On a Saturday morning in Middle Village, the line at Joe’s Bakery on Metropolitan Avenue runs out the door, and the men carrying white boxes of rainbow cookies nod to the men rolling bocce balls a few blocks north in Juniper Valley Park. The Italians in Middle Village did not arrive to a fanfare. They came quietly, family by family, into a corner of Queens that had been German farmland, and they made it home so thoroughly that today nearly one resident in five claims Italian ancestry.
The Place
Middle Village sits in west-central Queens, bounded loosely by Maspeth, Glendale, Forest Hills and Rego Park, with the ZIP code 11379 and a population of roughly 36,000. Its name is literal: it was the midway point for travellers on the old Jamaica Turnpike, today’s Metropolitan Avenue, between the Williamsburgh ferry and the village of Jamaica.
The neighbourhood has a low, suburban feel rare for the borough, with detached and semi-detached houses, deep back yards and tree-lined side streets. Its two commercial spines, Metropolitan Avenue and Eliot Avenue, are lined with bakeries, butchers, delis and pizzerias rather than chain storefronts.
At its centre is Juniper Valley Park, fifty-five acres of ballfields, tennis courts and bocce courts that until 1915 was a peat bog known as Juniper Swamp.
How It Became Italian
To understand the Italians of Middle Village, you have to start with the Germans, because the Italians moved into a place the Germans built.
The German farmland, 1850s to 1900
After the failed European revolutions of 1848, German refugees who had crowded into Kleindeutschland on Manhattan’s Lower East Side began looking east for land. Beginning in the 1850s they bought up the acreage between Metropolitan and Myrtle Avenues and turned it to farms and market gardens.
In 1852 German churches founded Lutheran Cemetery, a 225-acre burial ground that drew the dead, and the mourners, of all of New York’s German population. Many of the more than a thousand victims of the 1904 General Slocum steamboat disaster, the worst loss of life in the city before September 11th, were laid to rest there. The cemetery was renamed All Faiths in 1990.
The German imprint was so complete that one nineteenth-century account noted the village was made up very largely of German families, and nearly all the business of the place was transacted in that language. Niederstein’s, the German restaurant on Metropolitan Avenue that had served travellers since around 1854, became the place where the neighbourhood marked its weddings, communions and funerals.
The Catholic seed, 1860
The Italians who would come later inherited an institution already waiting for them. On 18 March 1860, ground was broken on St. Margaret’s Roman Catholic Church, a frame building twenty-five feet wide and fifty feet long, large enough for the seventy Catholic families then scattered across the farms. Before it was built, those families had travelled more than two miles by horse and buggy to St. Mary’s in present-day Woodside to hear Mass.
St. Margaret was dedicated to the patron saint of farmers, fitting for a parish born in fields. In 1865 the parish added a one-room log schoolhouse for twenty children. That single classroom would, within a century, swell to a thousand students, and the parish would become the spiritual anchor of a community whose accent was about to change.
The housing boom and the Italian arrival, 1900 to 1940
The shift came with the streets and the subway. The automobile and the instalment plan turned farmland into building lots, and the last working farm in Middle Village sold to developers in 1937. Into the new rows of brick and frame houses came the second wave of the great Italian migration, families who had first landed in the crowded tenements of Manhattan’s Lower East Side and East Harlem and were now reaching for a yard and a deed.
They were joined by Irish and, later, by Yugoslav-American neighbours, but it was the Italians and the Irish who set the tone. Italian was a language of homeownership here, not of arrival. A family in Middle Village had already climbed one rung; the move to Queens was the second.
St. Margaret’s filled with them. Over time the parish added Italian-language Masses, and to this day Sunday morning includes a 9:00 service in Italian, a small survival of the immigrant generation that built so much of the modern parish.
The making of the park, 1938
The defining public works of the era belonged to Robert Moses. The old Juniper Swamp, drained and named Juniper Valley by 1915, was acquired by the city, and construction of Juniper Valley Park began in 1938 with labour funded through the Works Progress Administration.
The bocce courts that the Parks Department laid out would become, over the decades, the social parliament of Italian Middle Village, where retired men gather most afternoons that the weather allows. The park gave the neighbourhood a green centre, and the Italians gave the park its most enduring ritual.
The post-war neighbourhood, 1945 to 1990
By the post-war decades Middle Village had become what the local civic association would describe as predominantly Italian-American and Irish-American, a settled, churchgoing, homeowning place. In 1962 the Diocese of Brooklyn opened Christ the King Regional High School at 68-02 Metropolitan Avenue, beside the M train terminal; its first class sat down in the unfinished building in May 1963, and the school went coeducational in 1973.
The bakeries and pork stores along Metropolitan Avenue became the everyday institutions of the community, the places where Sunday dinner began. The neighbourhood acquired the reputation, fairly or not, of a small town inside the largest city in America, where the same families stayed for three and four generations and the same surnames recurred on the rosters at St. Margaret’s.
The Landmarks
St. Margaret Roman Catholic Church, 66-05 79th Place. The mother institution of Catholic Middle Village, traced to the cornerstone of 1860 and the patron saint of farmers. Its Italian-language Sunday Mass is a living link to the immigrant generation, and its parish academy descends from the one-room schoolhouse of 1865.
Juniper Valley Park, between Juniper Boulevard North and South. Fifty-five acres reclaimed from swamp and built out under Robert Moses in 1938. The bocce courts here are the heartbeat of the old Italian community; come on a warm afternoon and the games, and the arguments, are still going.
Joe’s Bakery, 75-50 Metropolitan Avenue. An Italian bakery in the space once occupied by Catalano, famous along the avenue for rainbow cookies, cannoli and fresh bread. On weekend mornings the queue is a roll call of the neighbourhood.
Mario’s Meats and Gourmet Deli, 75-53 Metropolitan Avenue. A butcher and Italian deli on the main commercial strip, the kind of pork store where the sandwiches and the cuts of meat anchor a Sunday table. It is one of the businesses that has kept Metropolitan Avenue an Italian food street rather than a chain corridor.
Christ the King Regional High School, 68-02 Metropolitan Avenue. A Catholic college-preparatory school opened by the Diocese of Brooklyn in 1962, standing beside the Middle Village-Metropolitan Avenue subway terminal. For two generations of Italian and Irish families it was the natural next step after St. Margaret’s grammar school.
Lutheran All Faiths Cemetery, 67-29 Metropolitan Avenue. Founded by German churches in 1852 and the reason the surrounding village first grew. Renamed All Faiths in 1990, its 225 acres hold General Slocum victims and generations of Queens families of every background, Italian among them.
St. John Cemetery, 80-01 Metropolitan Avenue. The vast Catholic burying ground of the Diocese of Brooklyn at the edge of Middle Village, where a great many of the borough’s Italian Catholic families lie. It is among the largest cemeteries in the country and a fixture of the neighbourhood’s geography.
Where They Came From
The Italians who reached Middle Village were, overwhelmingly, the children and grandchildren of the southern Italian migration of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, families from the Mezzogiorno, the regions south of Rome, and from Sicily, who had first crowded into the tenement districts of Manhattan.
Their path to Queens was a path of arrival followed by ascent. They came not directly from Naples or Palermo but from East Harlem, the Lower East Side and the older Italian quarters of Brooklyn, moving outward as the subway reached the open lots of Middle Village and a mortgage became thinkable.
That is why the Italian presence here always felt rooted rather than raw. By the time these families bought their Middle Village houses, they were already New Yorkers; what Queens offered was a yard, a parish, a park and a permanence that the tenements never could.
Middle Village Today
The numbers tell a story of both endurance and change. Italian remains the single most common ancestry in Middle Village, claimed by roughly 18 per cent of residents, ahead of German at around 11 per cent and Polish close behind. That is a remarkable share for a New York neighbourhood eight decades after the last farm closed.
But Middle Village is no longer only Italian. Polish and other Eastern European families, Latin American newcomers and a growing Asian-American population have moved in over the past quarter-century, especially after early-2000s changes redrew some of the local ZIP boundaries. Metropolitan Avenue still has its Italian bakeries and pork stores, but it has other flavours now too.
What persists is the texture the Italians helped set: the homeownership, the parish life at St. Margaret’s, the Sunday bakery boxes, and above all the bocce courts in Juniper Valley Park, where the old men still play and the click of the balls is, for now, the most Italian sound in Queens. Middle Village remains, as its neighbours like to say, a small town hidden inside the largest city in America.
If you grew up here you can still walk Metropolitan Avenue past the church, the school, the bakery and the cemetery and read the whole arc of the community in a single mile. For more of the borough’s Italian story, the same patterns echo in the Italians of Whitestone and the Italians of Howard Beach, while the suburban flight northward shaped New Rochelle and Hawthorne in Westchester, and the New Jersey suburbs of Bloomfield and Clifton.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why are there so many Italians in Middle Village, Queens?
The Italians in Middle Village arrived chiefly in the early twentieth century, moving out from Manhattan’s crowded Italian quarters as the subway and the instalment plan opened up the old German farmland for houses. They came for yards, deeds and a Catholic parish, and they stayed for generations. Today Italian is still the single most common ancestry in the neighbourhood.
What part of Italy did Middle Village’s Italians come from?
They were overwhelmingly of southern Italian and Sicilian origin, descendants of the great Mezzogiorno migration of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Most reached Middle Village not directly from Italy but from East Harlem, the Lower East Side and the older Italian districts of Manhattan and Brooklyn.
What is the main Italian Catholic church in Middle Village?
St. Margaret Roman Catholic Church at 66-05 79th Place is the heart of Catholic Middle Village, founded in 1860 and dedicated to the patron saint of farmers. It still offers a Sunday Mass in Italian, a direct link to the immigrant families who filled its pews.
Where do the Italians in Middle Village play bocce?
At Juniper Valley Park, the fifty-five-acre park built under Robert Moses in 1938 on a drained swamp. Its bocce courts have been the gathering place of the Italians in Middle Village for decades, busy most afternoons the weather allows.
Is Middle Village still an Italian neighbourhood?
Largely yes, though it is changing. Italian remains the most common ancestry at around 18 per cent of residents, ahead of German and Polish, but Eastern European, Latin American and Asian-American families have moved in over the past quarter-century, giving Metropolitan Avenue a wider range of food and faith than it once had.
What are the best Italian food shops in Middle Village?
Metropolitan Avenue is the Italian food street: Joe’s Bakery at 75-50, in the old Catalano space, is known for rainbow cookies and cannoli, while Mario’s Meats and Gourmet Deli at 75-53 is a classic pork store and butcher. They are among the businesses that keep the avenue an Italian commercial strip rather than a chain corridor.
If your family’s story passed through Middle Village, or any of the places Italians have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a village in the Mezzogiorno to a tenement in East Harlem, to a house with a yard off Metropolitan Avenue, to wherever you are now.