Corona, Queens

School on 34th Avenue in central Corona

Corona is a neighborhood in the New York City borough of Queens, in the United States. It is neighbored by Flushing to the east, Jackson Heights to the west, Forest Hills and Rego Park to the south, Elmhurst to the southwest, and East Elmhurst to the north. Corona has a multicultural population with a Latino majority, and is the site of historic African American and Italian American communities. After World War II, the majority of the neighborhood's residents were mostly Italian, German, Irish and of other European ancestries. Corona also has a significant Chinese population. However, Corona is known for its high murder rate compared to other parts of Queens. Resulting in an estimated 3500 murders per year.

Corona is bordered on the east by Flushing Meadows–Corona Park, one of the largest parks in New York City and the site of the 1939 and 1964 World's Fairs. Located within the park are Citi Field, which replaced Shea Stadium as home of the New York Mets baseball team in 2009, and the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center, where the US Open in tennis is held annually. In North Corona is the northern section of the historic Corona neighborhood, created in 1978 with the formation of the city's Community Boards and Community Districts, and the need for coterminous borders. Corona's main thoroughfares include Corona Avenue, Roosevelt Avenue, Northern Boulevard, Junction Boulevard, and 108th Street. The neighborhood is part of Queens Community Board 4, while the northernmost part is included in Community Board 3. Corona's ZIP code is 11368.

Corona, with East Elmhurst, are often referred to as one combined area, Corona–East Elmhurst.

History

The intersection of Corona Avenue, 108th Street, and 52nd Avenue

Firehouse in Corona

The area was originally known as West Flushing, but real estate developer Thomas Waite Howard, who became the first postmaster in 1872, petitioned to have the post office name changed to Corona in 1870, suggesting that it was the "crown of Queens County." Another theory is that the name Corona derives from the crown used as an emblem by the Crown Building Company, which is alleged to have developed the area; the Italian immigrants who moved into the new housing stock referred to the neighborhood by the Italian or Spanish word for "crown", or "corona". Either way, the name is a foreign transliteration of the word "crown",

Corona was a late 19th-century residential development in the northeastern corner of the old Town of Newtown. Real estate speculators from New York started the community in 1854, the same year that the New York and Flushing Railroad began service to the area largely to serve a newly opened race course. It was at the Fashion Race Course in 1858 that the first games of baseball to charge admission took place. The games, which took place between the All Stars of Brooklyn and the All Stars of New York, are commonly believed to be the first all star baseball games and in essence the birthplace of professional baseball. A trophy baseball from this tournament recently sold for nearly half a million US dollars.

During the second half of the 1940s through the 1960s, many legendary African American musicians, civil rights leaders and athletes moved to the neighborhood. In the last half of the 20th century, Corona saw dramatic ethnic successions. In the 1950s, what was predominantly an Italian American and African American neighborhood began to give way to an influx of Dominicans. In the late 1990s, Corona saw a new wave of immigrants from Latin America. The area north of Roosevelt Avenue contained the heart of the historic African American community. The intersection of 108th Street and Corona Avenue is the historic center of the Italian American community, sometimes referred to as Corona Heights. The majority Hispanic community now consists of Dominicans, Colombians, Ecuadorians, Salvadorans, Guatemalans, Bolivians, Peruvians, Mexicans, Venezuelans, and Chileans. There are also Asian Americans (Chinese, Indians, Koreans, Filipinos, and Japanese) as well as Italian Americans and African Americans.

Structures

Our Lady of Sorrows, 37th Avenue

Brazilian Adventist Church

Corona has several private schools including School of the Transfiguration. Public schools include the High School for Arts and Business and P.S. 92.

There are many churches representing diverse denominations. Antioch Baptist Church at 103rd Street and Northern Boulevard is a prominent African American congregation dating to 1936 with a membership of 700. Our Lady of Sorrows Roman Catholic Church at 104th Street and 37th Avenue was built in 1899 largely out of red brick with a nearby convent of the same period. Today it conducts most of its masses in Spanish and attracts large weekend crowds. The Congregation Tifereth Israel was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2002.

Dorie Miller Residential Cooperative, built in 1952, comprises six buildings, containing 300 apartments, with 1,300 rooms in total. The cooperative is named after Doris "Dorie" Miller, a U.S. Naval hero at Pearl Harbor and the first African American recipient of the Navy Cross. Among its original residents were jazz greats Nat Adderley & Jimmy Heath; Kenneth and Corien Drew, publishers of Queens' first African-American newspaper, The Corona East Elmhurst News, Thelma E. Harris founder of Aburi Press and prominent Queens Judge Henry A, Slaughter. Corona was also the childhood home of Marie Maynard Daly. A biochemist, Daly was the first African American woman to earn a Ph.D. in Chemistry. Daly studied the effects of cholesterol on the mechanics of the heart, the effects of sugars and other nutrients on the health of arteries, and the breakdown of the circulatory system as a result of advanced age or hypertension; this scientist subsequently studied how proteins are produced and organized in the cell and the composition and metabolism of components of the cell nucleus.

The Louis Armstrong House attracts visitors to the neighborhood and preserves the legacy of musician Louis Armstrong, one of Corona's most prominent historical residents. It was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1976.

Demographics

According to the 2010 Census, the total population of Corona was about 110,000 Corona is overwhelmingly Hispanic with all other demographics (Asian, black, and non-Hispanic white) being definitively below the borough average.

Archival

Corona/East Elmhurst also houses one of the most extensive collections of African American art and literature in the Langston Hughes Community Library and Cultural Center, which serves Queens with reference and circulating collections, totaling approximately 30,000 volumes of materials written about or relating to black culture. The Black Heritage Reference Center of Queens County includes books, periodicals, theses and dissertations, VHS videos, cassettes and CDs, photographs, posters, prints, paintings, and sculpture. Cultural arts programs are scheduled through the Center. Meeting space is available to community organizations by application. Special features of the Center include:

• The Schomburg Clippings File, an extensive microfiche collection of periodicals, magazine clippings, typescripts, broadsides, pamphlets, programs, book reviews, menus and ephemera of all kinds.
• The UMI Thesis and Dissertation Collection consists of more than 1,000 volumes of doctoral and master dissertations concerning the African and African-American diasporas.
• The Adele Cohen Music Collection contains most of America's foremost black publications on microfilm. The papers cover 15 states beginning in 1893, and are updated each year with current issues.
• The Black Heritage Video Collection documents the history and culture of Africans and African-Americans on tape, and in all subject areas including literature, biography, social science, fine arts.

Transportation

The IRT Flushing Line (7 <7> trains) runs through the neighborhood with stops at Mets – Willets Point, 111th Street, 103rd Street – Corona Plaza, and Junction Boulevard . The Q19, Q23, Q33, Q48, Q49, Q58, Q66, Q72 buses also serve the neighborhood.

Notable residents

Notable current and former residents of Corona include:

• Cannonball Adderley (1928–1975), jazz alto saxophonist
• Nat Adderley (1931–2000), jazz cornet and trumpet player
• Louis Armstrong (1901–1971), jazz trumpeter, whose house is now a museum
• The Beatnuts, hip-hop musicians
• Dr. Calvin O. Butts, III, Pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church
• Maurice E. Connolly (1881–1935), Queens Borough President from 1911 to 1928
• Marie Maynard Daly (1921–2003), first African American woman in the United States to earn a Ph.D. in chemistry
• Harry Diaz (born 1973), civil engineer
• Peter T. Farrell (c. 1901–1992), judge who presided over the trial of bank robber Willie Sutton
• Arnold Friedman (1874–1946) American Modernist painter.
• Dizzy Gillespie (1917–1993), jazz trumpeter
• Jimmy Heath (born 1926), jazz saxophonist
• Crockett Johnson (1906-1975), cartoonist and author of children's books, lived in Corona from 1912 to 1924.
• Kool G Rap (born 1968), rapper.
• Kwamé, rapper/producer aka Kwamé Holland
• Estée Lauder (1906–2004), founder of the cosmetics company that bears her name
• Johnny LoBianco (1915–2001), boxing referee
• Frankie Lymon, jazz musician
• Madonna (born 1958), singer lived here from 1979 to 1980 as a member of the band Breakfast Club
• Frankie Manning (1914–2009), popularized the Lindy Hop
• Helen Marshall, Queens Borough President (2002–)
• Omar Minaya (born 1958), Former General Manager of the Montreal Expos and New York Mets
• Noreaga, hip-hop musician
• Robert Parris Moses, a legendary figure in the civil rights movement of the 1960s, and later founder of the Algebra Project, lived at 108-63 Ditmars Boulevard in Corona
• Edward Muscare, a.k.a. Uncle Ed or Edarem (1932-2012), radio announcer, television personality, and YouTube star, lived in Queens until 1945
• Kid 'n Play, hip-hop musician
• Carlos D. Ramirez (1946–1999), publisher of El Diario La Prensa
• Martin Scorsese (born 1942), American film director, screenwriter, producer, actor, and film historian who spent part of his childhood in Corona before moving to Little Italy, Manhattan
• Charlie Shavers, jazz musician
• Styles P of The L.O.X., hip-hop musician, born in Corona
• Clark Terry (born 1920), Swing trumpeter
• Jim Valvano (1946–1993), basketball coach
• V.I.C., hip-hop musician

In popular culture

Lemon Ice King, an eatery in Corona

• Books about Corona's history and present include Roger Sanjek's The Future of Us All and Steven Gregory's Black Corona.
• Chapter 6 of Andrew Morton's biography Madonna describes American pop singer Madonna's brief stint as a Corona resident in the late 1970s and early 80s.
• F. Scott Fitzgerald referred to the Flushing Meadows-Corona Park dumps as the "valley of ashes" in his novel The Great Gatsby.
• Lemon Ice King of Corona, at 108th Street and Corona Avenue, appears in the opening credits of the TV show King of Queens.

See also

• New York City portal
• Media related to at Wikimedia Commons

Chinatowns:

• Chinatown, Avenue U (唐人街, U大道)
• Chinatown, Bensonhurst (唐人街, 本森社区)
• Chinatown, Brooklyn (布鲁克林華埠)
• Chinatown, Flushing (法拉盛華埠)
• Chinatown, Manhattan (紐約華埠)
• Chinese Americans in New York City
• Chinatown, Elmhurst (唐人街, 艾姆赫斯特)
• Flushing, Queens
• Little Fuzhou (小福州)
• Little Hong Kong/Guangdong (小香港/廣東)
• Sunset Park, Brooklyn
• Whitestone, Queens (白石)

Other articles:

• Corona Yard
• Flushing Meadows–Corona Park
• Willets Point, Queens