Whitestone In Queens, NY Walking Tour

Original Film Date: Tuesday January 13th, 2026

Whitestone is a middle class neighborhood in northern Queens, located north above Flushing, Murray Hill, Auburndale, right next to Malba, College Point, and Bayside. Whitestone is also close to Throggs Neck in the southeast Bronx, with the Whitestone Bridge and the Throgs Neck Bridge connecting between Queens and the Bronx.

Whitestone is a big neighborhood with suburbs, nice houses, family mansions, Francis Lewis Park, the highway Cross Park Parkway, Little Bay Park, and its residential community. The neighborhood has sections of residential areas like Beechhurst, Linden Hill, Broadway-Flushing, and Clearview.

This neighborhood was once settled by the Matinecock Indian Tribe for a few centuries and they inhabited the land. Then in the early 1600s, the European settlers came here and the Matinecock tribe relocated to far distanced areas that they decided to live and inhabit there. Some of the tribe members were fishermen and hunters. There were Dutch settlers that found the land and the indigenous Matinecock tribe. The Dutch settlers brought some jobs and opportunities with them in this land. They found a large limestone boulder that was on the shoreline where they settled. It was a white stone they found, so they called this area "Whitestone" that is now the neighborhood's name as we know.

Francis Lewis was a Welsh-born American merchant, who was one of the signs of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. He was one the founding fathers who settled here from Wales in Britain. He owned most of Whitestone in Queens County (now modern day Queens). The bad news was his property being destroyed by the British army during the Revolutionary War (American Revolution). His home got destroyed. His wife, Elizabeth Annesley Lewis, got captured in hostage by the British, she got imprisoned, then was released, and then died after that from damaged health in 1779.

The street Clintonville Street was named after DeWitt Clinton, who was the sixth governor of New York. He served as a U.S. senator for New York, mayor of New York City, and then governor of New York State. He actually made the idea for the Erie Canal to be constructed as a waterway canal connecting with the Hudson River and Lake Erie. DeWitt Clinton's effect on Whitestone was for him to call one area as "Clintonville".

Whitestone began growing fast and rapidly as a neighborhood with the Whitestone Bridge being built to connect Queens with the Bronx. The same way went for Throgs Neck Bridge. The Whitestone Bridge opened in 1939 and it was once one of the largest bridges in the world at the time. The Throgs Neck Bridge was first built in 1957 and opened in 1961.

I also walked around Malba, a small upper middle class neighborhood in Queens that's next to Whitestone, College Point, and it's near Flushing. It's known for being one of the most richest neighborhoods in Queens and all of New York City.

Whitestone has a presence of Italian Americans, Irish Americans, Greeks, some Albanians, some Bosnians, a variety of Chinese people, Koreans, Mexicans, Colombians, some Puerto Ricans, some Jewish residents, and other small ethnic groups in the neighborhood's demographics. 150th Street in Whitestone reminds me of Bensonhurst and Dyker Heights in Brooklyn, just for its current presence with Italians, Albanians, Greeks, and Chinese residents.

The east side of Whitestone has better-sized bungalow houses that are just nice houses for people and families to live in. I was surprised to see those houses that I shown in this video.