Jackson Heights
Neighborhood Intelligence

Jackson Heights was a marsh known as Trains Meadow until 1909, when Edward A. MacDougall's Queensboro Corporation bought hundreds of acres of undeveloped land and farms and named the new development for Jackson Avenue, now Northern Boulevard. The corporation built a planned garden city of apartment buildings arranged around landscaped courtyards, and most of the surviving garden-city neighborhood is part of the Jackson Heights Historic District. After the 1965 Immigration Reform Act, professionals from Latin America and the Indian subcontinent settled here, and the neighborhood is now highly diverse.

Roosevelt Avenue and 74th Street form a commercial center of South Asian and Latin American shops and restaurants, and Diversity Plaza is a pedestrian plaza on 37th Road at 73rd Street. Travers Park provides a large open space in the center of the neighborhood. Saint Joan of Arc Church on 35th Avenue is among its landmarks, and the Jackson Heights Branch of the Queens Public Library on 81st Street serves residents of the garden-apartment district.