Walk south down Cross Bay Boulevard on a Saturday morning and you can still read the old neighbourhood in the storefronts: a salumeria counter, a parish bulletin in two languages, an espresso machine hissing behind a bakery window. For most of the twentieth century, the Italians in Ozone Park made this corner of Queens their own, a place locals nicknamed the Little Italy of Queens. The Cadillacs and the cannoli are fewer now, but the imprint runs deep.
The Place
Ozone Park sits in south-western Queens, hard against the Brooklyn line, bounded roughly by Atlantic Avenue to the north and the approaches to Aqueduct Racetrack and Jamaica Bay to the south. It is a neighbourhood of two-family brick rowhouses, narrow driveways, fig trees wrapped against the winter, and two great commercial spines: Liberty Avenue and Cross Bay Boulevard.
The name itself was a marketing flourish. When developers Benjamin Hitchcock and Charles Denton laid out the streets in the 1880s, after the railroad reached the area in 1880, they chose “Ozone” to suggest the fresh, healthful sea breezes blowing in off the Atlantic, then thought to be restorative.
This was never a wealthy enclave. It was, and largely remains, a neighbourhood of working and middle-class homeowners, people who scraped together a down payment and stayed for forty years. That ownership, modest and stubborn, is the thread that runs through the whole Italian story here.
How It Became Italian
Before the Italians
The land that became Ozone Park was sparsely settled farmland and a scattering of small villages. One of them, Centreville, dates to the 1840s and clustered around Centreville Street and a community church, east of where Cross Bay Boulevard now runs. The first immigrant workers in the area were French, drawn to a pot factory on Atlantic Avenue, followed by Irish and German families.
Through the late nineteenth century the neighbourhood grew slowly, held back by poor transport. To reach Manhattan meant a long, awkward journey, and so the rowhouses filled in only gradually. What the area lacked was a fast line to the city. When it finally arrived, everything changed. The fuller chronology of Ozone Park’s development traces this slow start in detail.
The El and the great influx
In 1915 the Fulton Street elevated line was extended into the neighbourhood, and the elevated trains transformed Ozone Park from a remote outpost into a commutable address. It was this connection, more than anything, that opened the floodgates for Italian families.
They came mostly from East New York, in neighbouring Brooklyn, where Italian immigrants had crowded into tenements a generation earlier. Ozone Park offered what Brooklyn could not: light, air, a patch of yard, and a house you could actually own. The same logic drew Italians a few miles south to the Italians of Dyker Heights in Brooklyn. Through the 1910s, 1920s and 1930s, Italian, Irish and Jewish families moved outward together, and the Italians put down the deepest roots.
Building the Little Italy of Queens
By the time Cross Bay Boulevard opened to traffic in 1925, the character of the neighbourhood was set. Italians filled the new rowhouses street by street, and the boulevard and Liberty Avenue grew thick with the businesses of an Italian neighbourhood: bakeries, pork stores, pastry shops, social clubs, and the small storefront restaurants that fed the racetrack crowd.
The Catholic parishes anchored it all. A child baptised at the local church was likely to make first communion there, marry there, and have a funeral mass said there decades later. Sunday meant the nine o’clock mass, then a long table at home. The neighbourhood earned its nickname honestly: the Little Italy of Queens, the same parish-and-pastry pattern you find among the Italians of Middle Village elsewhere in Queens.
The famous and the infamous
Ozone Park bred its share of names. Cyndi Lauper, the singer, grew up here, as did the actress and singer Bernadette Peters, both daughters of the Italian-American neighbourhood. The Beat writer Jack Kerouac lived above a drugstore on Cross Bay Boulevard and earned, from Allen Ginsberg, the affectionate title “the Wizard of Ozone Park”.
And then there was John Gotti, the Gambino crime boss who ran his operation from a storefront social club on 101st Avenue. His presence cast a long, unwanted shadow over the neighbourhood for decades, the lurid headline that obscured the far larger and quieter story of ordinary families minding their homes.
The slow turning
The Italian Ozone Park held firm for generations, but neighbourhoods are never fixed. As the original families aged, their children moved out to Long Island, to Howard Beach, to the suburbs, chasing more space and newer houses. Their parents stayed in the rowhouses; the next generation did not always replace them.
From the late twentieth century onward, new immigrants arrived in numbers, from the Caribbean, from Guyana and Suriname, from Bangladesh and across Latin America. They bought the same rowhouses, opened their own shops along Liberty Avenue, and made Ozone Park one of the most diverse neighbourhoods in the city. The Italian presence thinned, but it did not vanish. The same generational turning has reshaped Italian enclaves up and down the coast, from the Italians of Revere near Boston to the Italians of East Haven in Connecticut.
The Landmarks
Don Peppe, 135-58 Lefferts Boulevard. Opened in 1968 and a half-mile from Aqueduct Racetrack, this is the legendary Italian-American room of the neighbourhood, its walls hung with photographs of thoroughbreds and jockey silks from the days when the track crowd packed every table. The linguine with clam sauce is famous enough to have made television, and the place still draws a few faces from the racing world.
St. Mary Gate of Heaven Church, 103-12 101st Avenue. One of the Roman Catholic parishes at the heart of Italian Ozone Park, sitting right on the old commercial spine. For generations of local Italian families this was the church of baptisms, weddings and funerals, the building that organised the rhythm of the year.
Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, 101-41 91st Street. Standing near the corner of Rockaway Boulevard, this parish still says an Italian-language mass on Sunday mornings, a small living thread of the old neighbourhood. It is now joined with St. Stanislaus Bishop and Martyr as a single parish, a sign of how the Catholic map has been redrawn as congregations shrank.
Our Lady of Perpetual Help, 111-50 115th Street. Just over the line in South Ozone Park, this church served the Italian and Catholic families who settled the southern streets toward Aqueduct. Like the other parishes, it has adapted as the neighbourhood’s makeup changed, now welcoming a congregation that worships in more than one language.
The former Oxford Bake Shop, 104-01 Liberty Avenue. For nearly a century this was the neighbourhood’s bakery, opened in 1929 and reckoned the longest-running business to hold the same Ozone Park address. It finally closed in 2023, and its shuttering felt, to old-timers, like the closing of a chapter.
Jack Kerouac’s apartment, 133-01 Cross Bay Boulevard. Kerouac moved into a second-floor flat above a drugstore here in 1943 and worked the soda fountain below. In these rooms he wrote his first novel, “The Town and the City”, and began dreaming up “On the Road”, earning the nickname that stuck: the Wizard of Ozone Park.
The former Bergin Hunt and Fish Club, 98-04 101st Avenue. This unremarkable storefront on 101st Avenue was John Gotti’s headquarters from 1977 until the club closed in 2005. It is a piece of the neighbourhood’s most notorious history, the address that drew news cameras and federal surveillance for years.
Where They Came From
The Italians of Ozone Park did not arrive directly from Italy so much as from one stop over: the older Italian quarters of Brooklyn, above all East New York. Those neighbourhoods had absorbed the great wave of Italian immigration of the 1880s through the 1910s, the years when millions left southern Italy and Sicily for America.
Like most of New York’s Italians, the families that filled Ozone Park traced their origins overwhelmingly to the Mezzogiorno, the impoverished south: Naples and Campania, Calabria, Sicily, Apulia. They had left villages where land was scarce and work scarcer, crossed the Atlantic in steerage, and worked their way up through Brooklyn before they could afford the move to Queens. The same southern Italian roots run through older New England mill and port towns, such as the Italians of Bristol in Rhode Island. You can read more about the wider arc of Italian immigration to New York City for the fuller context.
The pull to Ozone Park was simple and it was about ownership. A house here, paid off over a working lifetime, was the tangible proof that the crossing had been worth it. It could be filled with children, leaned on, passed down. That hunger for a home of one’s own is the through-line of the whole Italian-American story, and Ozone Park is one of its clearest chapters.
Ozone Park Today
The Ozone Park of today is not an Italian neighbourhood, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. By the 2010 census the population was heavily Hispanic and substantially Asian, with residents of Italian ancestry making up a single-digit share of the whole. Walk Liberty Avenue now and the soundtrack is as likely to be Punjabi or Spanish as anything else, and the food is gloriously mixed. Other heritage communities in the New York region have held their ground more tightly, as with the Jews of Monsey in the suburbs to the north.
But the Italian neighbourhood has not been erased so much as folded into the new one. The fig trees still go up in the front yards. Don Peppe still fills its tables. The Italian mass is still said on Sunday morning at Nativity. Older Italian families still hold their rowhouses, and their grandchildren come back for a christening or a funeral and recognise the streets.
What endures most is the thing the neighbourhood was built on: the modest, owned home, defended across generations. The names on the deeds have changed and will change again, but the new families want exactly what the Italians wanted, and they are getting it the same way, one rowhouse at a time. That continuity, more than any nostalgia, is the real legacy of the Italians in Ozone Park.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why were the Italians in Ozone Park called the Little Italy of Queens?
From the 1910s onward, Italians moving out of crowded Brooklyn neighbourhoods, especially East New York, settled Ozone Park in such numbers that it became a recognisably Italian district. The bakeries, pork stores, social clubs and Catholic parishes that lined Liberty Avenue and Cross Bay Boulevard earned it the nickname the Little Italy of Queens.
When did Italians first move to Ozone Park?
Italian families began arriving in significant numbers after 1915, when the Fulton Street elevated line connected the neighbourhood to the rest of New York City. The influx continued through the 1920s and 1930s, as Italian, Irish and Jewish families moved outward from Brooklyn in search of homes they could own.
Where did the Italians in Ozone Park come from?
Most came by way of older Italian quarters in Brooklyn, particularly East New York, rather than directly from Europe. Their roots, like those of most New York Italians, lay overwhelmingly in southern Italy and Sicily, the regions of Campania, Calabria, Apulia and the Mezzogiorno generally.
What is the most famous Italian restaurant in Ozone Park?
Don Peppe, opened in 1968 at 135-58 Lefferts Boulevard near Aqueduct Racetrack, is the neighbourhood’s legendary Italian-American room. It is known for its linguine with clam sauce and for walls covered in racing photographs from the days when the track crowd packed it every night.
Is Ozone Park still an Italian neighbourhood today?
Not in the way it once was. By the 2010 census the population was heavily Hispanic and substantially Asian, with Italian-ancestry residents a small share of the total. A core of older Italian families remains, however, and the parishes, restaurants and a Sunday Italian mass keep the heritage visibly alive.
Who are the most famous people from Italian Ozone Park?
The singer Cyndi Lauper and the actress and singer Bernadette Peters both grew up in the neighbourhood. The writer Jack Kerouac lived above a Cross Bay Boulevard drugstore and was nicknamed the Wizard of Ozone Park, while the Gambino boss John Gotti ran his crew from a social club on 101st Avenue.
If your family’s story passed through Ozone Park, or any of the places Italians have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a village in Campania to a rowhouse off Cross Bay Boulevard, to wherever you are now.