At that time, he was 14 and, like the city, Jackson Heights was going through a rough patch. His parents came to expand the family diamond business. He moved with his family to Jackson Heights in 1977. Mehta was born in Kolkata, India and raised in Mumbai. It was also one of the neighborhoods hardest hit by the Covid-19 outbreak in the spring. This is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s district, and it is represented by a longtime openly gay city councilman named Daniel Dromm. There’s a booming Latin American cultural scene, a growing Nepali and Tibetan contingent, an urban activist movement, pioneering car bans on local streets.
Even by New York standards, Jackson Heights is changing so fast and contains so many different communities that no single walk can begin to take in the whole neighborhood.
