On a humid Sunday night in July, waiters in black vests and white shirts whipped around the counter, balancing pancakes and onion rings. It was the final day for the Neptune Diner in Astoria, Queens. Over the past week, patrons from across the region came to say good-bye over one last cup of Greek lemon chicken soup or a turkey triple-decker. The diner’s iconic scalloped booths, arched windows, and glass cake cases will soon give way to 278 residential units and retail space.
Neptune was more than a diner; it was an institution, where generations of Astorians met their spouses, marked milestones, and stumbled in for some disco fries after a long night of dancing. Local news covered the closing like the passing of a beloved family member. Not even the god of the sea could withstand the wave of change.
Ask longtime Astorians today to describe their hometown, and you’re likely to hear a lament: “It’s not like it used to be.” The loss of establishments like Neptune in recent years has deepened the sense that today’s Astoria bears only a superficial resemblance to the place where generations formed attachments to what they called home.
I’ve lived in Astoria my whole life. My home has shaped my views on policy, philosophy, and living. I’m an urbanist because I’m an Astorian. As unusual as it may seem in liberal New York, I’m also a conservative in the spirit of Edmund Burke because I’m an Astorian. I’ve witnessed Astoria’s changes firsthand. But unlike many of my neighbors, I see them as part of an evolution of urban society that, when properly managed, links the inheritance of the past with a future of promise for those yet to be born. Astoria, as I’ve known it, has gotten that evolution just about right.
Growing up in Astoria in the 1990s and 2000s, I experienced the richness of urban life. All around me were infrastructure and institutions, public and private, into which I was born—world-class museums, local newspapers, the police, the subway, Astoria Park, my parish of St. Francis of Assisi and its parochial school, and so much more. These gifts were an inheritance from my civic forebears. I was born not into a city but a civilization, forged by a multitude whom I would never know, but with whom I was linked in the great chain of urban society.
Take William Steinway, who in the 1870s brought Steinway & Sons to Astoria, where its world-famous pianos have been made ever since. By the late nineteenth century, he had constructed much of the housing in the northernmost part of town, then still largely undeveloped. Steinway hoped to keep his workers—mostly fellow German, Czech, and Irish immigrants—away from “the machinations of the anarchists and socialists,” and thus he assembled a company town for them: Steinway Village. It featured brick homes, roads, streetcars, schools, churches, a library, and even a beach and an amusement park. North Beach, also known as the Bowery Beach amusement park, provided diversion for workers from 1886 until 1921. The land later became the site of LaGuardia Airport. Many of Steinway’s houses still stand today, as does the Steinway Reformed Church that he helped build in 1890.
No friend of organized labor, Steinway undoubtedly operated in a spirit of enlightened self-interest. But he understood the value of community, reinvesting his firm’s profits not only in his factory but also in the place that would bear his name. Steinway couldn’t have foreseen what would become of his company or its village over the decades. His mansion remains, still perched on its hill near the piano factory, now surrounded by commercial and industrial activity. His practical and durable two-story brick houses would be adapted and reused over time, accommodating changing demographics and circumstances. That’s the story of urban life.
Modern Astoria, the town that today’s residents know, began with the subway system. The elevated Astoria Line was completed in 1917, following Manhattan borough president George McAneny’s negotiation and award of the seminal Dual Contracts subway-system expansion. The city-owned Independent Subway System’s launch of the Queens Boulevard Line in the mid-1930s added more trains along the southern part of Astoria, opening options for Manhattan workers to live only 20 minutes away. Construction of the Grand Central Parkway during the 1930s bisected Astoria: the northern part (mine), containing Steinway’s village, anchored by Ditmars Boulevard; and the southern part, closer to Manhattan, with its main thoroughfares of Grand Avenue (now 30th Avenue), 31st Avenue, and Broadway.
Housing construction followed along these transit corridors in the 1920s through the 1930s; mostly Irish working and middle class people moved into it. Despite the area’s relatively sparse population circa 1920—some farmland still existed—the developers of the day erected a sensible mix of housing types. Rowhouses of attached, small single-family homes on 20-by-100-foot lots were interspersed with larger two- and three-family townhouses on lots five feet wider, detached on one side, with common driveways and rear garages. Many featured front porches, where their owners could sit and greet neighbors or have friends join them for a late-afternoon chat. Six-family buildings over three stories, mostly composed of two-bedroom apartments, were situated closer to subways, with larger, four-to-six-floor apartment buildings located on corners. Buildings along avenue corridors consisted of ground-level storefronts, with two floors of housing above.
This mix offered abundance, affordability, convenience, and variety, suitable for every stage of Astorians’ lives for decades to come. Brick predominated, leaving an assortment of bond patterns and colors throughout town. Like Steinway’s houses of three decades prior, the durability, practicality, and workaday beauty of this housing let Astoria adapt to the needs of an expanding population. The gentle density of the area enabled community and convenience, rental income, and modest backyard greenery. Everything residents needed was within walking distance, though garages and driveways meant car ownership was possible, too.
These qualities made Astoria attractive to New York’s wave of postwar immigration. From the 1950s to the 1980s, newcomers from Greece and Italy flocked to an area growing in reputation for its authenticity. A 1991 New York Times feature called Astoria “the heartland of the Greek-American settlement in New York City, said to be the largest Hellenic city in the world except for the ancient city of philosophers and poets, Athens.”
Greek diners proliferated, as did Italian pork stores, pastry shops, fresh pasta makers, and more. Ethnic bakeries, banks, community centers, social clubs, stores, churches, theaters, and pharmacies—all helped give newcomers a sense of belonging. Affordable retail rents made it easier for local businesses to grow a loyal clientele; some established themselves as Astoria institutions. Tony Bennett, arguably Astoria’s most famous son, got his start as a singing waiter in Riccardo’s catering hall, also recently closed to make way for a housing development. In a 2009 video for the New York Times, Bennett said, “I still consider this the finest place to live. I come back here, and I like this better than any place I’ve ever lived.”
In 1960, my maternal grandparents came to Astoria from Orsogna, a village in rural Abruzzo, Italy, all but destroyed in some of the fiercest combat of World War II’s Italian campaign. After rebuilding most of their town, many Orsognesi sought to immigrate to Astoria, where demand for manual labor was high and a small group of their fellow townspeople—paisani—had put down roots in the 1920s and 1930s, setting up a mutual-aid society. Upon arriving, the Orsognesi tended to work together: men usually in construction, before joining trades or the Con Edison utility company, and women in the many small factories that dotted the area, including those for Chiclets gum, Silvercup Bread, Eagle Electric lightbulb sockets and switches, piecemeal fabric firms, and, yes, Steinway & Sons pianos.
So tight-knit was this community that any local trip usually meant running into paisani, parishioners, or classmates at any number of local institutions: the Neptune, Bel Aire, and Jackson Hole Diners, Bohemian Hall Beer Garden, Top Tomato and United Brothers Fruit Markets, Alba’s Pizza and Pizza Palace, (Christopher) Walken’s Bakery, Rosario’s and Sal, Kris & Charlie’s Delis, Square and Bartunek Hardware, Taverna Kyclades, K&T and International Meat Market, Marino’s Fish—and dozens more. These encounters set the rhythm of life, a routine serendipity. They invariably involved making the necessary inquiries about the well-being of multiple generations and branches of the passerby’s family.
Everything connected. Most residents frequented a handful of local doctors, dentists, and pharmacies, depending on one’s family background. Before the widespread use of health insurance, members of the Orsogna Mutual Aid Society gained access to the services—including house visits—of two Italian physicians, Emidio DiScala and Biagio Lombardi. Their sons, Reno and Paul, also physicians, continue to treat those first-generation patients and their descendants, including me. Two generations of doctors have thus served four generations of my family, giving life to the term “family medicine.”
As New York City endured the 1975 fiscal crisis and the lean early 1980s, Astoria’s communities bustled—an enclave of ethnic enclaves. Walking down one of its thoroughfares was like strolling across the globe. Greek cafés spilled over onto the sidewalks; one could enjoy hours of conversation and people-watching for the price of a frappé. On Catholic and Orthodox Easter, the smell of roasting lamb perfumed the streets. Only at the United Nations could more languages be heard. Italians and Greeks, as they joined the two halves of the Roman Empire, anchored a place that dozens of ethnicities now called home, from Brazilian to Bangladeshi, Chinese to Croatian.
“As New York City endured the 1975 fiscal crisis and the lean early 1980s, Astoria’s communities bustled—an enclave of ethnic enclaves.”
Astoria Park’s 60 acres of sprawling greenery, nestled between the Hell Gate and Triborough Bridges, served as a backyard for everyone who didn’t have one of their own. Its Olympic-size swimming pool, built under then–Parks Commissioner Robert Moses in 1936, helped cool long summer days. Bocce games took place steps away from a line of classic cars and motorcycles along Shore Boulevard, right off the East River.
Within a few years of arriving penniless, a construction worker or tradesman could afford to buy a home in cash or with modest mortgage financing. Industrious newcomers could be found on Friday mornings lined up outside the Astoria Federal Savings Bank, eager to deposit their paychecks and earn an extra day’s interest. But it was also about pride. They wanted to be seen making progress in the land of opportunity.
Many of these immigrants, often with just elementary school educations, achieved success partly because of the low barriers to becoming a landlord. It didn’t take a formal education to recognize that having an extra housing unit or two meant extra cash each month. After all, the landlord–tenancy relationship cuts across history and cultures, extending at least to the time of Hammurabi’s Code. With an unrelenting work ethic and extraordinary powers of delayed gratification, many first-generation Astorians bought rental homes to climb the economic ladder and create generational wealth.
No matter where they came from, most were immensely grateful to New York City and the United States. Most (at least those whom I knew) became proud American citizens. Unlike earlier waves of immigrants, however, most also refused to forgo their native language for English exclusively, opting to transmit their ancestral tongue at home to their children, who otherwise gradually Americanized. Some unintentionally preserved centuries-old dialects of Italian, like the one still spoken in my home, which are fading in Italy due to cultural homogenization.
Astoria’s Italian-American community produced Peter Vallone Sr., the first Speaker of the New York City Council, a position he assumed in 1986, when it was established. As the classic example of a pragmatic New York Democrat—a vanishing breed—he used his influence to improve the city’s quality of life. As the 1990s opened, Vallone saw the city’s economic recovery outpacing its progress on crime. The introduction of crack cocaine in the 1980s had contributed to a homicide spike that culminated in its awful 1990 peak of 2,245 slayings. In 1991, during Mayor David Dinkins’s administration, Vallone assembled the political support and funding—including controversial new taxes—to hire 6,000 additional NYPD officers, as part of the “Safe City, Safe Streets” initiative. Over the course of the next decade, the program increased the criminal-justice system’s capacity and helped make it possible for Police Commissioner William Bratton and his successors to introduce cutting-edge crime-fighting reforms. Miraculous improvements in public safety followed.
The city of my youth got better year after year—safer, more prosperous, more abundant with opportunity. Though they live but a short subway ride away from some of the world’s greatest cultural attractions, many Astorians still visit Manhattan—“the City”—only occasionally, finding that they have everything they want and need right at home. “We made a promise to ourselves when we moved here that we’d go back to Manhattan for dinner once a week,” said one young doctor, who moved in 2022 across the river from the Upper East Side, in a Times profile of Astoria. “But most weeks we don’t—there are so many fun restaurants and bars here.”
Astoria’s demographics and storefronts have indeed started to change, sometimes profoundly. Many, perhaps most, of the first-generation immigrants of the 1960s and 1970s have died. Their children tended to relocate to eastern Queens, in the quasi-suburban neighborhoods of Whitestone, Malba, Bayside, or still farther east, to Long Island. In their place, young, college-educated American professionals—often far to the left politically and more activist than lifelong residents—have moved in, usually without strong cultural or personal ties to the area. Astoria’s once-thriving civic associations have all, save for one, disbanded. Speaker Vallone retired after running for mayor in 2001. His son Peter Jr. succeeded him on the council but was term-limited out of office. In their seat now sits a socialist, Tiffany Cabán—an ally of the area’s leftist firebrand congresswoman, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Even today, though, former speaker Vallone lives in his former district, an Astorian to the core.
Old institutions have given way, usually after a lease expiration and the imposition of a significantly higher rent. Facing development pressures similar to those experienced by Neptune Diner, Trattoria L’incontro—the area’s best-known and loved Italian restaurant, owned by a chef from Orsogna—relocated to the Upper East Side after repeated attempts to stay in place. Others lost their leases but remained in Astoria, like Sac’s Place, also owned by Orsognesi brothers; they relocated their eatery to the Kaufman Astoria Studios, New York City’s largest TV and movie facility. (Kaufman will soon be joined by Wildflower Studios, a 775,000-square-foot film studio backed by actor Robert De Niro and located next to Steinway & Sons.)
Residential rents, once affordable to middle-class families, have risen dramatically, alongside those in the rest of the city, though they remain at least 30 percent less than the eye-watering prices found in Manhattan and on the Brooklyn waterfront. Astoria was rezoned for denser residential development in 2009–10 to encourage more housing construction along transit corridors. Some of the new condo developments that resulted have won architectural awards, injecting fresh capital and designs to the area, even as their units’ asking prices sometimes exceed $2 million.
Yet Astoria’s core stock of rowhouses, small multifamily homes, and ground-floor storefronts remains largely intact, instantly recognizable from historical photos. Fashions, cars, and signs may be different from those in the photos, but the buildings endure, adapted and readapted to different families and firms. Over the decades, this stability helped imprint Astoria’s characters and institutions on the souls of those who called this place their own. As the cost of living spirals upward, though, it has become increasingly hard for many native Astorians to keep pace.
When some of my compatriots lament the loss of old Astoria, they’re not yearning for Steinway’s farmland or the pre-1920s housing boom. They’re nostalgic for the times they knew firsthand, from the 1960s onward, when the area already had the infrastructure and housing built by previous generations. They miss a place where shopkeepers brought the world to the avenue and remembered everyone’s name, where knowing one’s neighbors was a given, and where everyone worked toward a hopeful future.
The very forces that shaped the beloved Astoria of yesterday are now what its older residents lament. They feel powerless to stop the changes making their hometown livable for a new generation and economy: luxury developments—but also chains like Taco Bell and Starbucks, short-lived restaurants, the erosion of Old World traditions, and the closure of family-run establishments like the Neptune Diner.
Astoria’s story thus represents a case study in the perennial urban conflict between constancy and growth. In longing for vanished days, Astorians unknowingly express the Burkean conservative impulse: the recognition of something venerable as good and the desire to preserve it. This love of home—“oikophilia,” as the late English philosopher Roger Scruton termed it—is the wellspring of conservatism. “To exist fully in time is to be aware of loss and to be working always to repair it,” Scruton writes.
Repairing the loss of the past doesn’t mean turning back time. What’s needed is a balance between stability—sufficient to foster the attachments and affections for home—and the flexibility to embrace new circumstances and growth. Like the siting of the Steinway piano factory and village, the subway system’s extension, postwar immigration, and the public-safety miracle of the 1990s, transitions need not spell decline.
Achieving this balance requires good stewardship from citizens and leaders. The prospect of growth imposes an intergenerational calculus. Fail to build for growth, and your home falls behind other places. Build only for today’s population, and you may need more capacity soon. Build more than necessary, and you risk wasting resources if growth doesn’t materialize.
Though these decisions are inherently uncertain, one thing is clear: without considering future generations, true stewardship and intergenerational justice are impossible. In turn, the living should honor their inherited tradition, showing gratitude for past decisions made for today’s benefit. Figures like Steinway, McAneny, and Vallone understood that new opportunities for economic growth, density, connectedness, and public safety would enhance, not diminish, life in Astoria. They planned for growth that they couldn’t fully foresee but trusted in its goodness. The builders of the 1920s also planned for greater density than most might have imagined. Empowered by good public policy, private-market actors created abundance for all who followed.
The great fallacy of today’s opponents of growth is the assumption that victory will achieve preservation. More likely, it will mean steady decline. Examples abound of cities in the Rust Belt and elsewhere that failed to keep up with economic and technological transformations. Good stewardship aims at preventing such decay by cultivating growth in different circumstances while preserving the qualities that make each place unique.
Good local stewardship means more than reflexively resisting new development; residents should guide growth that fosters continuity. At community board meetings, Astorians could, for example, encourage new developments to reflect the character and function of the buildings that they replace. Mixed-use buildings should remain mixed-use. No regulation—zoning or otherwise—should prevent a diner from occupying the ground floor of the new building that replaces the Neptune Diner. Likewise, buildings with truly extraordinary historical or cultural value can be landmarked, with compensation given to the owners, such as transferable development rights. This would allow for denser buildings elsewhere in town, while preserving neighborhood character. And neighbors must take responsibility for maintaining clean and safe streets, keeping a close watch on their blocks to deter crime and disorder. To shape the future in these ways, citizens should form and engage with local civic associations, using these groups to demand that elected officials exercise their authority for the long-term good of the area. Without active civic engagement, Astorians risk losing their ability to shape their home.
New York will always attract short-term residents, but families rooted for generations anchor its neighborhoods. These families draw from these places the knowledge of the past, enriched by the affections of growing up in an area that they can call their own. From this perspective, they can appreciate what makes their neighborhood a place worth loving and living in. The loss of institutions like the Neptune Diner become more bearable through the constancy of community.
That’s why I’m committed to staying in Astoria. Just as it has shaped me and my family, so now I shape it, continuing the legacy of my civic and familial forebears and preserving its benefits for future generations. I serve as an officer of one of the few remaining civic associations, as treasurer of my parochial school, and as president of the 88-year-old Long Island City Lawyers Club, where members’ fathers were past presidents. This gives me a sense of purpose but has also liberated me by limiting me. I may never be a leading citizen of the United States, or even of New York, but that doesn’t matter. I need only be a decent citizen of the place I proudly call home. Astoria has been good to me, and it’s good enough for me.
In his novel The Leopard, retelling the changes in Sicily during the Risorgimento, the Italian aristocrat-author Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa wrote, “For things to remain the same, everything must change.” In a few short years, a high-rise will stand in the place of the Neptune Diner’s chunky terrazzo floors. If it’s done well, Astorians will someday say—perhaps in Greek or Italian—that they couldn’t imagine anything else being there.
Top Photo: Astoria’s gentle density and livability, with most conveniences available within walking distance, have long made it attractive to newcomers. (Richard Levine / Alamy Stock Photo)
