The crescent moons come on after dark. Strings of green and white lights trace the storefronts along Coney Island Avenue, glowing over windows full of gold bangles, mannequins draped in shalwar kameez, and trays of orange jalebi cooling behind the glass. A cab idles outside Punjab Restaurant while the driver carries out a foam container of nihari. Two doors down, a sweet shop weighs out burfi by the pound for a customer buying ahead of a wedding. The Urdu signs outrun the English ones, block after block.
This is Little Pakistan Brooklyn, the largest Pakistani community in New York City, packed into roughly a dozen blocks of one long avenue. It has been arrived at, hollowed out, and rebuilt, and most people walking it on a Friday afternoon have no idea how close it came to disappearing.
Coney Island Avenue: The Place
Little Pakistan runs along Coney Island Avenue in central Brooklyn, its heart roughly between Foster Avenue and Avenue H, where Ditmas Park gives way to the Midwood section. The avenue is a wide commercial spine that cuts south toward the boardwalk, lined with two- and three-story brick buildings, shops at street level and apartments above. The Q train at Newkirk Plaza and the buses down Coney Island Avenue connect it to the rest of the borough. Around the storefronts sit the leafy blocks of Victorian Flatbush and the brick rowhouses of Orthodox Jewish Midwood, a quieter world a few feet from the bustle.
How Coney Island Avenue Became Little Pakistan
Before the Pakistanis
In the 1970s, this stretch of Coney Island Avenue was known for a different kind of commerce. It was an informal Antique Row, more than thirty shops selling secondhand furniture, bric-a-brac, and the dusty leftovers of other people’s lives to bargain hunters. Almost none of them survive. The dealers who once traded in other people’s pasts became part of the avenue’s own.
Just east of the avenue sat Midwood, one of the most heavily Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods in Brooklyn, its blocks full of yeshivas, kosher butchers, and families who kept the Sabbath. That detail matters more than it looks. When the first Pakistani Muslim families settled nearby in the early 1980s, there were too few of them to support a halal butcher of their own. So they turned to the kosher butchers of Midwood, whose ritual slaughter came close enough to their own dietary rules. The presence of observant Jews, in other words, helped make the avenue livable for observant Muslims.
The Pakistanis Arrive
The door had opened in 1965, when the Hart-Celler Act ended the national-origin quotas that had kept most Asians out of the United States. The first Pakistanis to come through were students and professionals. The larger, working-class wave arrived in the late 1970s and the 1980s, many of them from the big cities of Karachi, Lahore, and Rawalpindi, and from Kashmir. The congregation that founded the first local mosque came largely from Kashmir.
A great many of the men drove cabs. By night the yellow taxis crisscrossed Manhattan, and the drivers wanted a place to eat at the end of a shift and hear their own language. In 1985, Tanveer Iqbal opened Punjab Restaurant at 691 Coney Island Avenue, and his first customers were Pakistani cabdrivers stopping in after work. They asked him to stay open around the clock so they could eat whenever their shifts ended. He did, and Punjab still runs at all hours. Word of work, of an apartment, of a cousin who could help, traveled back to Pakistan and pulled the next family over. Chain by chain, the avenue filled.
The numbers tell the speed of it. The Pakistani population of New York City grew from around 15,000 in 1990 to nearly 40,000 by 2000, lifted again by the Immigration Act of 1990. In Brooklyn alone, the count rose from 4,949 Pakistani immigrants in 1990 to 9,903 in 2000. Grocers, travel agents, jewelers, and clothing shops opened to serve them, and Coney Island Avenue became a place where a newcomer could find a job, a meal, a mosque, and a flight home to Lahore without leaving the block.
Coney Island Avenue at Its Peak
By the late 1990s the avenue was at full tide. Sweet shops, halal butchers, electronics stores, and dozens of clothing boutiques crowded the strip, their signs in Urdu and their shelves stocked with goods imported from home. Every Friday, thousands packed into Makki Masjid for Jummah prayer, so many that latecomers knelt on the sidewalk out front when the hall filled.
The community had its own calendar. Every August, the avenue shut to traffic for the Brooklyn Mela, the Pakistan Independence Day street fair that local merchants started in 1990, blocking Coney Island Avenue from Avenue H to Foster Avenue. Vendors sold biryani and grilled kebabs, pop singers flew in from Pakistan to play a main stage, and shopkeepers tripled a day’s takings in an afternoon. For a few hours each summer, the flag of a country thousands of miles away flew over a Brooklyn avenue.
The Change
Then came September 11, 2001. In the months after the attacks, the federal government turned its attention to Muslim and South Asian communities, and Coney Island Avenue felt it harder than almost anywhere in the city. FBI agents went door to door. Men were detained, often on minor immigration violations that in any other season would never have led to a cell. Roughly 450 people from the greater New York area were swept up in the post-attack investigation.
In late 2002 came the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System, known as special registration. Men aged sixteen to forty-five from two dozen mostly Muslim countries, Pakistan among them, were ordered to report to immigration offices to be fingerprinted, photographed, and questioned under oath. Nationwide, more than 82,000 men registered, and more than 13,000 were placed in deportation proceedings. Word spread that registering could mean detention, and fear emptied the avenue.
Families left in a hurry. Some drove north to seek asylum in Canada. Others went back to Pakistan. By one Pakistani government estimate, around 15,000 people left the Midwood area for Canada, Europe, or Pakistan. A local survey by a community group later put the departures across Brooklyn’s South Asian neighborhoods above 20,000. Apartments were abandoned with food still in the refrigerators and children’s clothes still in the closets. One labor activist, Bobby Khan, ended up holding seventy or eighty keys handed to him by neighbors who fled. Storefronts went dark. For a while it looked like the avenue might not come back.
The Landmarks of Little Pakistan
Makki Masjid, 1089 Coney Island Avenue. The neighborhood’s anchor opened in 1982 near Glenwood Road, the first mosque on the avenue, and it grew with the community it served. By the 1990s its Friday crowds spilled onto the pavement, and today several thousand worshippers still gather for Jummah, with far more at Eid. More than a house of prayer, it was the magnet that first drew Pakistani families to these blocks.
Punjab Restaurant, 691 Coney Island Avenue. When Tanveer Iqbal opened it in 1985, the avenue was barely Pakistani yet. His cabdriver regulars asked him to never close, and the kitchen has been running around the clock ever since, ladling out nihari and karahi to night-shift drivers and Friday families alike. It is one of the oldest Pakistani tables in Brooklyn and helped set the avenue on its course.
The Council of Peoples Organization, on Coney Island Avenue. When the detentions began, frightened families went looking for someone who could speak to the FBI on their behalf, and they found Mohammad Razvi, a local businessman. He opened COPO’s doors on February 1, 2002, meaning to run a legal-aid desk for six months. It never closed. The organization now serves tens of thousands of people a year with immigration help, English classes, food, and benefits enrollment.
Future Fashion, between Foster Avenue and Avenue H. Nosheen Ahmed’s grandmother opened this clothing shop in 1991, selling shalwar kameez, jewelry, and fabric mostly imported from Pakistan. Her mother ran it next, and Nosheen runs it now, three generations of one family stocking the bridal silks that neighbors come back to year after year. Stores like hers are where the avenue dresses for its weddings and its Eids.
The Brooklyn Mela, Coney Island Avenue from Avenue H to Foster Avenue. Not a building but an event, the August Independence Day fair has been the community’s biggest day since the local merchants’ association launched it in 1990. For more than a quarter century it drew Pakistani Americans from across the country, until a 2018 dispute over the permit canceled it for the first time in twenty-eight years. The crowds still find the avenue every August all the same.
Rahim Grocery and Halal Meat, on Coney Island Avenue. Halal meat once sent the first Pakistani families to Midwood’s kosher butchers; now grocers like Muhammad Ashraf’s stock the avenue’s own. Alongside the produce and the spices, shops like this one anchor the daily rhythm of a neighborhood that buys its rice in twenty-pound sacks. They are the unglamorous landmarks that make a place a home.
Where the Little Pakistan Pakistanis Came From
Most of the families who built the avenue came from urban Pakistan, above all from the great cities of Karachi, Lahore, and Rawalpindi, the same places that have long fed Pakistani migration to America’s big cities. They were drawn by the same things that pull people anywhere: political turbulence and thin opportunity at home, and the promise of wages, however hard-earned, in New York.
There was a strong thread from Kashmir as well, especially among the congregation that built Makki Masjid in the early 1980s. Once a few families had a foothold, the migration ran on relatives and home-town ties, a cousin sponsoring a cousin, a village name repeating itself across a dozen Brooklyn apartments. That is how an avenue ends up sounding like a particular corner of Punjab or a particular district of Kashmir, one chain of kin at a time.
Little Pakistan Today
The avenue is full again. The clothing shops are lit, the sweet shops sell mithai by the box for Chand Raat the night before Eid, and the restaurants run late. The crescent-and-star lights strung along Coney Island Avenue now mark something official: in December 2021 the City Council co-named a stretch of it Muhammad Ali Jinnah Way, after the founder of Pakistan, a designation the community’s younger activists had pushed for years to win.
That second generation is the real story now. The children of cabdrivers and shopkeepers have gone into medicine, law, and city politics, and many have chosen to raise their own families on the same blocks rather than leave. They gather at the corner of Foster and Coney Island Avenues to celebrate a Pakistan cricket win, the way their parents once gathered for the mela. The neighborhood has not erased what happened after 9/11, and older residents still carry it, but the fear that once emptied the sidewalks no longer runs the place.
Rents are rising, some families have spread out to Queens and New Jersey, and the avenue is changing the way every Brooklyn avenue changes. But the lights still come on after dark, and the next newcomer off the plane from Lahore still finds, within a block, a job, a meal, a mosque, and a sack of rice. The avenue that almost vanished is busy writing its second chapter.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Pakistanis settle on Coney Island Avenue?
The first Pakistani families came in the early 1980s, drawn partly by Makki Masjid, which opened on the avenue in 1982, and by the nearby Orthodox Jewish butchers of Midwood whose ritual slaughter let observant Muslims eat before halal shops existed. Many of the men drove taxis and wanted somewhere to eat and pray near home. As cousins sponsored cousins, Little Pakistan Brooklyn grew block by block into the city’s largest Pakistani community.
Is Coney Island Avenue still a Pakistani neighborhood today?
Yes. After thousands of residents left following the post-9/11 immigration crackdown, the avenue has filled back in, and Little Pakistan Brooklyn remains New York City’s largest Pakistani enclave. Urdu signs, sweet shops, halal restaurants, and clothing stores still line Coney Island Avenue, and in 2021 the city co-named part of it Muhammad Ali Jinnah Way.
What are the most famous landmarks in Little Pakistan?
Makki Masjid at 1089 Coney Island Avenue, the area’s first mosque, is the community’s anchor, drawing thousands to Friday prayers. Punjab Restaurant at 691 Coney Island Avenue, open around the clock since 1985, is one of the oldest Pakistani kitchens in Brooklyn, and the Council of Peoples Organization has served the neighborhood since 2002.
Where did the Pakistanis of Coney Island Avenue come from?
Most came from urban Pakistan, especially the cities of Karachi, Lahore, and Rawalpindi, with a strong early presence from Kashmir among the founders of Makki Masjid. They arrived after the 1965 Hart-Celler Act opened the door, with the largest working-class wave coming in the late 1970s and 1980s and again after the Immigration Act of 1990.
When did Pakistanis first arrive in Little Pakistan Brooklyn?
Pakistani families began settling along Coney Island Avenue in the early 1980s, and the opening of Makki Masjid in 1982 helped anchor the new community. The city’s Pakistani population grew from about 15,000 in 1990 to nearly 40,000 by 2000, with Brooklyn’s enclave at the center of that growth.
If your family’s story passed through the cab garages and crescent-lit storefronts of Coney Island Avenue, it is part of a larger map of arrival, of cousins sponsoring cousins from Lahore and Kashmir to a single Brooklyn street. You can trace the same kind of journey in the Pakistani community on Devon Avenue in Chicago, among the Bangladeshis a few blocks away in Kensington, and in the South Asian heart of Indian Jackson Heights in Queens.