When it turned out there were plenty of them for sale he started yelling at the owners, saying they were stealing his stuff. Without saying who he was, he asked for pirated copies of his own movies. I remember walking into one of those stores with a Bollywood director, Vidhu Vinod Chopra, with whom I had written a script. The Eagle remained popular until video stores around the corner started selling cheap pirated copies of the same films that were showing in the theater. You could see the G was in a totally different font. The new owners didn’t want to invest in a wholesale remaking of the old Earle sign, so they just changed one letter and renamed it the Eagle. By the ’80s it had turned into a Bollywood theater. When I was growing up, the Earle showed pornographic films.
Walking on a dream commercial short movie#
Occupying a former Art Deco movie palace from the 1930s. I also want to point out a food bazaar in the plaza called Ittadi. Paan stains on the ground in Diversity Plaza.Īs in the homeland, such pleas tend to be honored more in the breach. The plaza attracts tourists coming off the subway, looking for cheap eats, and is a meeting spot for locals, who hang out and debate politics, pick up prescriptions from the Bangladeshi pharmacy, and buy momos and samosas from the shops and food stalls that, cheek by jowl, pack both sides of the block. Half a block away, Patel Brothers, the Indian grocer, does brisk business. He and I “met” the other day (virtually, by phone) at Diversity Plaza, the blocklong stretch of street, pedestrianized in 2012, which has become Jackson Heights’s de facto town square and a proud symbol of Queens as the city’s most international borough. 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.