They call it Little Manila. And unlike almost every other unofficial neighbourhood in New York, this one is written on a street sign. Since June of 2022, the corner of Roosevelt Avenue and 70th Street in Woodside, Queens has carried the name Little Manila Avenue, white letters on green, bolted beneath the rumble of the elevated 7 train. For half a century, the blocks of Roosevelt Avenue between 61st and 70th Streets have held the densest concentration of Filipino life in New York City. The story of how they got that sign begins with nurses.
Walk the strip on a Saturday and you can still read the whole history in the shopfronts. A grocery that has been here since 1976. A barbecue joint named after the Tagalog word for grill. A cargo office shipping boxes the size of washing machines across the Pacific.
The Place
Woodside sits in western Queens, with Sunnyside to the west and Jackson Heights and Elmhurst to the east and southeast. The elevated 7 train runs the length of Roosevelt Avenue, and the 69th Street station drops you in the heart of the Filipino strip. The housing is modest and tightly packed: brick rowhouses, two-family frame homes built between the wars, small walk-up apartment buildings on the avenues.
It is a working-class, deeply residential neighbourhood, and one of the most diverse in the country. The Filipino blocks sit shoulder to shoulder with Thai, Ecuadorian, Mexican, and Irish Woodside, and a short walk east brings you to the Indian enclave of Jackson Heights.
How It Became Filipino
Before the Filipinos
For most of the twentieth century, Woodside was Irishtown. By the early 1930s roughly four out of five residents were Irish American, anchored by the parish of St. Sebastian, founded in 1894. The Irish story of Woodside is its own chapter, and it did not end so much as make room.
Through the postwar decades the neighbourhood was Irish, Italian, and Jewish. Then, in 1965, Washington rewrote the immigration laws, and the whole map of Queens began to change.
The Nurses Arrive
The United States had been training Filipino nurses for decades. Nursing schools established in the Philippines during the American colonial period taught in English and followed American curricula, and from 1948 the Exchange Visitor Program brought thousands of Filipino nurses to understaffed American hospitals on two-year stints.
The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 turned that temporary pipeline into a permanent one. The new law favoured skilled professionals, and American hospitals were desperate for nurses. New York’s public hospitals recruited heavily from the Philippines through the 1970s, and many of those nurses worked at Elmhurst Hospital, a short ride from Woodside. They settled along the 7 train, where the rents were low and the commute was short.
By the 1990s, 72 percent of Philippine immigrants in New York were registered nurses. And each nurse who landed became an anchor for the next arrival. Under the family reunification provisions of the same 1965 law, a nurse with a green card could petition for a husband, a sister, a parent. The classic chain migration pattern took hold, one relative pulling the next across the Pacific, and the chain ran straight through Woodside. The longer history of that profession is told well in TIME’s account of Filipino nurses in America.
Little Manila at Its Peak
The businesses followed the people. Phil-Am Food Mart opened on Roosevelt Avenue in 1976 and became the pantry of the community, the place to find longanisa and kakanin when no supermarket in New York stocked them. Through the 1980s and 1990s the strip filled in: restaurants, remittance counters, a branch of the Philippine National Bank, freight offices shipping balikbayan boxes home.
A balikbayan box is a care package the size of a washing machine, packed over months with chocolate, sneakers, vitamins, and toys, and shipped to family in the Philippines. The offices that send them, like Johnny Air Cargo on Roosevelt Avenue, are as central to diaspora life as any restaurant.
By 2009, roughly 13,000 of Woodside’s 85,000 residents were of Filipino descent, about one in seven. The 2010 census counted 38,000 Filipinos in Queens, more than half of New York City’s Filipino population. And in 2009 the strip received its pop-cultural crown: Jollibee, the Philippines’ beloved fast food chain, opened its first New York branch at 62-29 Roosevelt Avenue, with lines around the block for Chickenjoy and peach mango pie.
The Pandemic and the Sign
In the spring of 2020, the neighbourhood’s founding profession became its burden. Elmhurst Hospital, where so many of Little Manila’s nurses worked, became the epicentre of the epicentre of America’s first COVID wave. Filipino nurses worked the wards through the worst of it, and many did not survive.
The numbers, when National Nurses United counted them in late 2020, were staggering. Filipinos make up about four percent of America’s registered nurses. They were nearly a third of the registered nurses COVID killed.
In June 2020, artist Jaclyn Reyes painted a mural on the side wall of the Amazing Grace restaurant at 69th Street and Roosevelt Avenue. It reads Mabuhay, a Tagalog blessing that means, among other things, may you live. At its unveiling, community organiser Sockie Laya Smith read aloud the names of Filipino healthcare workers who had died.
The mural became a rallying point. A petition to co-name the street followed that same year, the City Council passed the bill in December 2021, and on June 12, 2022, Philippine Independence Day, more than 200 people gathered to watch the Little Manila Avenue sign unveiled at Roosevelt and 70th. The neighbourhood the nurses built finally had its name on the map.
The Landmarks
Phil-Am Food Mart, 70-02 Roosevelt Avenue. Family-owned since 1976 and the oldest anchor of the strip. Suman wrapped in palm leaves, house-cured sausages, shelves of imported snacks, and nearly fifty years of homesickness answered over a single counter.
Renee’s Kitchenette & Grill, 69-14 Roosevelt Avenue. Serving homestyle Filipino cooking since 1992 and named for the family matriarch, who grew up in Pampanga, the province widely considered the culinary capital of the Philippines. The kare-kare and sisig are the standard against which the neighbourhood measures everyone else.
Ihawan, 40-06 70th Street. Founded by a husband and wife in the early 1990s, its name is the Tagalog word for grill, and its claim to the best barbecue in town has gone largely unchallenged for three decades. The pork skewers are the neighbourhood’s signature smell.
Jollibee, 62-29 Roosevelt Avenue. The first New York outpost of the Philippines’ favourite fast food chain, opened in 2009. For Filipino New Yorkers it is less a restaurant than a teleport home; for everyone else it is an initiation.
Johnny Air Cargo, 69-04 Roosevelt Avenue. The freight office where Little Manila packs its love into balikbayan boxes and ships it 8,500 miles west. Few storefronts anywhere say more about what a diaspora actually does all day.
Bayanihan Filipino Community Center, 40-21 69th Street. Run by the grassroots organisation Philippine Forum from this address since 2007. Health screenings, immigration clinics, language classes, and disaster fundraising, including thousands of dollars raised for typhoon relief in 2013. Bayanihan names the old Filipino custom of neighbours carrying a house together, which is more or less what happens inside.
The Mabuhay mural and Little Manila Avenue sign, 69th to 70th Street at Roosevelt Avenue. The 2020 mural honouring the community’s pandemic dead and the 2022 street sign it inspired. Together they are the shortest walking tour in Queens, and one of the most moving.
Where They Came From
Little Manila draws from the whole archipelago. The nurses who founded the community trained at colleges across the Philippines, many in metro Manila, and the wave of family members who followed came from provinces in every region, Luzon to the Visayas to Mindanao. The strip’s kitchens tilt noticeably toward Pampanga, the Kapampangan province whose cooks run Renee’s and whose grilling traditions fire Ihawan.
What binds the neighbourhood to the homeland is not one province but the traffic between them: the remittance counters, the balikbayan boxes, the December flights home. Woodside is one node in a much larger Filipino America that includes Daly City in California and Historic Filipinotown in Los Angeles, and it is the East Coast’s beating heart of it.
Little Manila Today
Around 86,000 Filipinos and Filipino Americans live in New York City today, the city’s third-largest Asian community, and 54 percent of New York’s Filipinos live in Queens. In Woodside they remain roughly one in seven residents, and the strip between 61st and 70th is still recognisably theirs: the groceries, the grills, the cargo offices, the fourth-Sunday Filipino Mass at St. Sebastian, the Simbang Gabi novena that begins each December 16.
The pressures are real. Rents along Roosevelt Avenue keep climbing, and longtime merchants worry openly about being priced out of the enclave they built. The community has organised in response, campaigning during the city’s redistricting process to keep Little Manila in one council district and building cultural institutions like Little Manila Queens Bayanihan Arts, which grew out of the mural project.
But this is not a fading neighbourhood. It is a named one now, younger than the sign suggests and prouder than it has ever been. The nurses’ grandchildren are still here, and the 7 train still delivers new arrivals to 69th Street with addresses written on their phones. The story that began with a two-year hospital contract in the 1970s is still being written.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Filipinos settle in Woodside, Queens?
Filipinos settled in Woodside from the 1970s onward because New York hospitals, especially nearby Elmhurst Hospital, recruited Filipino nurses heavily after the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act opened the US to skilled professionals. Woodside offered cheap rents and a fast 7 train commute, and family reunification visas let the first nurses bring relatives over, building the enclave now known as Little Manila, Queens.
Is Little Manila in Queens still Filipino today?
Yes. Filipinos remain roughly one in seven Woodside residents, and the stretch of Roosevelt Avenue between 61st and 70th Streets is still lined with Filipino groceries, restaurants, and freight offices. Queens is home to 54 percent of New York’s Filipinos, and the corner of Roosevelt Avenue and 70th Street was officially co-named Little Manila Avenue in 2022.
What are the best Filipino restaurants in Little Manila, Woodside?
The strip’s classics are Renee’s Kitchenette & Grill at 69-14 Roosevelt Avenue for Kapampangan home cooking, Ihawan at 40-06 70th Street for barbecue, Amazing Grace at 69th and Roosevelt, and Jollibee’s first New York branch at 62-29 Roosevelt Avenue. Phil-Am Food Mart at 70-02 Roosevelt Avenue has been the neighbourhood grocery since 1976.
Where in the Philippines did the Woodside Filipinos come from?
The community draws from across the entire Philippine archipelago rather than a single region. Its founding generation of nurses trained at colleges throughout the islands, many in metro Manila, and later family migration came from provinces in Luzon, the Visayas, and Mindanao. The neighbourhood’s food scene leans toward Pampanga, the home province of several of its best-known restaurant families.
When did Filipinos first arrive in Woodside?
Filipinos began moving to Woodside in significant numbers in the 1970s, after the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act and aggressive hospital recruitment brought thousands of Filipino nurses to New York. Phil-Am Food Mart, the strip’s oldest Filipino business, opened on Roosevelt Avenue in 1976, and the enclave grew steadily through the 1980s and 1990s.
What is Little Manila Avenue?
Little Manila Avenue is the official co-name of the intersection of Roosevelt Avenue and 70th Street in Woodside, unveiled on June 12, 2022, Philippine Independence Day. The City Council approved the name in December 2021 after a community petition inspired by a 2020 mural honouring Filipino healthcare workers who died during the COVID-19 pandemic.
If your family’s story passed through Little Manila, or through any of the neighbourhoods Filipinos have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a nursing college in Manila to a walk-up off Roosevelt Avenue, to wherever you are now.