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On August 8, 2005, President George W. Bush signed the Energy Policy Act of 2005. So what possible bearing could this have on the 18^th Annual Children’s Halloween Parade in Jackson Heights, Queens in 2007?

Because of this new policy which called for Daylight Saving Time to be extended starting in 2007 (clocks will fall back an hour on the first Sunday of November as opposed to the last Sunday of October), parade participants—as a first—were able march under a holiday-appropriate orange-hued sunset.

The act was implemented as a national policy effort to save energy, but for parade participants here, it provided the incidental benefit of having the sun take a little longer to set as the parade followed its westward course through the Jackson Heights neighborhood along 37^th Avenue.

Sponsored by the Jackson Heights Beautification Group (JHBG), the parade was to be a family-friendly event, and that intention was in full evidence. Toddlers, teens, and everything between marched down 37^th Avenue, punctuated by local schools and marching bands throughout the line. I had caught a glimpse of an Optimus Prime here, a few Spider-Men over there, many princesses, a baby Cookie Monster, and the list goes on.

The wee little ones went in style as their parents pushed them along in wave after wave of strollers. Most parents opted for the plainclothes-chaperon look (as most busy parents probably do on Halloween night), but a few made the extra effort to also wear costumes with their kids. But even parents that didn’t dress up were sometimes stuck with the incongruous appearance of carrying their kids’ costume props, e.g., I spotted one mom in business-casual attire dutifully holding her child’s rather unwieldy (even if only plastic) double-bladed axe as he concentrated on gathering treats for his loot bag.

As the parade progressed, many local merchants kept their doors open in anticipation of annual trick-or-treaters who moved from shop to shop. For Octavio, co-owner of Lety’s Bakery (named after his wife), this is his first Halloween in Jackson Heights, having only opened up his bakery six months ago on 37^th Avenue.

Octavio rarely comes out from the back kitchen, working hard to put out a fresh assortment of Italian pastries for the store’s display cases, but on this Halloween night, he stands in the seating area (although never far from the kitchen) in order to take in all the sights from his storefront window. Two of his staff take customer orders as usual, pulling double-duty by also giving out candy to incoming trick-or-treaters. He apologizes for his limited English but smiles as I ask him what he thinks of the neighborhood. “Jackson Heights is beautiful. Yes.”

Moving further east, I ask the new owner of Monika’s Polish Meat & Deli, whose store is also along the parade path, how much money she had to spend on candy in preparation for trick-or-treaters. She chuckles, “I’m not entirely sure, but at least $40!” According to her, the store has been around for about 10 years, but this is also her first year experiencing the parade.

Back in the parade, a man in a dark fall coat bears a festive orange sash indicating “Parade Marshall” across his shoulder. He enjoys a lollipop (indeed, why should the kids get all the treats?) while waiting at the corner of an intersection for his students to come along the parade route.

Before his students arrive, one child in the parade exclaims (loudly enough even to overwhelm the music of one of the nearby marching bands), “You’re the guy from the church!” Indeed, that “guy” is Dr. Ronald Tompkins, Senior Pastor of the Community United Methodist Church in Jackson Heights. But this evening, he will be greeting his students as Chair of the Board that supports the 82^nd Street Academics, a local after-school program.

Walking into the middle of the avenue to greet them all, Dr. Tompkins finds himself standing waist-deep in a flow of children who continue along the parade route. His face beams with amiable pride. After the last students walk by, he returns back to the side of the parade to declare, “They’re 100 of the best kids in Jackson Heights.”

Throughout the entire parade event, police officers were at every intersection from 89^th Street to 77^th Street to manage the crowds, maintaining a firm but polite tone towards individual pedestrians who were wandering or dawdling where they shouldn’t be. They set up fairly elaborate barricades in the concluding block of the parade, where volunteers for the JHBG volunteers waited on hand with 3000 plus loot bags (they refer to them as “goodie bags”) to hand out to the children who participated in the parade.

For Richard Mirro, a local resident dressed as Harry Potter’s Professor Severus Snape, he estimates this is 6^th time attending the parade. In comparison to previous years, he says, “The parade has grown quite a bit,” but happily notes that it still retains a local flavor and remains dedicated to the children.

It’s Carl Eden’s 8^th time (he’s sporting a beanie with devilish horns), and even with the conclusion of the parade, his Halloween won’t end until he’s distributed candy to all the trick-or-treaters he expects will come around to his apartment complex later in the evening. For some of his over-eager trick-or-treaters, he posts a sign, “You can come by once, but the second time you might be cursed!”

Putting aside the temptation of going for seconds at the same doorstep, the children of Jackson Heights are fortunate to receive the community support that they do on so many levels, and not just this one day out of the year. And as for the piles of candy the children will have accumulated from this Halloween night, it’s good to know that the Jackson Heights community also has its fair share of dental offices (or scary to know, depending upon how you feel about dentists)! Brush those teeth, kids.

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If New York City has a reputation for being one of the most diverse places on the planet, then one could make a strong argument that its borough of Queens is a significant contributing factor.

Just take a look at this list below with a percentage breakdown by ethnicity of Queens relative to the other boroughs of New York City based on my findings within the State & County QuickFacts site of the U.S. Census Bureau. You’ll note that Queens has a more even distribution of major ethnic groups (the Census Bureau uses the term “race”) in the comparison among counties, i.e., boroughs).

New York City Data Set from US Census Bureau (2005)

Queens County (Queens Borough)

• White : 55.1%
• Black : 21.1%
• American Indian and Alaska Native : 0.7%
• Asian : 20.9%
• Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander : 0.1%
• Persons reporting two or more races : 2.1%
• Persons of Hispanic or Latino : 26.1%
• White persons not Hispanic : 31.7%

New York County (Manhattan Borough)

• White : 66.5%
• Black : 19.8%
• American Indian and Alaska Native : 0.7%
• Asian : 10.7%
• Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander : 0.1%
• Persons reporting two or more races : 2.2%
• Persons of Hispanic or Latino : 25.9%
• White persons not Hispanic : 47.7%

Bronx County (Bronx Borough)

• White : 49.6%
• Black : 42.5%
• American Indian and Alaska Native : 1.2%
• Asian : 3.4%
• Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander : 0.5%
• Persons reporting two or more races : 2.8%
• Persons of Hispanic or Latino : 51.3%
• White persons not Hispanic : 13.1%

Kings County (Brooklyn Borough)

• White : 50.6%
• Black : 38.3%
• American Indian and Alaska Native : 0.5%
• Asian : 8.9%
• Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander : 0.1%
• Persons reporting two or more races :1.5%
• Persons of Hispanic or Latino : 9.9%
• White persons not Hispanic : 35.6%

Richmond County (Staten Island Borough)

• White : 80.3%
• Black : 10.8%
• American Indian and Alaska Native : 0.3%
• Asian : 7.2%
• Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander : 0.1%
• Persons reporting two or more races : 1.3%
• Persons of Hispanic or Latino : 14.6%
• White persons not Hispanic : 67.9%

If you’re wondering why the numbers don’t add up to a 100%, the Census Bureau considers the designation of “Hispanic” to potentially belong to any race, so it is included in applicable race categories. Also, certain respondents reported to more than one race category.

Why do I bring all of this up, and single out Queens in particular? Well, I sometimes come across the perception, either overt or unconscious, from residents and visitors alike, that Manhattan is synonymous with the name New York City. It obscures the fact that Manhattan is just one of five boroughs that make up New York City.

Granted, Manhattan is a rather impressive chunk of island real estate. It is a juggernaut engine for the arts, culture, finance, cuisine, and real estate, but its energy derives not just from within but from the surrounding denizens of the tri-state area that commute in and out every day like a million pistons (not to mention people from all over the world). To extend upon the venerable poet and preacher John Donne’s phrasing “no man is an island,” I would further compound that no island is truly an island…figuratively speaking.

And yet still, some ostensibly worldly Manhattanites have been known to refer to those residents who must commute into “the city” (in pursuit of diversion or duty ) with the pejorative term “the bridge and tunnel crowd” (bridge and tunnels being the primary means of access to the island of Manhattan from the surrounding area).

It smacks of specious elitism at best, ugly bigotry at worst. Those who use the phrase might claim it is a distinction of class rather than ethnicity; but in our social reality, they often sadly become one and the same—and really, are such prejudices on either ground a remotely palatable humanistic outlook?

At the other extreme, I’ve had young students from more socioeconomically challenged neighborhoods throughout NYC take pride in a certain “street cred” that derives from claiming to hail from certain neighborhoods in the boroughs of Bronx, Manhattan, and Brooklyn. I was amused though slightly chagrined to learn that no such cool factor was afforded to any resident of either Queens or Staten Island, although I would wager there were very different reasons for these two boroughs.

Part of the identity of Queens owes itself to a substantial immigrant culture, and State Island is just very very white (refer back to the statistics above). But in my students’ delineation of what’s cool and what’s not by localized boundaries, they draw a curious parallel to the perceptions of those Manhattan elite who deride those from the “outer” boroughs (and New Jersey). They have bought into the myth of their own locality, not considering that other neighborhoods may offer something of unique cultural value.

New York City is a glorious manifestation of people from a dizzying array of socioeconomic, professional, and cultural backgrounds. What would you have if you cut off the boroughs from one another and the surrounding tri-state area? Well, eventually, on a literal level, you would get starving populations slowly becoming mired in their own accumulated squalor, excepting the Bronx which is the only borough contiguous with the U.S. mainland.

But the states of hunger and squalor operate figuratively in terms of a dearth in cultural diversity and in terms of moral obsolescence respectively. Every community has something to offer, which is why I will do my best to write an ongoing segment devoted to my own neighborhood, Jackson Heights, Queens, arguably one of the most diverse neighborhoods in the United States, if not the world.

Jackson Heights fascinates me as a paradigm for those marginalized in their multiculturalism, just as Manhattan to me often represents a high order of status and power that sometimes forget the little guys that work so hard make it look so good.

In Jackson Heights, you will find in the span of roughly .8 square miles a panoply of ethnic cultures. From the Asian demographic comes immigrants from Bangladesh, China, Korea, India, Pakistan, and the Philippines; from the European demographic comes multigenerational descendents of Irish, Jewish, Italian, Polish, and Russian heritage; and from the Latino demographic comes immigrants from Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, and Uruguay. There is also a distinctive pocket in the way of a gay community amidst this huddle of immigrants.

Given the wealth of material stemming from this paradigm for the United States, a country built on immigration, I’m sure I’ll find plenty to relay in the future in keeping my eye on Jackson Heights.