Little Pakistan (Midwood, Brooklyn)
The Midwood section of Brooklyn —on Coney Island Avenue, between Avenue H and Newkirk Avenue—has been called “Little Pakistan” because of its many residents of Pakistani descent. The nickname “Little Pakistan” has been cited in print from at least 1995.
Wikipedia: Midwood, Brooklyn
Midwood is a neighborhood in the south central part of the New York City borough of Brooklyn, New York, USA, roughly halfway between Prospect Park and Coney Island. The Community is within Community Board 14. It is patrolled by the 66th. and 70th. Precinct’s of the NYPD.
It is bounded on the north by the New York and Atlantic Railway freight line tracks just above Avenue I and the Brooklyn College campus of the City University of New York, and on the south by Avenue P and Kings Highway. The eastern border is Nostrand Avenue or Flatbush Avenue (depending on whom you ask), and Coney Island Avenue or Ocean Parkway to the west is the other boundary (again, depending upon whom you ask).
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Many Midwood residents moved to the suburbs in the 1970s, and the neighborhood and its commercial districts declined. Drawn by its quiet middle-class ambiance, new residents began pouring into Midwood during the 1980s; many of them were recently-landed immigrants from all over the world. The largest group were from the Soviet Union, but substantial numbers also arrived from from Jamaica, Haiti, Mexico, Guyana, and elsewhere in South America; from Ireland, Italy, Poland, the Baltic countries (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania), and elsewhere in eastern Europe; and from Greece, Turkey, Israel, Syria, the Persian Gulf states, Iran, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, China, and Korea. So, in a short time, Midwood was transformed, from a predominantly Jewish neighborhood with a smattering of Irish-Americans and German-Americans, to a remarkably polyglot section of the borough of Brooklyn.
New York (NY) Daily News
A ONE-MAN HELP CENTER FOR CITY’S PAKISTANIS
By RUSSELL BEN-ALI
Wednesday, December 6th 1995, 1:95AM
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“We are facing problems because we are a growing community,” said Choudhri as he sat in his cluttered second-floor office overlooking bustling Coney Island Ave. near Avenue H.
Some have dubbed the strip Little Pakistan for the Pakistani-American restaurants, fabric stores, travel agents, car services and groceries established there.
Google Books
Brooklyn:
A soup-to-nuts guide to sites, neighborhoods, and restaurants
By Ellen Freudenheim
New York, NY: St. Martin’s Griffin
1999
Pg. 162:
Coney Island Avenue, between Cortelyou Road and Avenue H: A little Pakistan, a growing community of Pakistani immigrants and the stores that serve them.
New York (NY) Times
A Community Stunned and on Edge
By DAVID BARSTOW
Published: Friday, December 31, 1999
Police officers are a familiar presence to the people who live and work in the Midwood section of Brooklyn, a bustling, largely Pakistani enclave that has struggled over the last decade to cut crime and revive a fraying neighborhood.
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Residents in the building said they thought the men mainly spoke Arabic. But this was hardly remarkable in a neighborhood known as Little Pakistan.
New York (NY) Daily News
Lots of trees & shades of diversity Midwood also boasts rich housing stock
By LUIS PEREZ DAILY NEWS WRITER
Sunday, August 18th 2002, 1:43AM
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A few blocks away on Coney Island Ave. sits Little Pakistan, with shops, restaurants and one of the largest Muslim mosques in the city. According to the 2000 census, there are 9,903 Pakistanis in Brooklyn. And 80% of those are in Midwood, said Jagajit Singh, director of the Council of Pakistan Organizations, which offers employment and legal advice.
BBC News
Thursday, 10 July, 2003, 11:14 GMT 12:14 UK
Big troubles in Little Pakistan
By Shahzeb Jillani
BBC Urdu service correspondent in New York
Here in New York City’s Brooklyn district is an area that goes by the name of Little Pakistan.
Men and women stroll in the traditional clothing of the shalwar kameez.
You can shop in outlets such as the Urdu Bazaar, buy sweetmeats and Indian films.
Village Voice (NY)
Fleeing America
Post–9-11, Thousands of New York’s Pakistanis Leave the U.S. Under Pressure
Alisa Solomon
Tuesday, September 9th 2003
Donald Rumsfeld will lay a wreath at Arlington Cemetery. Michael Bloomberg and George Pataki will join a ceremony at ground zero. Families for Peaceful Tomorrows—an anti-war group of relatives of victims of the 9-11 attacks—will lead a candlelight procession and silent vigil. In the Pakistani enclave of Midwood, Brooklyn, New Yorkers will also remember the gruesome day when three of their community members lost their lives at the World Trade Center. But for “Little Pakistan,” where a hefty portion of the U.S.‘s 500,000 immigrants from that country make their homes, the date also marks another, related tragedy: the beginning of their neighborhood’s undoing.
Google Books
Pakistanis in America
By Stacy Taus-Bolstad
Minneapolis, MN: Lerner Publications
2006
Pg. 47:
In New York City, Brooklyn’s Midwood neighborhood along Coney Island Avenue became home to so many Pakistani Americans that it was nicknamed Little Pakistan.
New Statesman (London)
A walk in Little Pakistan
Basharat Peer
Published 18 December 2006
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An hour later, I was walking in Coney Island Avenue, which stretches for miles and is home to Pakistanis, Indians, Russians and Italians, and to Chinese and Latino immigrants. A few minutes later, I knew I was in the part of Coney Island Avenue that American newspapers describe as “Little Pakistan”. The shop signs were written in Urdu and English.
Voice of America
Bhutto Murder Hits Hard in New York City’s ‘Little Pakistan’
By Adam Phillips
New York
30 December 2007
News of the assassination of Pakistani opposition leader Bhenazir Bhutto at a political rally in Rawalpindi on Thursday was a seismic event in that politically volatile nation. But Bhutto’s murder also reverberated powerfully in neighborhoods around the world where Pakistanis have come to live. To gauge the reaction in the United States, VOA’s Adam Phillips traveled to a neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York, that locals call “Little Pakistan.”
The mosques in the Midwood section of Brooklyn, where a majority of New York’s Pakistanis live, are usually busy on Fridays.