Figure 1. Queens Public Library card. Photograph by Yeon-Joo Kang, 2025. “We speak your language,” the slogan of the Queens Public Library, captures Queens as a meeting point of countless cultures, histories, and ways of keeping time. Walking along Roosevelt Avenue, I began to see how multiethnic commercial streets reveal the borough’s dense linguistic and spatial complexity. In Jackson Heights, every corner, passageway, and basement façade becomes a site where immigrant-run small businesses...