s New Order.
For two decades the community in New York was tiny. By the early 1980s a small group of Indonesian Muslims had started gathering for pengajian, the regular Quran study sessions that hold a community together, in private apartments and in space borrowed from the Indonesian Consulate in Manhattan. They were a few dozen families at most. There was no mosque, no restaurant, no obvious street.
What there was was Queens. Cheap rents, a 7 train that ran into Midtown, and the kind of polyglot block life that meant a Javanese family did not have to explain themselves to anybody. Elmhurst absorbed them the way it had already absorbed Filipinos, Thais, Malaysians and Chinese from Fujian.
Elmhurst at Its Peak
The real growth came in two overlapping waves in the 1990s and early 2000s. The first was economic. The 1997 Asian financial crisis gutted the Indonesian rupiah, wiped out middle-class savings overnight, and pushed tens of thousands of Indonesians to look for work abroad. New York, with its existing Indonesian foothold, was an obvious target.
The second wave was a refugee wave. In May 1998, anti-Chinese-Indonesian riots tore through Jakarta, Medan, Solo and Surabaya. Mobs targeted ethnic Chinese homes and businesses, with mass sexual violence against Chinese-Indonesian women and an estimated death toll of around a thousand people. As many as a hundred thousand Chinese-Indonesians fled the country in the months that followed. More than seven thousand were granted political asylum in the United States.
A significant share landed in Queens. Many were Christian, many were Surabayan or from Medan, and many had relatives or friends already in Elmhurst from the earlier student waves. By the early 2000s, the Indonesian population in New York had tripled.
The community that took shape on Whitney Avenue was not religiously or ethnically uniform. Javanese Muslims from Jakarta and Yogyakarta worshipped at Masjid Al-Hikmah on 31st Avenue in Astoria. Chinese-Indonesian Christians, often from Surabaya, filled Protestant and Catholic parishes across Queens. Batak Lutherans from North Sumatra organised their own services. Balinese Hindus, never more than a handful, kept their festivals quiet and family-sized. What everybody shared was Bahasa Indonesia, the national language that holds the archipelago together.
The Change
The community is still here, but it is changing shape. The original asylum generation has aged. Their children, raised on PS 89 and the 7 train, have moved on to careers in tech, medicine, finance and food, and many have left Elmhurst for Long Island City, Forest Hills or the suburbs in New Jersey.
Some of the early restaurants have not survived. Java Village, the much-loved hole in the wall on Justice Avenue, closed at the end of 2015. Upi Jaya, the larger Indonesian restaurant on Woodside Avenue that opened in 2004 and ran for nearly two decades, has also shuttered. Rents have climbed and the storefronts turn over.
But new migration keeps arriving. Indonesian students still come for graduate school. Chinese-Indonesians still come for safety. Sumatran and Javanese cooks still find work in the kitchens. The community is not the same as it was in 2005, but it is not gone.
The Landmarks of Indonesian Elmhurst
Masjid Al-Hikmah, 48-01 31st Avenue, Astoria. The mosque was established on 17 August 1995, the fiftieth anniversary of Indonesian Independence, after a small group of Indonesian Muslims raised the money to buy and renovate a warehouse just over the Elmhurst line in Astoria. President Suharto, in his role as chairman of the Yayasan Amalbakti Muslim Pancasila, donated 150,000 US dollars to the cause.
The mosque now anchors Indonesian Muslim life across New York, New Jersey and Long Island. It runs a Saturday Islamic school with more than a hundred children and hosts its own food bazaar in the courtyard each summer.
Sky Cafe, 86-20 Whitney Avenue. The clearest single landmark of Indonesian Elmhurst is a small, halal, family-run room behind a sliver of a storefront. Lilly and her family cook Sumatran home food: nasi bungkus wrapped in banana leaf, batagor under thick peanut sauce, beef rendang slow-cooked the Minangkabau way. The restaurant has become a community kitchen as much as a business. Regulars describe Lilly as a savior to the Queens Indonesian community.
Indo Java, 85-12 Queens Boulevard. By day this is a small Indonesian grocery store, run by Dewi Tjahjadi, stacked with kecap manis, krupuk, instant noodles, palm sugar and frozen tempeh. Every Saturday evening after six it puts out a tray-line of homemade prepared dishes that disappear within hours. On Tuesday it transforms into one of the smallest restaurants in New York, with a single table in the back and a rotating Jakarta chef cooking warung-style for whoever can squeeze in.
The New York Indonesian Food Bazaar, St James Episcopal Church, 84-07 Broadway. Founded in 2011 by Felincia “Fefe” Anggono, a Chinese-Indonesian from Surabaya who left during the 1998 riots, the bazaar is held once a month in the parish house of an Episcopal church. Twenty home cooks set up stalls, and as many as five hundred Indonesians and curious New Yorkers show up to eat. It is the closest thing the community has to a regular town hall.
OK Indo Food Store, on Justice Avenue. A tiny, red-awning grocery that holds maybe five customers at a time, stocking the imported chillies, fermented shrimp paste and Sumatran cinnamon that bigger supermarkets do not carry. It exists because Indonesian cooks insist on the right brand of sambal.
HKBP New York City, registered in Queens County in 2025. The American branch of the Huria Kristen Batak Protestan, the largest Lutheran church in Indonesia. The congregation, drawn from Batak families from the highlands of North Sumatra, gives the Elmhurst Indonesian community a Sunday hymn line that nobody outside the Batak diaspora knows.
The Indonesia Independence Day flag-raising, every 17 August. The Indonesian Consulate in Manhattan hosts the formal ceremony, but the Queens community brings the celebration to Elmhurst and Astoria the same weekend. There are gamelan performances, batik shirts on grandfathers, dancers from Bali and Java, and trays of rendang and gado-gado on long folding tables.
Where the Elmhurst Indonesians Came From
Indonesia is enormous, more than 17,000 islands, more than 600 ethnic groups, more than 700 living languages. The Elmhurst community is not a cross-section of that whole archipelago. It draws disproportionately from a small set of urban sending regions.
The biggest group is Javanese, from the island that holds more than half of Indonesia’s population. Most arrived from the big Javanese cities: Jakarta on the northwest coast, Surabaya on the east, Bandung in the highlands of West Java, and the royal city of Yogyakarta in the centre. Many are Javanese-speaking Muslims, but a significant share are Chinese-Indonesians who grew up speaking Hokkien at home and Indonesian outside it.
After Java comes Sumatra. Medan, the largest city in the north, sends a steady stream of both Chinese-Indonesians and Bataks. Padang, on the west coast, is the home of the Minangkabau, whose rendang and nasi padang are now the default flavour of New York Indonesian cooking. Sundanese families from Bandung and the Priangan hills add another distinct line. Small numbers come from Sulawesi, especially Manado in the north, where the Christian Minahasan minority has long had links to the United States. Even smaller numbers come from Bali, Ambon, and Aceh.
Elmhurst Today
Walk the four blocks from the Elmhurst Avenue M and R station down to Justice Avenue today and you will pass Bangladeshi grocers, Chinese hot pot places, Mexican panaderías, Tibetan momo windows and Thai noodle counters in the same stretch. The Indonesian businesses are dotted among them, smaller and quieter than the Chinese or Latino ones, easy to miss if you do not read Bahasa Indonesia.
The neighbourhood has not been gentrified out. Rents have risen, yes, but the population of Elmhurst is still more than 70 percent foreign-born, still Asian-majority, still working immigrants and their children. Mandarin is the most commonly heard language on Broadway now, not Indonesian, but Sky Cafe is still full on a Friday night and the food bazaar still draws five hundred people on a Sunday afternoon.
What has changed is who counts as Indonesian Elmhurst. The second generation is everywhere except this one block. They are software engineers in Queens Plaza, nurses at Elmhurst Hospital, restaurant managers in Manhattan, students at Hunter and Stony Brook. The grandparents stayed. The grandchildren come back for the bazaar.
That is the rhythm of every diaspora neighbourhood that lasts more than a generation. The streets become a Sunday memory before they ever become a museum.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Indonesians settle in Elmhurst?
Indonesians settled in Elmhurst because central Queens offered affordable apartments, direct subway access to Manhattan jobs, and a polyglot working-class culture that absorbed new arrivals without forcing them to assimilate. The earliest Indonesian students and migrants in the 1970s and 1980s chose Elmhurst for those reasons, and chain migration from Java, Sumatra and the Chinese-Indonesian community did the rest. By the late 1990s, when the 1997 financial crisis and the 1998 anti-Chinese-Indonesian riots pushed a much larger wave out of Indonesia, Elmhurst already had the restaurants, mosques and family contacts that made it the natural landing place.
Is Elmhurst still home to a large Indonesian community?
Yes. Estimates put the New York City Indonesian community at roughly 5,000 to 15,000 people, with the densest single concentration still in and around Elmhurst, Queens. It is the largest Indonesian-American community on the East Coast. The second generation has dispersed to Long Island City, Forest Hills and New Jersey, but the Whitney Avenue corridor, the Indonesian Food Bazaar at St James Episcopal Church and Masjid Al-Hikmah in Astoria still anchor Indonesian life in New York.
What are the most famous Indonesian landmarks in Elmhurst?
The most prominent Indonesian landmarks in and around Elmhurst are Masjid Al-Hikmah at 48-01 31st Avenue in Astoria, the main Indonesian mosque on the East Coast, founded in 1995, and Sky Cafe at 86-20 Whitney Avenue, the Sumatran family restaurant that has become the de facto community kitchen. The monthly New York Indonesian Food Bazaar at St James Episcopal Church on Broadway is the largest gathering, and Indo Java at 85-12 Queens Boulevard doubles as a grocery store and one of the smallest restaurants in New York.
Where in Indonesia did the Elmhurst Indonesians come from?
Most Elmhurst Indonesians come from the urban centres of Java, especially Jakarta, Surabaya, Bandung and Yogyakarta, and from Sumatra, particularly Medan and Padang. There are also smaller numbers from Sulawesi, especially Manado, and from Bali. The community is unusually mixed by ethnicity and religion, including Javanese and Sundanese Muslims, Chinese-Indonesian Christians, Batak Lutherans from North Sumatra, Minangkabau from West Sumatra, and a handful of Balinese Hindus.
When did Indonesians first arrive in Elmhurst?
The first Indonesian residents arrived in Queens in small numbers after the Hart-Celler Immigration Act of 1965 opened legal migration from Asia, but the community in Elmhurst stayed tiny through the 1970s and 1980s. The two big growth periods came in the 1990s, after the 1997 Asian financial crisis and the May 1998 anti-Chinese-Indonesian riots, when tens of thousands of Indonesians left the country and a significant share found their way to Elmhurst.
If your family’s story passed through Elmhurst, or through any of the Indonesian sending cities of Jakarta, Surabaya, Medan, Padang, Bandung or Yogyakarta, Atlas of Home can help you trace that journey. From the kampung to Whitney Avenue, to wherever you are now.