Filming in Flushing, Queens

Main Street meets Roosevelt Avenue in the middle of downtown Flushing, and the crossing is the third busiest in New York after Times Square and Herald Square. The 7 train ends a few steps away. Buses from across Queens turn at the corner. The crowd waiting at the lights is deep at most hours.

The buildings behind the crowd are mostly two and three storeys, and their fronts are covered in signs. Chinese and Korean lettering runs down the brick vertically and sticks out over the sidewalk on brackets. Glass towers have gone up behind them since the 2000s. The Long Island Rail Road crosses Main Street on a bridge south of Roosevelt Avenue, and fruit sellers work the sidewalk underneath it.

Taiwanese families settled here in the 1970s, the first Mandarin speaking wave to reach New York. Fuzhounese and Wenzhounese immigrants came in the 1990s and 2000s. There is a large Korean population as well.

Kissena Boulevard runs southeast from Main Street. The shops along it are South Asian and halal rather than Chinese, with tall brick towers behind them.

Older Flushing is still standing in pieces. The Old Quaker Meeting House on Northern Boulevard was built in 1694. The John Bowne House on Bowne Street dates from about 1661. Kingsland Homestead, an eighteenth century house, stands behind the apartment blocks in Weeping Beech Park.