The colored powder hangs in the air over Liberty Avenue. Pink, green, yellow, blue, drifting between the elevated A train and the storefronts below, settling on hair and shoulders and the hoods of double-parked cars. From a sari shop near 125th Street, Bollywood plays loud enough to argue with the tassa drums up the block. The smell of pholourie and tamarind chutney rises from a folding table outside Sybil’s. This is Phagwah morning in Richmond Hill, and the largest Guyanese community outside Guyana is celebrating spring the way its grandparents did in Berbice and Demerara.
Richmond Hill, The Place
Richmond Hill sits in south-central Queens, bounded by Forest Park to the north, Atlantic Avenue to the south, Lefferts Boulevard to the east, and the Van Wyck Expressway to the west. The A train rumbles along the elevated Fulton Street line above Liberty Avenue, ending its southern run at Ozone Park-Lefferts Boulevard. The J train threads the BMT Jamaica Line a few blocks north, along Jamaica Avenue.
Below the tracks, the housing stock is famously varied. Queen Anne Victorian “painted ladies” from the 1890s line the leafy side streets near Forest Park. Frame two-families fill the blocks further south. The long commercial spine of Liberty Avenue is where Little Guyana lives.
How Richmond Hill Became Guyanese
Before the Guyanese
Richmond Hill was one of New York’s first planned suburbs. In the late 1860s, a developer named Albon Platt Man bought up the farmland south of Forest Park and divided it into lots aimed at Manhattan families looking for an escape into the country. The Queen Anne houses that still line 87th Avenue and the streets above Jamaica Avenue date from that first wave.
By the early twentieth century the population was mostly German and Irish, with smaller numbers of Italians, Scots, Danes, and English. Triangle Hofbrau, a German restaurant on the avenue, was a neighborhood institution. Grocery shelves carried imported delicacies from Hamburg and Munich. Jacob Riis lived in Richmond Hill. So did Mae West, briefly.
The shift began slowly. After the Second World War, the children of the German and Irish families moved out to Long Island. The 1970s brought a smaller Hispanic wave, mostly Puerto Rican and Dominican, into the southern blocks. By the late 1970s, Liberty Avenue was tired. Storefronts sat empty. Houses sold for less than they had a decade earlier. That dip was what the Guyanese walked into.
The Guyanese Arrive
Guyana gained independence from Britain on May 26, 1966. Within a year, Forbes Burnham had begun consolidating power, and by the early 1970s his government had nationalized the sugar and bauxite industries, restricted imports, banned wheat flour, and made political life narrow and dangerous, especially for the Indo-Guyanese majority who had backed his rival Cheddi Jagan.
The 1965 US Immigration and Nationality Act had just opened the door. Estimates suggest Guyana lost something close to seventy percent of its university-trained professionals in the years between 1962 and 1968 alone. Nurses, teachers, accountants, mechanics. They came to New York because New York was where the visas were, and they came to Richmond Hill because the houses were cheap and the A train ran straight to Manhattan jobs.
The first arrivals settled where they could. Jamaica, Queens. Crown Heights. Flatbush. Some of the Afro-Guyanese community took root in East New York and Canarsie, where they remain. But the Indo-Guyanese, descendants of Indian indentured laborers brought to British Guiana between 1838 and 1917, found something on Liberty Avenue that the other neighborhoods could not give them. They found space to build temples.
Richmond Hill at Its Peak
By the mid-1980s the chain migration was running fast. One sister sponsored another. A father brought his sons. An aunt opened a roti shop and her nephew opened a second one across the street. The Sybil family had arrived in 1976 and opened a bakery on Liberty Avenue, selling pine tarts and cassava pone and Guyanese chicken patties to a clientele that grew larger every month.
The 1990s and 2000s were the boom. Liberty Avenue between Lefferts and Van Wyck became a continuous strip of Indo-Caribbean commerce. Gold jewelry shops with thick chains in the window. Sari boutiques. Music stores selling chutney soca and Indian devotional CDs. Doubles vendors, roti shops, pepper-pot kitchens, fish markets selling hassar and gilbacka flown in via Georgetown. The Phagwah parade, first held in 1989, became an annual fixture. By the 2010s it was the largest Holi celebration outside India.
The 2000 census counted 24,662 people in Richmond Hill who had been born in Guyana. The 2010s pushed those numbers higher. By the time the city was ready to act, the neighborhood had been Little Guyana in fact for a quarter of a century.
In December 2020 the City Council passed the legislation. On May 29, 2021, under a light Saturday rain at the Leo F. Kearns parking lot, Council Member Adrienne Adams unveiled the green-and-white street sign that co-named the intersection of Liberty Avenue and Lefferts Boulevard “Little Guyana Avenue.” A tassa band played. Speeches were given in three languages.
The Change
The Guyanese community in Richmond Hill is not shrinking. It is spreading. Younger families who grew up on 121st Street are now buying houses in Floral Park, in Elmont, in Valley Stream, in Hicksville. The commute back to Liberty Avenue for groceries and the temple is part of the rhythm.
New arrivals are still coming. The flow from Berbice and the East Coast Demerara has not stopped, and Guyana’s recent oil boom has only changed its character, not its volume. Newer Indo-Caribbean groups, including Indo-Trinidadians and small numbers of Surinamese, have layered onto the Guyanese base. The avenue is more crowded than it was twenty years ago, not less.
The Landmarks of Guyanese Richmond Hill
Sybil’s Bakery and Restaurant, 132-17 Liberty Avenue. Founded in 1976, Sybil’s is the oldest Guyanese institution on the strip and the one every taxi driver and every grandmother knows. The triangular corner building serves pepper pot, chicken cook-up rice, Jamaican and Guyanese beef patties, and the pine tarts and cassava pone that make a Guyanese kitchen smell like a Guyanese kitchen. Open on Christmas Day. There is a line on Christmas Day.
Singh’s Roti Shop and Bar, 131-18 Liberty Avenue. The Singh family is Indo-Trinidadian rather than Indo-Guyanese, but the distinction blurs on Liberty Avenue, where the food crosses borders the way the indentureship ships once did. Singh’s opened on Liberty in 1990 and built its reputation on dhalpuri roti folded around goat curry, oxtail, or curried chickpeas. The doubles are the gateway dish. Take them home in a paper bag and try not to eat them in the car.
Shri Lakshmi Narayan Mandir, 128-04 Liberty Avenue. A storefront temple on the avenue itself, easy to walk past on a Saturday afternoon. Inside, the deities are draped in silk and gold leaf, and the priest leads pujas in a Hindi inflected with Bhojpuri and Caribbean English. The mandir is one of more than a dozen Hindu temples that anchor the Indo-Guyanese community across South Richmond Hill, Ozone Park, and Jamaica.
Shri Surya Narayan Mandir. Founded in 1993 just south of Liberty Avenue, this temple is Caribbean-Hindu in the most specific sense: most of its members emigrated from Guyana, and Pandit Ram Hardowar, the senior priest, was born and raised in Crabwood Creek on the Corentyne. He came to New York in 1985. The mandir runs Ramayana readings, weddings, sacred-thread ceremonies, and a calendar of pujas that tracks the lunar Hindu year.
The Phagwah Parade, Liberty Avenue. Held the Sunday closest to Holi, usually in late March, the Phagwah parade is the headline event of the year. It starts near 133rd Street, runs west along Liberty Avenue, turns up 124th Street, and culminates at Phil “Scooter” Rizzuto Park with tassa bands, chutney singers, and clouds of pink and yellow abeer powder. Tens of thousands attend. The 38th annual parade ran in March 2026.
The Indo-Caribbean Alliance, on Liberty Avenue. Founded in 2008, the ICA is the secular counterweight to the temples and mosques. It runs immigration clinics, English classes, art and music programs, voter registration drives, and the oral-history projects that are quietly preserving the indentureship-to-Liberty-Avenue arc before the people who lived it are gone.
The gold and sari corridor, Liberty between Lefferts and Van Wyck. Not a single landmark but a continuous one: thirty blocks of jewelry shops with thick yellow chains in armored cases, bridal sari boutiques where a wedding outfit runs into four figures, music stores, doubles vendors at folding tables, and the elevated A train rattling overhead every five minutes.
Where the Richmond Hill Guyanese Came From
The Indo-Guyanese in Richmond Hill carry two homelands. The closer one is Guyana itself, mostly the coastal sugar belt: Berbice on the eastern coast, particularly the Corentyne and Port Mourant; the East Coast Demerara villages stretching from Georgetown out to Mahaica; the West Bank Demerara plantations like Uitvlugt and Leonora; and Georgetown, the capital, which sent the white-collar professionals.
The further homeland is India, four generations back. Between 1838 and 1917, more than 238,000 indentured laborers were carried from Calcutta and Madras to the sugar estates of British Guiana on more than 500 voyages. The Whitby and the Hesperus, the first two ships, landed on May 5, 1838 with 396 Indians aboard.
They came mostly from eastern Uttar Pradesh and western Bihar, the Bhojpuri-speaking heartland. Smaller numbers came from Awadh, Bengal, and the Tamil and Telugu south. They signed five-year indentures, often misled about what awaited them, and many never returned. The Hindu temples on Liberty Avenue, the Phagwah powder, the Bhojpuri words still salted into Guyanese Creole all reach back to that crossing.
It is a double diaspora, in other words. Two journeys inside one family tree. Indian on the family tree, Guyanese on the passport, American on the lease. The grandmothers in Richmond Hill cook the way their grandmothers cooked in a Berbice village, who cooked the way their grandmothers cooked in a Bihar village before that.
Richmond Hill Today
Liberty Avenue in 2026 is louder, busier, and more Guyanese than it has ever been. The street sign at Lefferts Boulevard now reads “Little Guyana Avenue” in green and white. Mayor Zohran Mamdani walked the 38th Phagwah parade in March. New roti shops keep opening. The bridal sari business is fierce.
Around it, the neighborhood is layering. Mexican and Bangladeshi families are moving into blocks that were Guyanese ten years ago. The Christian Guyanese, mostly Afro-Guyanese, still attend St. Benedict Joseph Labre and the Anglican parishes nearby. The Muslim Guyanese pray at the Muslim Center of Richmond Hill and the Imam Razack center. The Hindus walk to a temple within ten minutes of their door.
The children and grandchildren of the 1970s arrivals are professionals, civil servants, council aides, nurses, accountants, teachers. Some have left for Long Island. Some have stayed. All of them come back for Phagwah, and for Diwali in October, and for the long weekend in late May when the Guyana Independence Day parade winds along the same blocks the Phagwah parade walked two months earlier.
The avenue endures because the people endure. A village in Berbice ended up on a corner in Queens. A grandmother in Crabwood Creek became a grandmother on 130th Street. The journey did not stop in 1976 when Sybil opened her bakery. It is still happening.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Guyanese settle in Richmond Hill?
Guyanese began arriving in Richmond Hill in the 1970s and 1980s, driven out of Guyana by the Forbes Burnham government’s authoritarian turn and pulled to the United States by the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act. They chose Richmond Hill because housing was cheap after the German and Irish families moved to Long Island, the A train ran straight to Manhattan jobs, and chain migration meant each new arrival had family already on the avenue.
Is Richmond Hill still Guyanese today?
Yes. Richmond Hill in 2026 is more Guyanese than it has ever been, and the Liberty Avenue commercial corridor known as Little Guyana is busier than it was a decade ago. Some younger Indo-Guyanese families have moved out to Long Island, but they return to Liberty Avenue for the temple, the groceries, the Phagwah parade, and the bakeries. New arrivals from Berbice and Demerara continue to settle in the neighborhood.
What are the most famous Guyanese landmarks in Richmond Hill?
The anchor landmarks of Little Guyana are Sybil’s Bakery at 132-17 Liberty Avenue, open since 1976; Singh’s Roti Shop at 131-18 Liberty Avenue; the Shri Lakshmi Narayan Mandir and Shri Surya Narayan Mandir temples; the Indo-Caribbean Alliance community center; and the Phagwah parade, which has run every spring since 1989 and is the largest Holi celebration outside India. The co-named “Little Guyana Avenue” street sign at Liberty and Lefferts, unveiled in May 2021, is the official marker.
Where in Guyana did the Richmond Hill Guyanese come from?
The Richmond Hill community is overwhelmingly Indo-Guyanese and comes mostly from the coastal sugar belt of Guyana: the Berbice region (especially the Corentyne and Port Mourant), the East Coast Demerara villages, the West Bank Demerara plantations, and Georgetown. Their further ancestry traces to eastern Uttar Pradesh and western Bihar in India, the regions that supplied most of the 238,000 indentured laborers carried to British Guiana between 1838 and 1917.
When did Guyanese first arrive in Richmond Hill?
Guyanese began arriving in New York City in significant numbers in the late 1960s after the 1965 Immigration Act opened the door and Guyana’s 1966 independence triggered political instability under Forbes Burnham. The first wave settled in Jamaica, Queens, and parts of Brooklyn. The real shift into Richmond Hill came in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the German and Irish families were leaving and Indo-Guyanese families began buying their houses and opening businesses on Liberty Avenue.
If your family’s story passed through Richmond Hill, or through Berbice or Demerara or a Bihar village four generations before that, Atlas of Home can help you trace it. From the indentureship ships to the elevated train, from a sugar estate to a corner on Liberty Avenue, to wherever you are now.