A BRISK AUTUMN Sunday morning in Richmond Hill, a scruffy, bland neighbourhood deep in south-central Queens. Half a dozen men gather on the southern edge of a pocket park named for Phil “Scooter” Rizzuto, a beloved post-war shortstop with the New York Yankees. There is an air of hushed anticipation among the men: small talk, warm air blown into cupped hands, frequent glances up and down the otherwise quiet street. An occasional plane passes overhead, perhaps to La Guardia, perhaps to JFK .

The gathered men are all from Guyana, and speak in the lilting accents of their South American homeland. A few blocks away Singh’s Roti Shop is heaving with families out for their Sunday morning saltfish bakes and curried chicken with dhalpuri roti. Guyanese people began emigrating to America in the late 1960s; numbers picked up as economic and political conditions at home declined in the 1980s. Today around 250,000 of them live in America, most of them in the New York area and a lot of them in Queens.

A windowless white van pulls up, and out come two cages, each holding a lively-looking black bird. Their songs cut through the otherwise quiet park: declining five-note trills with grace notes, entirely unlike the pigeons or crows that coo and caw across the city. The gathered men look at the birds intently as they sing. Asked what sort of birds they are, a rangy young guy shrugs: “Don’t know the name. They just sing, sing, sing nice.”

They also compete to be deemed the nicest. Rizzuto Park has hosted the Guyanese community’s songbird contests on Sunday mornings for years. Large sums of money are rumoured to be wagered on these contests; the price of a champion bird can reach four figures. Today’s seems more of an audition, or perhaps some choristic sparring, than a fully-fledged bout. There is no judge to be seen. But there is still a certain furtiveness. A man with a cropped white beard and wool beanie looks darkly at the inquisitive stranger at the edge of their circle—“You wan’ see pretty birds,” says the older man, “you go up to the Bronx Zoo.”

Queens lies at the west end of Long Island, which means it is a creation of the most recent ice age. The islands and peninsulas north of New York harbour—Long Island, Nantucket, most of Martha’s Vineyard, Cape Cod—were pushed into place by the bulldozer blade of the Wisconsinan ice-sheet. The terminal moraine which marks its greatest extent forms a strip of high ground across the borough. The aspirationally named Richmond Hill—more of a gentle incline, really—sits on the south side of that low ridge.

After the ice retreated, the seas rose to fill the East River—the narrow neck of Long Island Sound that sits to the north of Queens—and the lagoons that fringe its southern shore. Then the birds arrived, some settling the wetlands and marshes year round, some stopping by for seasonal replenishment. Native Americans followed, living in loose bands across Long Island. The flow first of ice, then water, then wildfowl shaped this place and the life it made possible. Now Queens shapes and is shaped by a constant flow of people.

Manhattan has energy and money; Brooklyn has hipster cachet and old-world, brownstone beauty; the Bronx has pugnacity; Staten Island has apartness. Queens has no clear defining quality (and it is most definitely not hip, whatever the estate agents may tell you). But it has the vibrancy of a whole world. Around 160 languages are spoken across the borough; residents hail from almost 200 countries. Nearly half its residents are foreign-born; most speak a language other than English at home. Few places can boast the linguistic, ethnic, religious and cultural diversity of Queens. To wander its streets is to walk through what makes America great.

Worldly, and fair

Start in Flushing, in the north. When the Dutch West India Company bought out the Matinecock people to create the colony of New Netherland, they named this bit Vlissingen, after a port in Zeeland long known in English as Flushing. Not long after its founding, its residents began accepting persecuted outsiders—not from over the ocean, but from across the East River.

Peter Stuyvesant, a governor of New Netherland, was a religious zealot. He issued an edict forbidding his subjects from harbouring Quakers, whom he abhorred, on pain of imprisonment or eviction. A settler in Flushing who defied this order was banished back to Holland. In 1657, 30 of the townsfolk sent Stuyvesant a letter in reply that came to be known as the Flushing Remonstrance.

“We desire”, they wrote, “not to judge lest we be judged, neither to condemn lest we be condemned, but rather let every man stand or fall to his own Master…If any [Quakers] come in love to us, we cannot in conscience lay violent hands upon them…for we are bound by the law of God and man to do good unto all men and evil to no man.” It was among the earliest endorsements of religious freedom in the New World, and more robust and disinterested than many that followed. No signatory was a Quaker. By protesting, all risked their fortunes. Their stand came to define what America could be.

Later refugees included African-Americans in the early 19th century, drawn by the tolerance shown to Quakers and, in the early 20th century, eastern European Jews—including your correspondent’s great-grandparents, fleeing pogroms on what today is the Polish-Ukrainian border. The Bowne House, where Quaker meetings were held in the 1660s, still stands—just blocks away from a Korean supermarket, a Sikh temple, a blue-domed mosque, various synagogues and churches of a wide range of denominations. Stuyvesant, one hopes, is spinning in his grave.

This is not to say that everyone who ends up in Queens is drawn by a particular vision of religious freedom. Most come, as most migrants come to any spot, simply because some people they know, or their family knows, already live there. That is why Flushing hosts one of New York’s three biggest Chinatowns. Strolling around the area where Flushing’s subway station sits you hear not just Mandarin and Cantonese, but also Hokkien, Hunanese, Shanghainese, Hakka and Sichuanese, as well as Mongolian and Uighur.

Leaving along Roosevelt Avenue you cross Flushing Creek. Once it was mighty—the outlet through which the Hudson flowed to the sea. But that was before the ice age rearranged the neighbourhood, sending the Hudson down its current path. Today it is a poky little stream, bounded and half-buried, fouled with decades of industrial waste. Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, on what might generously be called its banks, hosted World’s Fairs in 1939 and 1964.

In 1939 to get to the fair was to take the train; from the middle of the 19th century to the middle of the 20th, the railways were the artery by which people flowed to and through Queens. In the 1870s farmers near Flushing were used to living alongside those who commuted into New York City (meaning, at the time, Manhattan).

Today the only patch of that agrarian 19th-century Queens which can still be seen is the Queens County Farm Museum, a 47-acre tract in distant Floral Park, perhaps the oldest continually farmed land in the state. On early autumn afternoons you can buy tomatoes, greens, chilies and honey all produced across the road from a dense thicket of brick two-storey homes.

Beyond the meadows, Elmhurst is among the most diverse neighbourhoods in Queens. An array of Latino merchants and restaurants—Venezuelan, Peruvian, Guatemalan, Salvadoran—line the streets. Shortly before noon Ecuadorean food carts show up where Roosevelt Avenue meets Junction Boulevard, piled with trays of steamed maize, fried chicken, squash and, at the centre of each cart, a massive, deep-fried pork shoulder, equal parts delicious and intimidating.

In 1960 what was then Elmhurst-Corona was 98% white. After Queens joined Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx and Staten Island to become the five-boroughed city of New York in 1898, its northern part boomed, attracting immigrants from Germany, as well as southern and eastern Europe and Ireland. Around 1960 Latin American, Caribbean and Asian immigrants began arriving. African-Americans moved in to North Corona, Latin and Asian immigrants to the rest of the area and whites began leaving. Between 1960 and 1980, amid a cratering of its white population, Elmhurst-Corona’s overall population grew by more than half.

Corona was the home of Archie Bunker, an archetype of mid-century Queens, and mid-century white American manhood. Between 1971 and 1983 Mr Bunker, played by Carroll O’Connor, provided the focus for two sitcoms, “All in the Family” and “Archie Bunker’s Place”—a gruff, bombastic, bigoted but big-hearted blue-collar patriarch. He disparaged all non-white minorities—blacks, Hispanics, Asians—as well as Jews, Poles and Catholics. He was endlessly outraged by the social and cultural changes of the 1960s, by the growing diversity of his neighbourhood and his own increasingly liberal offspring (in particular, his son-in-law).

Bunker was neither buffoon nor a caricature, and certainly was not a role-model. In a way, though, like Queens itself, he provided the old America with a way to understand acculturation. Embarrassed young white liberals could see that their grouchy, bigoted fathers were not irredeemable—just products of a different era. Bunkerish viewers could see that Hollywood liberals were laughing with him, affectionately, rather than at him. Viewers who happened not to be white, heterosexual Protestants may have viewed him with considerably less affection.

We can hitch a ride to Rockaway Beach

Some might see Mr Bunker as the borough’s most important cultural figure, edging out Martin Scorsese, Paul Simon and Louis Armstrong—were they not all eclipsed in recognition at least by Peter Parker, a Spider-Man from Forest Hills (also home, as it happens, to the Ramones, but that is another story). The unmean streets around Midtown High School are far from the mythic Krypton-to-Smallville-to-Metropolis world of Superman, or the plutocratic privilege of Batman; but that distance makes Spider-Man closer, and more relatable, to his fans. Queens is the right place for a friendly neighbourhood superhero—one who, in the recent film “Spiderman: Homecoming”, has a debate-team rival played by a Guatemalan-American; a best friend played by a Hawaiian-Filipino-American; and a prom date who is African-American.

Back in Elmhurst, heading west, the neighbourhood becomes more South-East Asian. The Wat Buddha Thai Thavornvanaram, a Thai Buddhist temple tucked down a small side street, is among the oddest structures in the borough, its ornate, peaked, golden gables and doorframe grafted onto an otherwise utterly ordinary two-storey brick building. Inside, several dozen people line up to present food to three shaven-headed monks. Thawin Pukhao, the senior abbot, said that this is about the average number of congregants on weekdays; weekends and festivals are much bigger.

Trained in Thailand, Thawin says that when his master invited him to go abroad, “I thought maybe to Japan or China. But now I feel that this is my second hometown...In the temple, these are my people.” A few blocks east is a newer Buddhist temple—Tibetan, festooned with prayer flags and carpets, a prayer wheel and plastic bottle filled with coloured oil at every seat. The very different temples sometimes hold events together. Like many New Yorkers, Thawin appreciates getting to meet “different types of people, different cultures...we learn from each other how to live together”.

On the other side of Roosevelt Avenue from Thawin’s temple is the Jackson Diner, one of the area’s older Indian restaurants. Its clientele is as diverse as the neighbourhood: South Asian teens, a Korean mother and daughter, burly city workers in their dark T -shirts and orange vests, two Caribbean women laden with shopping bags. The food will win no awards for innovation, but the curried goat is tasty enough—rich but not greasy, nor too gamey.

The manager, Manjit Singh, is a small, amiable man with the sort of watchfulness common to lifers in the restaurant industry. When his father founded the diner in 1983, he says, the neighbourhood had only four or five Indian shops. “This restaurant used to be a Woolworth’s. Next door, the Patel Brothers’ store? That was a Key Foods.” The flow shifted. Today the businesses on the diner’s street are almost exclusively Indian. And things are changing again. Near the Jackson Heights subway station the Gulshan Pharmacy’s sign boasts “We speak in Bengali, English, Hindi, Nepali and Spanish”. There are more Bangladeshis than there were before, says Mr Singh. Shopfronts along and just off Roosevelt have signs in Nepali and Tibetan.

Just as the Irish, Italians and Jews of Mr Bunker’s time decamped to the suburbs, or warmer climes, the Indian-Americans of Jackson Heights are on the move. “We’ve grown used to driving,” says Mr Singh. He rattles off places his friends now live: Atlanta, Houston, North Carolina. He himself now lives farther out on Long Island: “More space, better schools,” he sighs, the haunting call of the migrant to the suburbs.

Immigrants normally come to Queens because they have links here. They land at JFK , and stay for five years, fifteen, a generation. Then they or their children move on. America has changed them and they have changed America—witness Mr Parker’s classmates. Across Jamaica Bay from JFK , a more ancient migration is taking place, on softer wings. The Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge is part of a 9,000-acre national park, America’s first to be located entirely within a city. It has a whispering, undulating beauty made more wondrous by the flight paths above it, and the world famous skyline on the distant horizon. Visitors park just off a heavily trafficked road but, once past the gatehouse, on raised paths through the tall grass, the sounds and smells of urban life vanish quickly.

The bays, salt marshes, woods and ponds draw the area’s oldest migrants: snow geese, oystercatchers, warblers, plovers, egrets, herons. Hundreds of species pause in Queens for a time on journeys before heading north or south, depending on season and custom. They come back; they pass through. The ecosystem, like all ecosystems, is defined by flow, not stasis. Above them, occasionally, an aircraft comes in to land, a new family on board. And, too far away to hear, but still there in the mind, small birds are singing sweetly to Guyanese gamblers in a park, elsewhere in Queens.