A story about the networks of mutual aid and collective care that sustain a working-class neighborhood in Queens, New York.
By Mae Francke
Running eastward all the way from west Manhattan in the newly developed Hudson Yards, the Line 7 subway crosses all of northwest Queens and ends in Flushing’s Main Street, connecting one of the richest areas of New York City with some of the poorest. Starting at 34 St-Hudson Yards at the northern end of the popular High Line, the 7 continues on to Times Square and Grand Central to then cross the tunnel under the East River and travel across Queens, passing by Long Island City, Sunnyside, Woodside, Jackson Heights, Corona and Elmhurst, and finally Flushing. The 7 train, famously nicknamed the "International Express" by the City Planning Commission, was publicized as an embodiment of the immigrant experience and cross-cultural encounters. It is towards the end of this line, just before the Mets-Willets station that sits the 103rd St - Corona Plaza station. Along with 111th Street, Junction Boulevard, and 90th Street, these stations trace the northern border of Corona, where the elevated tracks over Roosevelt Avenue rumble over two-story houses and street vendor carts, and where a neighborhood of majority immigrant and working-class families live.
Corona has a long history of community organizing and mutual aid, with a long-established and robust network of local organizations and well-developed grassroots social networks that have also situated Corona as a neighborhood composed of resilient communities where mutual aid and solidarity networks are life-sustaining for its residents and communities. They have historically occurred along racial and class struggles, mainly driven by struggles for the rights of immigrant communities.
These networks have also managed to articulate themselves in specific circumstances and advocate for more significant issues: in 2017 they successfully fought off attempts at an expansion of the Roosevelt Avenue Business Improvement District (BID) that would have effectively privatized more public spaces in the neighborhood, and from 2012 to 2018 they collaborated in a massive project with the Department of Transportation (DOT) and the Queen’s Museum that resulted in the reconstruction of the space in between 103rd and Roosevelt Avenue into what is now Corona Plaza. These events illustrate a story of Corona, one of a neighborhood plagued by systemic oppression and historical disinvestment, but also one of cooperation and resistance, where mutual aid is not only present but fundamental for the survival and formation of resilient communities in the neighborhood.
This project aims to visualize and spatialize these networks of solidarity and mutual aid in Corona, and the fundamental roles local actors play in establishing and maintaining them.
Feminist geographers have long established the solidarity economy as a distinct spatial subject, one that creates new geographies of cooperation, commoning, and collective care. This project maps these networks and shows them not as isolated islands scattered across the city, but as complex and expanding rhizomatic structures where encounters and exchanges occur, and where many things flow —ideas, resources, knowledge, and people. Furthermore, visualising them not only shows the spatial relationship between each other but also with the existing structural inequalities occurring in the city, and how they are distributed.
In order to explore mutual aid and solidarity in Corona (and the city), an understanding of the city and its inequalities as they present in space must first be examined.
Along with Elmhurst and Jackson Heights, Corona has the city’s densest concentration of overcrowded households, a process brought about by the reduction in public housing investment and rising property values. Here the average household size is 3.59, a big difference from the borough average of 2.8 and the city average of 2.55. This also only accounts for its documented population, and housing units in Corona are well known by the neighbors to commonly house over 6 people per unit, where 78.5% of the total population are renters and do not own their homes, a rate higher than the city average of 60%. Of this population, 56% are rent-burdened, meaning that more than 30% of the household income goes toward paying rent.
Corona is also a neighborhood of immigrants, most of them Hispanic: 61% of its residents are foreign-born, a number that almost doubles the city-wide average of 35.4%. And of the foreign-born population, over 40% are not citizens, almost triple the city average of 14.5%. Looking at this data in space shows a clear pattern, with both the foreign-born and noncitizen population being concentrated at higher rates in Sunset Park and South Brooklyn, Corona and Flushing in Queens, Washington Heights and Inwood in Upper Manhattan, and the Bronx.