CCSRE Summer Internship 2007: 7/16/07

Today, when I arrived at the office, I found out that the internet was not working. Since most of the work that I had been doing at the office required the internet, I, along with some of the other interns, decided to do one of the other neighborhoods that we had been assigned for the photovoice project. I headed home on the subway and picked up a camera from my house. I took a bus with Jenn, one of the other interns, to Queens Blvd and Broadway in Elmhurst. While Elmhurst is known for many things, like being the site where Eddie Murphy’s “Coming to America” and where I went to middle school, it is also the area in NYC with the largest Filipino population.There were a few specific places that we wanted to get pictures of, so we began our trek down Broadway from Queens Blvd to Roosevelt Avenue. Although Elmhurst has the largest Filipino population, there aren’t many Filipino businesses in the area. Instead, the businesses are mostly Chinese, Korean, and South Asian owned. We snapped some pictures in the various restaurants and markets along Broadway. Finally, we came to the largest point of interest to us: a park on Broadway and Elmhurst Avenue. I had been told that this park was often frequented by older Filipino men who played chess and Filipino youth.

While we came hoping to grab some picks of these two populations which we had not seen much on our last photovoice trip, we were unlucky because neither of these groups were there at the time that we went. We did manage to get a couple of pictures of a Filipino youth skateboarding and some older Chinese men playing chess and xiang qi. I’ve been told that the park is not too safe at night and that it is the site of a lot of drug deals. Our organization is trying to establish a Filipino youth organization in the area to prevent the youth from getting mixed up in the drugs and violence which they are so often exposed to while growing up here.

Here are some of the pictures I took over the two photovoice trips:

WOODSIDE