Before dawn on a Sunday, the kitchen at 95-30 118th Street is already loud with the clang of steel pots the size of bathtubs. Volunteers, many of them women who keep house the rest of the week, knead dough and stir lentils for a crowd that will not stop arriving until late at night. By the end of the day the great white gurdwara of the Sikh Cultural Society will have fed more than a thousand people, and not one of them will be asked their name, their religion, or for a single dollar.
That kitchen is the beating heart of what Richmond Hill, Queens has quietly become: one of the largest Sikh communities on the American East Coast, dense enough that a stretch of its main avenue now carries a second, official name. Punjab Avenue.
Richmond Hill: The Place
Richmond Hill sits in south-central Queens, bordered roughly by Forest Park to the north and Atlantic Avenue to the south, with Woodhaven to the west and Jamaica to the east. The Sikh and Punjabi heart of it falls in South Richmond Hill, below Atlantic Avenue, in ZIP code 11419. The housing is mostly attached and semi-attached frame houses, with pockets of the gabled Queen Anne homes that made the area a desirable suburb a century ago. The J and Z trains run along Jamaica Avenue and the A train along Liberty Avenue, feeding the neighborhood into Manhattan.
How Richmond Hill Became Little Punjab
Before the Punjabis
Richmond Hill is one of the oldest planned suburbs in Queens. In 1868 a Manhattan banker named Albon Platt Man bought up the Lefferts and Welling farms and, with the lawyer Edward Richmond, laid out a leafy commuter town beside a new Long Island Rail Road station. Man wrote restrictive covenants into the deeds, banning front-yard fences and mandating uniform setbacks, so the streets would feel like a forest of lawns.
For decades it was a prosperous, largely white, middle-class neighborhood of Victorian houses, churches, and tidy yards. One of those churches, a Methodist one on 118th Street, would eventually change hands in a way its builders never imagined. By the second half of the twentieth century, as older residents moved out to Long Island, the big frame houses and cheap rents drew a new wave of arrivals from across the world.
The Punjabis Arrive
The opening came from Washington. The Hart-Celler Immigration Act of 1965 abolished the national-origin quotas that had effectively barred most Asians since 1917, and Punjabi Sikhs began trickling into New York. The first Sikh congregational gathering in the city, marking Guru Nanak’s birthday, dates to 1954, but the community was tiny: by 1963 only about ten families were meeting monthly for worship in private homes.
They organized quickly. The Sikh Cultural Society was registered in 1965 and incorporated as a nonprofit in November, 1968. In April 1972 it pooled its money and paid $65,000 cash for that old Methodist church on 118th Street, converting it into the first Sikh house of worship on the East Coast. The gurdwara became the anchor, and people came to live near it.
The real surge came in the late 1970s and 1980s, then accelerated through the 1990s. Working-class Punjabis arrived as the green-card lottery opened new paths, and some came as asylum seekers after the violence of 1984, when the Indian army’s assault on the Golden Temple in June and the anti-Sikh mob killings that followed Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s assassination that October drove families to seek safety abroad. They were farmers and tradesmen, and in New York they found work waiting for them behind the wheel.
Richmond Hill at Its Peak
The timing was uncanny. Just as Punjabi men were arriving, New York’s taxi industry was hungry for drivers. By the late 1990s South Asians made up more than 40 percent of the city’s cab drivers. When the city auctioned medallions in 1996 for the first time since 1937, South Asian drivers bought 43 of the 53 sold. The yellow cab became the economic spine of the community, and later many graduated to long-haul trucking.
The money flowed back into Richmond Hill. Through the 1990s, families clustered around the Sikh Cultural Society and a second congregation, the Baba Makhan Shah Lubana Sikh Center, established in 1998 at 113-10 101st Avenue. The stretch of 101st Avenue between roughly 111th and 123rd Streets filled with Punjabi sweet shops, grocery stores, and dhabas until people simply called it Little Punjab. Richmond Hill earned a bigger title too: the Sikh capital of the United States.
Every spring the community spills out of the neighborhood and into Manhattan for the Sikh Day Parade, a nagar kirtan that the Sikh Cultural Society organizes to mark Vaisakhi and the 1699 founding of the Khalsa. Thousands march down Madison Avenue near 24th Street, with bhangra, kirtan, the Nishan Sahib flags, and free langar handed to passersby. It is one of the largest Vaisakhi celebrations anywhere outside India.
The Change
Two shocks tested the community. After midnight on March 8, 2002, a gas leak seeped from the street into the basement of the gurdwara on 118th Street, found a pilot light, and exploded. The fire killed a 37-year-old visitor from India and injured seven others, and it gutted the oldest Sikh temple on the East Coast.
The response was to build something far larger. On April 14, 2004, chosen to fall on the 305th anniversary of Vaisakhi, five Sikhs in saffron robes broke ground on a new gurdwara at the same address. The rebuilt complex rose to five stories and roughly 85,000 square feet, replacing the 30,000-square-foot original, at a cost estimated near 14 to 15 million dollars and designed in the harmandir style of the great gurdwaras of Punjab.
The other shock came from outside. In the weeks after September 11, 2001, turbaned and bearded Sikhs across the country were attacked by people who confused them with the men behind the attacks. Sikh New Yorkers, the dastaar and uncut hair central to their faith, found themselves targets of a violence that had nothing to do with them. The day after the attacks, Sikhs founded the Sikh Coalition, headquartered in New York, to defend civil rights and explain who they were to neighbors who had never asked. The work continues: the community has met later incidents with vigils and a steady insistence on being known.
The Landmarks of Little Punjab
The Sikh Cultural Society Gurdwara (95-30 118th Street) is the center of gravity. Born in a converted Methodist church bought for cash in 1972, rebuilt as a towering white complex after the 2002 fire, it serves nearly 700 families and draws some 7,000 worshippers on the holiest days. Its langar feeds about 500 people on weekdays and well past a thousand on Sundays, every meal free, cooked by volunteers who start before sunrise.
Baba Makhan Shah Lubana Sikh Center (113-10 101st Avenue) opened in 1998 as the community outgrew a single gurdwara. It runs Punjabi-language classes, summer camps, and cultural programming, and the intersection beside it became the first site in the United States outside India to be co-named for the ninth Guru, Guru Tegh Bahadur.
Punjabi Dhaba Catering & Sweets (119-16 101st Avenue) has been family-run since 2006, its glass cases stacked with besan ladoo, khoya barfi, and coils of bright jalebi. It is the kind of roadside-style eatery, transplanted from Punjab to a Queens storefront, that turned 101st Avenue into a destination for Punjabi food across the city.
Gulaabo opened in 2023 with chef Param Bombra, who trained in India and moved to the United States in 2017, cooking a menu devoted entirely to Punjabi dishes. It is proof that Little Punjab is still attracting new restaurateurs, not just preserving old ones.
Singh Farm and Apna Bazaar, neighboring grocery and market storefronts near 117th and 118th Streets, stock the spices, produce, and pantry staples that let families cook the food of home. They are the unglamorous infrastructure of an immigrant neighborhood, the places you visit weekly rather than for a special occasion.
Punjab Avenue itself is the landmark you can read off a street sign. On October 23, 2020, the stretch of 101st Avenue around Lefferts Boulevard was officially co-named Punjab Avenue, the result of a two-year campaign by community leaders including Harpreet Singh Toor and Jatinder Singh Boparai of the Sikh Cultural Society, alongside elected officials. A nearby stretch was slated to become Gurdwara Street.
Where the Richmond Hill Sikhs Came From
The overwhelming majority trace their roots to the Indian state of Punjab, the historic homeland of the Sikh faith, with a heavy concentration from its rural districts of farming families and small tradesmen. Chain migration did the rest: one cousin sponsored another, one driver vouched for the next, and whole villages reassembled, street by street, in south Queens.
Some arrived through the diversity visa lottery of the 1990s, some on family petitions, and a portion as asylum seekers after the upheavals of 1984. What they shared was a faith built around the gurdwara and the langar, which made the act of putting down roots inseparable from the act of building a place to worship and a kitchen to feed strangers.
Richmond Hill Today
Little Punjab is not a museum piece. The sweet shops still do brisk weekend trade, the gurdwaras still serve thousands of free meals, and the second generation, raised between Punjabi at home and English at school, is moving into law, medicine, business, and politics. The neighborhood shares its blocks with a large Indo-Caribbean population, and the two communities have grown side by side, a story told in the parallel history of the Guyanese in Richmond Hill.
The community has also gained a voice in Albany. Jenifer Rajkumar, of Punjabi descent, was elected in 2020 to the New York State Assembly representing a district that includes Richmond Hill, becoming the first Indian-American woman in the state legislature, though as a Hindu she is not herself Sikh. Around her, the Punjabi presence keeps deepening: more street co-namings, more storefronts, more of the city’s Sikh life centered here.
For all the change, the kitchen at 118th Street keeps doing the one thing it has always done. Anyone can walk in, sit on the floor, and eat. In a city that asks everyone to hustle, that open door is the most Punjabi thing about Richmond Hill, and the most enduring.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Sikhs settle in Richmond Hill, Queens?
Sikhs settled in Richmond Hill from the 1970s onward because the big frame houses and affordable rents suited large families, and because the Sikh Cultural Society had bought a church there in 1972 and turned it into the first gurdwara on the East Coast. People moved to be near the temple, and the community grew outward from it. New York’s hunger for taxi drivers, work many Punjabi men took up, sealed the choice.
Is Richmond Hill still a Sikh neighborhood today?
Yes. The Sikhs in Richmond Hill remain one of the largest Sikh communities in the eastern United States, and a stretch of 101st Avenue was officially co-named Punjab Avenue in 2020 to recognize them. The gurdwaras still serve thousands of free meals each week, and Punjabi shops and restaurants line the avenue. The neighborhood shares its blocks with a large Indo-Caribbean community.
What are the most famous Sikh landmarks in Richmond Hill?
The best known is the Sikh Cultural Society gurdwara at 95-30 118th Street, a towering white temple rebuilt after a 2002 fire, whose free kitchen feeds more than a thousand people on Sundays. The Baba Makhan Shah Lubana Sikh Center on 101st Avenue, founded in 1998, is the second major gurdwara. Punjabi Dhaba and other sweet shops along Punjab Avenue are the commercial landmarks.
Where did the Sikhs in Richmond Hill come from?
Almost all came from the Indian state of Punjab, the homeland of the Sikh faith, and especially from its rural farming districts. Many arrived through chain migration after the 1965 immigration reform, with later waves through the 1990s green-card lottery and as asylum seekers following the anti-Sikh violence of 1984. Whole villages effectively reassembled in south Queens.
When did Sikhs first arrive in Richmond Hill?
The first Sikh worship in New York City dates to the 1950s, and by 1963 about ten Sikh families were meeting in private homes. The community took root in Richmond Hill after the Sikh Cultural Society bought its 118th Street building in 1972, with the largest growth coming in the late 1970s, the 1980s, and especially the 1990s. Today the Sikhs in Richmond Hill anchor the area sometimes called the Sikh capital of America.
If your family’s story passed through Richmond Hill, through a cab shift, a Sunday in the langar hall, or a first apartment near the gurdwara, that history is worth keeping. You can trace the wider arc of Sikh migration in our piece on the Sikhs in Yuba City, California, and the broader South Asian story in Indians in Jackson Heights, Queens.