Flushing Main Street (1997) 

Likewise

How has it changed more asians

@@richardrock71 No, things have really CHANGED. Use your brain.

Caesar Harrison - I’m with you bud, love to turn the clock back and bring back the “old Flushing”. I remember one Chinese restaurant on Northern Blvd. called Lum’s. And then there was Jahn’s, great soda shop on Main St. Been back just a few years ago, and it’s like a foreign city!!! It sucks now!!! They totally destroyed what was once a nice place.

Caesar Harrison - I fled to Arizona, and it’s so much more civilized here. Born & raised in Whitestone and went to Flushing to catch the IRT to Manhattan. Been back a few times, and I can’t believe how dirty Flushing has become! Whitestone and Bayside are still nice, but who knows how long it’ll be before the losers move there and ruin it too. Of course Great Neck and parts of Long Island are still nice, but the high taxes and the political bias in NY will keep me in Arizona.

I feel your pain. 50 years old. Still live in the area. I know things change, but this was a bit drastic!

hey, youre a fart smeller, I mean, a smart feller!

True

And the library

I remember Blue Star Market, Roy Rogers, Prospect Theatre, etc.

@Jenny Lee 25*

Cherry St

Damn I grew up in 43-70 Kissena Blvd. Skyline towers. Entire 80's. I also remember Woolworths and Macys on Roosevelt. I ran all these streets as a kid. Went to PS 120 and IS 237. Definitely miss those years

In New Jersey where I still live and this is for russianbot2397...the stores u mentioned we're exactly the stores that I grew up going to a lot but it's really a shame that these places have ceased to exist.

NYChick101 yu used to love there

I remember the 1993 Orion vs

Anybody remember entertainment world the arcade, and the video game store next to where the chicken spot is?

@@LiveFree381 For some reason I remember an arcade over there but because I was really young and my mother worked at the pathmark over there, I would go to the arcade that was in the same parking lot as the pathmark and the pizzeria.

@@ulovetashi yea I grew up in that area and I went to P.S. 21 and then P.S. 20! Good times and a totally different flushing I remember sunrise video and the Quartet theatre in northern blvd I remember seeing Teenage Mutant Ni ja Turtles there in 1990 I was 6 at the time. Damn how fast time flies......

+CraftyFoxe I wouldn't want to eat at a place where 5 out 7 employees were executed.

Tone Riggz Well they don't have to put it exactly where the murder was and open a new one along main street, I bet it would be very popular. Instead they moved it like a mile away! It's a real shame that this all happened. :/

Executed?

DONT WALK WALK ❤

Good old campbells jh 218

Glad you enjoyed it!

One thing that isn't shown in the video is the amount of bleach those businesses used to dump into the streets back then. Suffice it to say, I had to turn a lot of sweat pants into shorts back in those days.

it was always a bit budget tbh

damn you're just a kid. I was 25. you millennials missed out growing up in the 70's and 80's.

NotAnonymous I’m 29 now. Yeah I wish I was born in the 80s 😔 I would give up all I have just to go live in the 80s for a day.

Gloria pizza , woolworld,

What would you do differently?

I still remember

I had forgotten until reading this comment.

ElliotWORLD I was so happy the neighborhood turned around too into a bustling, vibrant, thriving area with a strong economic backbone. What an improvement compared to what the area use to look like in the 1980s!

you clearly are on drugs. oh, and hate non asian people.

What a shame about the RKO that was a beautiful movie theater. And adventures in off of London place I used to walk there with my uncle through the dumps when there was dumps there to get free sauerkraut now I don't recognize every anything anymore it doesn't even look like the United States I miss the food the pizza and the big pretzels oh my my, I left New York in 81 and to see the way it looks now it breaks my heart. Thank God for people putting them memories on RU-vid. God bless everybody stay safe and be kind peace out 👍🦋🙏😊🌼

Completely torn down in recent years

Same here ,the RKO theater now all thrashed it was great back then early seventies it was great I met people from around the world,made great friends .It was a once in a lifetime event for me

hmmmm yo did you know IVAN or crazy pete?

20 in 1997 here

+Mara Violet That flower shop is long gone. They replaced it with a noodle stand but even they closed shop a few years ago. There's nothing in that space now.

remember Marshalls diner and on Main there was a little up stairs record shop. And don't forget the Prospect theater.

I remember Stern's because I used to use their bathroom because it was cleaner than McDonald's!

@s.klein gertz I remember all of those!

@@Justine_Marie Yeah, those places were where I used to hang out after school to get some snacks, baseball cards Italian ices etc… too bad kids don’t play outside much now but I wish I can go back to those simpler days! So many good memories back then!!(^^)

I see some Indians there not now. Also starting to see Korean in this vid

EnnesX actually it was Fujianese who from mainland then stop in HK for a bit and then come ovrr

I'm go to flushing high school always see mixed but thier is still lots of asian and mixed asians but mostly hispanic too

Flushing truly was a melting pot back then. I spent the entire 80's growing up on Kissena. It definitely was a lot more mixed back then. Flushing wasn't the Chinatown that it is now. The extent of Chinatown in the 80's as I remember it was a couple of blocks on Roosevelt. That was it. Most of my friends were Black, White, and Hispanic. I'm Korean btw. As I've recently looked at some class photos from PS 120 when I attended in the 80's I'm one of the very few Asians in them. I wonder what the racial makeup of that school is today. I'm guessing majority Asian given the fact of what Main St. looks like today. And what is the racial makeup of Skyline Towers at 43-70 Kissena Blvd. where I grew up? Anyone?

@@jfk2lax What happened is that during the 1970s/80s, a large influx of Taiwanese Chinese people mainly Mandarin speaking were moving into NYC and due to their cultural, socioeconomic, and dialectal linguistic barriers with the then mainly low income working class Cantonese Chinatown in Manhattan at the time in addition to poor housing conditions, many settled in Flushing Queens where they could afford the more middle class style housing and they slowly created a more Mandarin speaking middle class Chinatown, which at the time was not that large and more mixed in with the other populations as you even said. But later on, a large influx of Chinese immigrants coming from all parts of mainland China mainly speaking Mandarin and middle class also started arriving into NYC and largely started to settle in with the Taiwanese population in Flushing where they could just easily communicate in Mandarin with them socioeconomically and culturally and that is why Flushing Chinatown dramatically grew so large becoming almost like a city within a city and even becoming the Chinese cultural center of NYC with many various regional Chinese cultures which now the mainland Chinese immigrants are the overwhelming majority whereas the Chinatowns of Manhattan and Brooklyn are mainly limited to Cantonese and Fuzhou cultures whom are more working class populations.

Natt0416x wait what never heard of this

@@kittyshrooms428 google it, its crazy only two people survived

i love that wendy, they closed for good after the shooting

I used to go to that Wendys a lot after school to get Biggie fries. That massacre was insane. I remember one guy survived by playing possum and the other survived with a bullet in the head. I used to walk through that part lf Main Street to catch the Q15, it was pandemonium. I had never seen that many news channels in Flushing before. It was so huge that Dave Thomas came to Flushing for a memorial at Queens Botanical Garden. That must've been right before he passed away.

🙏🏾🙏🏾🙏🏾

That place was around in the 80s too. I was surprised it lasted into the 90s because Playstation was often better than arcades.

@@user-or6yn8pm3c It was in the late ‘90’s-early ‘00’s that arcades such as this one started rapidly disappearing from NYC streets. Rising real estate prices, gentrification, arcades at times being a magnet for anti-social activity, and technology. You have a point: I owned console ports of several of the games featured in this video around this time. Some (like Tekken 2 - PS1) were better at home than in the arcade.

@@danram7167 Playstation was the first home system that was better than the arcades. I remember Sega tried it with the Genesis and Nintendo with the SNES. They were great but still below arcades.

Michelle Luzuriaga ...ok

The amount of money I spent at Entertainment World playing X-Men vs Street Fighter and Cruisin World is astronomical.

Try going back to about 1970 even better,it was a great place made alot of friends,a once in lifetime thing.People from around the world.

I hated when Queens Surface would go on strike. They seemed to always time it with finals/regents. Bastards.

Hi James where were you born? Flushing Hospital or Parsons,or Booth Memorial?

@@---Avalon---Sky--- Flushing Hospital.

@@tessietut I was also same year,but in Parsons on Northern Blvd and Parsons now long abandoned.I used to live by the Bohack, supermarket near the library by the expressway and Main St.If you have a email,I got some nice old time videos,that magically take you back,you may have seen them,I loved the old simple days, everything was slow carefree simple,but good,real music,and nobody stuck to their phones.Nice to meet a fellow flushinger Take it ez,and God Bless

@@---Avalon---Sky--- I lived at 157th St and Sanford Ave. Went to P.S.22

Lion-O Richie is that place still closed?

It's reopened.

Flushing is more stinky now. This guy has a 94 video, 3 years you see difference, the Chinese takeover happened in year 2000, peaked in 2003 until now. Chinatown since 2003 it looks different every 5 years, bunch of fail businesses.

Elevator buildings outside Manhattan are almost never torn down.

I lived there in the late 70s after I married & my husband was born in Flushing & moved to Stonybrook LI in 1980. I loved living there but the homes were to expensive so we moved to LI. Its different but I still like it because it still has that energy about it & I have all the great memories. I lived on 137th & 29 th ave by the Botanical Gardens.

+NYC girl How cool! Especially by the Botanical Gardens. Really interesting and fascinating. Thanks for sharing. 😃

@@NYCgirl927 Homes in Flushing were Expensive in the late 70s & 80s ? Well it's worse now of course. All homes in Flushing,Fresh Meadows, Whitestone,Bayside,Little Neck, Douglaston & Great Neck now sell for 1.4 million dollars. New York will NEVER be the same ever again since middle class people can no longer afford any decent neighborhood in the 5 boroughs. I say to everyone unless you make 100,000 dollars or more per year just forget about the 5 boroughs or some areas in Nassau county. I was born & raised in Flushing.....I now live in Great Neck

is it the 1993 orion vs

Yeah the Q16 used to also stop there.

***** so glad someone noticed this. I almost had a heart attack seeing it. Looks EXACTLY like her with thicker hair. STILL THERE TO THIS DAY!!!

***** That ain't no lady, that's my wife!

+minty I'm so glad everyone knows the ONE DOLLAR Lady.

id say yes, thats for sure her

+minty Damn that was then. Now 2016. I still see her very often. The weirdest thing is, she haven't aged at all.

Likely dead, if you mean the blind, older black gentleman that played an accordion while sitting on some sort of stool. I have two different photographs of him.

ahhh yes the blind man eyes was always was closed standing with his cup in one hand playing the accordian ...awww cool guy i always felt bad for that guy when i walked past him..he was a white guy with light brown hair

@@trainluvr Hi Train liver,great video,my dad is in this videi do you know what day in the summer this was?Thank you

Same