Walk up the narrow staircase above the cell phone shops at 37-65 74th Street on a winter afternoon and you can smell the broth before you see the room. Phayul, the Tibetan word for homeland, sits on the second floor of a brick walk-up in Jackson Heights, Queens.
Down on the street the 7 train rumbles overhead, prayer flags flutter from third-floor windows, and somewhere on Roosevelt Avenue a butter-tea kettle is on. The neighborhood holds the largest concentration of Tibetans anywhere in the United States, and for many of the people who live here, this stretch of Queens is the closest thing to Lhasa they will ever see.
They call it Phayul. Not on any subway map, not on any street sign. But every Losar, every March 10, every birthday of the Dalai Lama, this is where Tibet has gathered in America.
Jackson Heights, The Place
Jackson Heights sits in northwestern Queens, roughly bounded by Northern Boulevard, Junction Boulevard, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, and Roosevelt Avenue. The 7 train, the E, F, M, and R lines all converge at the 74th Street-Roosevelt Avenue station, which is one of the busiest transit hubs in the borough.
The neighborhood is famously layered. The 74th Street commercial strip south of Roosevelt is “Little India”. Roosevelt Avenue itself, running east-west under the elevated 7 line, mixes Colombian, Mexican, Ecuadorian, Bangladeshi, and Nepali storefronts. A few blocks north and east, slipping into adjacent Elmhurst and Woodside, is where Tibetan New York actually lives: prayer-wheel painted on a bodega window, a momo counter behind a cell phone shop, a Buddhist temple in a former Lutheran church.
The housing is mostly six-story prewar co-op apartment buildings, brick garden complexes, and walk-ups above commercial ground floors. The New York Times has called Jackson Heights the most culturally diverse neighborhood on earth. About sixty percent of its 175,000 residents are foreign born and more than 160 languages are spoken inside its boundaries.
How Jackson Heights Became Tibetan
Before the Tibetans
Jackson Heights was farmland and marsh until 1909, when the Queensboro Corporation bought 325 acres and started one of America’s first planned garden-apartment developments. The original residents were middle-class white Protestants, with the developer running explicitly discriminatory ad campaigns through the 1930s.
That covenant collapsed after the Second World War. By the 1960s Jackson Heights was Irish, Italian, Greek, and Jewish, with a growing Latin American population. The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act opened the door wider, and through the 1970s and 1980s Colombians, Ecuadorians, Dominicans, and South Asians began to settle along Roosevelt Avenue and 74th Street.
By 1986, Indian businesses had clustered so densely along 74th Street that the City unofficially recognized the strip as “Little India”. That commercial spine, already a magnet for new South Asian arrivals, was about to take on a second life.
The Tibetans Arrive
The story of Tibetan New York starts, like every Tibetan diaspora story, in March 1959. The 14th Dalai Lama fled Lhasa after the failed uprising against Chinese rule and crossed the Himalayas into India. Roughly 80,000 Tibetans followed him over the next two years, settling in formal refugee camps in Dharamshala, Bylakuppe, Mundgod, Kathmandu, and Boudhanath.
For thirty years, almost no Tibetans came to the United States. Then in 1990, Section 134 of the Immigration Act, known as the Tibetan Immigration Act, set aside 1,000 special immigrant visas for Tibetans living in India and Nepal. It was a tiny number by US standards. For the Tibetan exile community it was the first legal pathway to America.
The first wave landed in 1992. The Tibetan U.S. Resettlement Project, organized in 1989, distributed visa holders across roughly twenty “cluster sites” so the small population would not be isolated. New York, Minnesota, Massachusetts, and the San Francisco Bay Area got the largest allocations. The New York cluster pointed straight at Queens.
The pull was practical. Cheap rent, an existing South Asian commercial corridor where momo flour and butter tea ingredients were easy to find, a 7 train that fed jobs in Manhattan. Most of the 1992 arrivals had grown up in Indian refugee settlements and spoke Hindi alongside Tibetan, which made the Indian-run businesses of 74th Street feel like a half-step from home.
Jackson Heights at Its Peak
Through the 1990s and 2000s, the Tibetan presence in Jackson Heights moved from invisible to anchor. The 1,000 original visa holders sponsored spouses and children. Asylum seekers came directly from Tibet through the 1990s and after the 2008 protests in Lhasa. Refugees from the Indian and Nepali settlements joined siblings already in Queens.
By 2010 community estimates put the New York metro Tibetan population at around 9,000. Today, depending on whose count you trust, it sits between 9,000 and 15,000, with the densest concentration in Jackson Heights and the adjacent neighborhoods of Elmhurst, Woodside, and Sunnyside. New York has surpassed every other US city, including Minneapolis-St. Paul, as the largest Tibetan settlement outside the Himalayas.
What did daily life look like at the peak? It looked like a momo. Twenty or more Himalayan kitchens were operating within a six-block radius of 74th Street and 37th Avenue by the mid-2010s. The annual Momo Crawl, started in 2013, drew thousands every fall to vote on the best dumplings in the corridor.
It looked like a face. Older monks in maroon robes waiting for the bus at 74th Street. Teenagers in Queens College sweatshirts speaking Tibetan into their phones. Aunties carrying bags of tsampa flour out of a counter that had no signage in English.
And it looked like a flag. Every March 10, on the anniversary of the 1959 uprising, the snow lion flag is carried through Manhattan from the United Nations to the Chinese Consulate, with the Jackson Heights community at the head of the march.
The Change
Two pressures are reshaping Tibetan Jackson Heights right now. The first is rent. The 74th Street and 37th Avenue corridor has gentrified hard since Phayul opened upstairs around 2003, and Tibetan families have steadily pushed eastward into Elmhurst and northward into Woodside, where rents are still within reach.
The second is the pipeline itself. The Tibetan refugee population in India and Nepal has been shrinking since the mid-2000s. The chain migration that built Jackson Heights through the 1990s and 2000s has thinned. The community here is now mostly American-raised, with a fast-growing second generation in CUNY classrooms and city jobs.
The cultural anchor still holds. Phayul, Lhasa Fast Food, Himalayan Yak, and the United Sherpa Association temple are still open. But the Tibetan footprint of Queens is wider and shallower than it was a decade ago, and the conversation inside the community is increasingly about what a second-generation, American-born Tibetan identity still owes to Tibet.
The Landmarks of Tibetan Jackson Heights
Phayul Restaurant, 37-65 74th Street. The name means “homeland”. Phayul opened upstairs above the 74th Street cell phone shops in the early 2000s and became the cultural shorthand for the entire corridor. The Michelin Guide listed it. It is the closest thing the Jackson Heights Tibetan world has to a parish hall.
Lhasa Fast Food, hidden behind a cell phone counter at 37-50 74th Street and now at 76-03 37th Avenue. Anthony Bourdain put Lhasa on the map in 2014 when he filmed it for “Parts Unknown”. Walk into what looks like a phone-card shop, follow a narrow corridor past the back of the counter, and you arrive in a fourteen-seat room serving hand-pulled noodles, beef and chive momos, and thukpa soup.
Himalayan Yak, 72-20 Roosevelt Avenue. Open since 2004, named the Village Voice’s Best Tibetan Restaurant in 2008, and the place Tibetan New Yorkers take their non-Tibetan friends. The yak meat genuinely comes from a Vermont farm. The room is one of the few in the neighborhood that fits a full family party for Losar.
United Sherpa Association, 41-01 75th Street, Elmhurst. Just over the Jackson Heights border, this Buddhist temple occupies a former Lutheran church for the deaf. It was founded in 1996 to anchor New York’s roughly 10,000-strong Sherpa community, who share Tibetan Buddhist practice with the wider Tibetan population. Inside, hand-painted murals cover the old church walls. It is the most visited Himalayan religious site in the five boroughs.
The Mount Everest Way co-naming, Mount Everest Way at 74th Street and 41st Avenue. In 2019, the City of New York co-named the corner in honor of the neighborhood’s Nepali and Sherpa community. It is the first official Himalayan place name on the New York City street grid.
The Momo Crawl, every fall along 74th Street and 37th Avenue. Founded in 2013 by Jeff Orlick, the crawl turns the Tibetan and Nepali corridor into a walking dumpling festival. Twenty to twenty-five Himalayan kitchens compete, several thousand attendees vote, and the People’s Momo trophy goes back to one restaurant for the year.
Tibet House US, 22 West 15th Street, Manhattan. Strictly speaking it is in Chelsea, not Queens, but no portrait of Tibetan New York is complete without it. Founded in 1987 at the personal request of the 14th Dalai Lama, Tibet House is the cultural center of the diaspora in the city. Its annual benefit concert at Carnegie Hall, hosted for decades by Philip Glass, is the largest Tibetan-cause fundraiser in the United States.
Where the Jackson Heights Tibetans Came From
The answer is honest and complicated. Historically, the Tibetan plateau divides into three regions: U-Tsang in the center, including Lhasa and the cultural heartland; Kham in the east; and Amdo in the northeast, the birthplace of the present Dalai Lama. Tibetan New Yorkers trace ancestry to all three.
But most of the Jackson Heights community did not come directly from those regions. They came from the Tibetan refugee settlements built after 1959 across India and Nepal: Dharamshala in Himachal Pradesh, where the Dalai Lama is based; Bylakuppe and Mundgod in Karnataka; Majnu-ka-Tilla in Delhi; the Boudhanath stupa neighborhood in Kathmandu. A 2009 census recorded around 94,000 Tibetans in India and 13,500 in Nepal. Jackson Heights pulled from all of them.
A smaller, growing share are direct arrivals from inside the Tibet Autonomous Region or from Kham and Amdo, often through the asylum system after the 2008 Lhasa protests. They speak the Lhasa dialect natively. Their parents are still inside China. For them Jackson Heights is the first place outside Tibet that has more than one Tibetan grocery store.
The shared identity is religious as much as regional. Tibetan Buddhism, in its Gelug, Nyingma, Kagyu, and Sakya schools, runs through almost every Jackson Heights household, whether the family came through Dharamshala in 1992 or Kathmandu in 2009.
Jackson Heights Today
The Tibetan corridor is still alive, and it is also moving. Walk 74th Street on a Saturday in 2026 and you will still hear Tibetan spoken over momos at Phayul, still see prayer-flag bunting on third-floor balconies, still find butter tea on every Himalayan menu. The annual Losar festival, falling in February or March on the lunar calendar, still fills the Queens community halls and the Yarlung Center in Long Island City.
But the new center of gravity has shifted east. The New York Tibetan Service Center now operates out of 76-09 Queens Boulevard in Elmhurst. Tibetan families have spread into Woodside, Sunnyside, parts of Bergen County in New Jersey, and the Hudson Valley. The Office of Tibet, which represented the Dalai Lama in North America from a Manhattan brownstone for fifty years, moved its formal headquarters to Washington, D.C. in 2014.
What remains in Jackson Heights itself is the commercial and emotional anchor. The momo crawl, the Losar gatherings, the March 10 march, the Dalai Lama’s birthday picnic in July: these still pull every Tibetan in metropolitan New York back to the same six blocks. The neighborhood is no longer the only place Tibetans live in the city. It is still the only place where Tibetans gather.
For a community whose homeland exists mostly in memory, that gathering point may matter more than where anyone sleeps. Phayul, after all, just means home.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Tibetans settle in Jackson Heights?
Tibetans settled in Jackson Heights because the 1990 Tibetan Immigration Act directed the first 1,000 US visa holders to a small set of “cluster sites” including New York City, and Queens offered cheap rents, easy transit on the 7 train, and an existing South Asian commercial corridor where Tibetan refugees who had grown up in India felt immediately familiar. Family reunification through the 1990s and 2000s deepened the concentration on and around 74th Street and 37th Avenue.
Is Jackson Heights still Tibetan today?
Yes, although the community has spread eastward into Elmhurst, Woodside, and Sunnyside as rents have risen. Jackson Heights remains the cultural anchor of Tibetan New York, with active restaurants, community organizations, and annual gatherings, but a growing share of the roughly 9,000 to 15,000 Tibetans in metropolitan New York now live in the adjacent neighborhoods rather than Jackson Heights proper.
What are the most famous Tibetan landmarks in Jackson Heights?
The best known are Phayul Restaurant at 37-65 74th Street, Lhasa Fast Food (originally hidden behind a cell phone shop at 37-50 74th Street, now at 76-03 37th Avenue), and Himalayan Yak at 72-20 Roosevelt Avenue. The United Sherpa Association Buddhist temple at 41-01 75th Street in adjacent Elmhurst, the Mount Everest Way street co-naming at 74th Street and 41st Avenue, and the annual Momo Crawl along the corridor round out the list.
Where in Tibet did the Jackson Heights Tibetans come from?
Most Jackson Heights Tibetans did not come directly from Tibet. They came from the Tibetan refugee settlements built across India and Nepal after the 1959 exile, including Dharamshala, Bylakuppe, Mundgod, Majnu-ka-Tilla in Delhi, and Boudhanath in Kathmandu. Family roots trace back to all three traditional regions of the Tibetan plateau: U-Tsang in central Tibet around Lhasa, Kham in the east, and Amdo in the northeast.
When did Tibetans first arrive in Jackson Heights?
A small number of Tibetan students and exiles lived in New York from the 1960s onward, but the community as it exists today began with the Tibetan Immigration Act of 1990, which set aside 1,000 special immigrant visas for Tibetans living in India and Nepal. The first major wave of arrivals reached Queens in 1992, and chain migration through family reunification built the Jackson Heights corridor over the following two decades.
If your family’s story passed through Jackson Heights, or any of the places the Tibetan exile made home, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From the refugee settlements of Dharamshala and Boudhanath, to Phayul on 74th Street, to wherever you are now.
(image: Wikimedia Commons)