The Quiet Rise of Corona: From Queens’ Greatest Italian Neighborhood to Latino Capital

Corona, Queens was once the proudest Italian neighborhood in New York City. Spaghetti Park, the Lemon Ice King, Leo’s Latticini, bocce courts lit up on summer nights, families who spoke Calabrese and Sicilian before they spoke English. Louis Armstrong chose to live here for twenty-eight years. Dizzy Gillespie moved in around the corner. It was a neighborhood where everybody knew everybody, and your summer tasted like lemon ice from a window on 108th Street.

Then, decade by decade, wave by wave, Corona changed. Dominican families arrived in the nineteen sixties. Colombians followed in the seventies and eighties. When Ecuador’s economy collapsed in the late nineties, hundreds of thousands of Ecuadorians came to this same stretch of the seven train, looking for the same thing the Italians had found eighty years earlier: cheap rent, a relative who was already there, and a subway that reached Times Square in thirty minutes.

This is the story of how one neighborhood’s crown got passed from one community to the next, told through two gathering places one block apart.

Sources and further reading:
Wikipedia — Corona, Queens (neighborhood history, founding, demographics, landmarks)
Wikipedia — Anthony Federici (Park Side Restaurant background)
CityNeighborhoods.NYC — Corona neighborhood profile (demographics, commercial corridors, business data)
6tocelebrate.org — Corona-East Elmhurst community profile (jazz community, Great Migration history, Dorie Miller Cooperative)
Untapped New York — Top 10 Secrets of Corona, Queens (Lemon Ice King history, Fashion Race Course baseball games, neighborhood trivia)
City Lore — William F. Moore Park / Spaghetti Park (bocce courts, park history, Italian community gathering)
Queens Chronicle — Queens Roots Jazz Greats (Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, jazz musicians in Corona and East Elmhurst)
Queens Chronicle — Mama’s of Corona co-owner obituary (Leo’s Latticini history, DeBenedittis family, PS 16 naming)
The Neighborhoods (Substack) — East Elmhurst history (Malcolm X, Ella Fitzgerald, neighborhood context)
CUNY Center for Latin American, Caribbean and Latino Studies (CLACLS) — Latino demographic data for Queens Community District 3 (national-origin breakdowns, population shifts nineteen ninety to two thousand six)
Milagros Ricourt and Ruby Danta — Hispanas de Queens (nineteen ninety Corona Latino national-origin data, Dominican forty-four percent figure)
Roger Sanjek — The Future of Us All: Race and Neighborhood Politics in New York City (Elmhurst-Corona demographic transition data, census percentages)
Steven Gregory — Black Corona (jazz enclave, middle-class community, political activism north of Roosevelt Avenue)
New York Times — Pete Wells, The 100 Best Restaurants in New York City, April twenty twenty-three (Corona Plaza vendors ranked forty-eighth, Tacos El Borrego ranked thirtieth)
Various news sources — Corona Plaza vendor crackdown July twenty twenty-three, La Asociación de Vendedores Ambulantes, December twenty twenty-three reopening under Queens Economic Development Corporation permitting
Louis Armstrong House Museum — National Historic Landmark designation, Louis Armstrong Center opening twenty twenty-three, Corona Collection exhibit October twenty twenty-three

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