Richmond Hillਰਿਚਮੰਡ ਹਿੱਲ

Richmond Hill is a residential and commercial neighbourhood in the southwestern part of Queens, New York City, known across the United States as Little Punjab for its large Punjabi, mostly Sikh, population. It holds the largest Sikh population of any neighbourhood in New York City, and its main Punjabi streets carry official city co-names: Punjab Avenue, Gurdwara Street and Guru Nanak Way.

Where is Richmond Hill, and why do Punjabis live there?

Richmond Hill sits between Kew Gardens and Forest Park to the north, Jamaica to the east, South Ozone Park to the south, and Woodhaven and Ozone Park to the west. The part south of Atlantic Avenue is called South Richmond Hill. Its commercial streets are Jamaica Avenue, Atlantic Avenue and Liberty Avenue, and its ZIP codes are 11418 and 11419. The 2010 census counted 62,982 people in the neighbourhood.

The community was laid out in 1868, when the lawyer Albon Platt Man bought some 400 acres of farms and hired the landscape architect Edward Richmond to plan its streets. It was incorporated as an independent village in 1894 and became part of New York City in 1898, when Queens was consolidated into the city.

Punjabis live here because the neighbourhood gave newcomers from Punjab what they needed most: affordable houses near work in the city, and a gurdwara to gather around. South Asians arrived in numbers after the United States reformed its immigration laws in the 1960s, and Punjabi Sikh immigration grew sharply in the 1980s. Families settled close to the temples, shops followed, and the area became the East Coast counterpart to California's older Punjabi settlements. Richmond Hill is listed under Punjabi places in the United States.

What do the numbers say?

The United States census does not ask about religion, so there is no official Sikh count for Richmond Hill, and this page does not invent one. What the American Community Survey does count is Punjabi ancestry and language. In the 2017 to 2021 ACS, the Queens Community District 9 area, Richmond Hill and Woodhaven, counted 7,705 Punjabi Americans, 5.39 per cent of its population, one of the largest such district totals in the United States.

The wider figures show the same pattern. New York City counted 18,187 Punjabi Americans in the same ACS period, 16,139 of them in Queens alone, and the New York metropolitan area counted 49,005. Richmond Hill, with the largest Sikh population in the city, is where that Queens concentration is densest and most visible.

Little Punjab and Little Guyana

Richmond Hill carries two nicknames side by side. South Richmond Hill is known as Little Guyana for its large Indo-Caribbean population, mostly Indo-Guyanese, and a portion of Liberty Avenue has been officially renamed for it. The Punjabi side of the neighbourhood is centred on 101st Avenue, which has evolved into Little Punjab, also called Punjab Avenue.

The city has made those names official. In 2020 the stretch of 101st Avenue between 111th and 123rd streets was co-named Punjab Avenue, and a stretch of 97th Avenue near the temple became Gurdwara Street. In 2023 a section of 118th Street was co-named Guru Nanak Way, honouring the founder of Sikhism. Shop signs across the area appear in English and in Punjabi written in the Gurmukhi script.

The Sikh Cultural Society and the gurdwaras

The heart of Little Punjab is the Sikh Cultural Society temple in South Richmond Hill. The society has organisational roots in 1954, and its gurdwara opened in 1972, which makes it one of the oldest gurdwaras on the East Coast and, in the words of community accounts, the first gurdwara in the New York metropolitan area. The original building was destroyed by fire in 2002, and the present temple on the site was built in 2004.

A second major gurdwara, the Baba Makhan Shah Lubana Sikh Center, was founded in the late 1990s a few blocks away. Community members describe the two temples drawing more than a thousand visitors a day between them. On Sundays the Sikh Cultural Society fills for prayer and langar, the free communal meal served to everyone who comes, whatever their faith.

Shops, food and the Sikh Day Parade

Around the temples, Little Punjab runs on Punjabi businesses: restaurants such as Punjabi Dhaba and Punjabi Kabab House, grocery stores such as Apna Bazaar, and shops selling food, clothing and jewellery from home. The annual Sikh Day Parade brings the community out onto the streets each year, one of the public celebrations that mark the neighbourhood's calendar alongside the Phagwah festivities of its Indo-Caribbean neighbours.

Today Richmond Hill is a settled, homeowning Punjabi neighbourhood inside the largest city in the United States: grandparents who arrived in the 1980s, children born in Queens, and street signs that read Punjab Avenue in English and Gurmukhi. For the West Coast's Punjabi centre in the Pacific Northwest, see Seattle, and for the full map, Punjabi places in the United States.