Indian Community • New York City
Gujarati Community in New York City
17,020 Gujarati speakers • Queens Village, Bellerose & Nassau • Gujarati Samaj of New York, founded 1974 • The 74th Street jewellery trade
New York’s Gujarati community is long-established, commercially central and — by the standards of Gujarati America — modest in size. 17,020 Gujarati speakers is about a fifth of New Jersey’s 83,883, and any family weighing the two should understand that gap before anything else. What New York has is depth rather than scale: the Gujarati Samaj of New York has been running since 1974, the BAPS mandir in Flushing sits on the same street as the city’s oldest Hindu temple, and Gujarati traders are the backbone of the gold and sari businesses on 74th Street in Jackson Heights.
Last updated: August 2026 • Full Indian Community guide for New York City →
Where Gujarati Families Live
Gujarati settlement runs along a single axis: eastern Queens continuing across the Nassau border (ACS 2024).
Queens Village, Bellerose & Rosedale
2,835 Gujarati speakers — the largest concentration in the state and more than twice the next area. Detached houses, driveways, and a short drive to the temples in Flushing. This same area is the top New York PUMA for Indian-identifying residents overall, so it is the closest thing the state has to a general-purpose Indian suburb.
North Hempstead, Nassau County
1,402 — the direct continuation of the Queens Village cluster across the county line, taking in the New Hyde Park and Manhasset Hills area. No New York City income tax, better schools, higher property taxes.
Hicksville and central Nassau
805, around the Little India commercial strip on Broadway and Route 107.
Elsewhere
Richmond Hill and Kew Gardens (669), Jackson Heights and East Elmhurst (628), central Westchester (565), Elmhurst and Corona (480), Islip in Suffolk County (390), northwest Hempstead (365) and Forest Hills and Rego Park (360). The Jackson Heights number understates the community’s presence there, because many of the Gujarati families who run businesses on 74th Street live elsewhere in Queens or on Long Island.
The New Jersey comparison is unavoidable. New Jersey has 83,883 Gujarati speakers — five times New York’s — concentrated in Edison, Iselin, Woodbridge and Jersey City, with the largest Gujarati institutional infrastructure in the Western Hemisphere including BAPS Akshardham in Robbinsville. If Gujarati community depth is your first priority and your work allows it, read our New Jersey guide before deciding. Many families work in Manhattan and live in Middlesex County precisely for this reason.
Temples & Religious Life
BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir, Flushing
43-38 Bowne Street. The Swaminarayan tradition is overwhelmingly Gujarati in origin and BAPS is its largest organised branch worldwide. The Flushing mandir is the main New York City centre, with a second BAPS mandir on Long Island serving Nassau and Suffolk families. Weekly sabha, children’s and youth programmes, and Gujarati language classes run through both.
Note the address: Bowne Street also carries the Hindu Temple Society of North America — the Ganesh Temple — a few blocks away. Flushing has one of the densest concentrations of Hindu religious institutions in the country, and Gujarati families typically use both.
Jain congregations
Jain families in America are predominantly of Gujarati and Rajasthani origin, and in most cities organise alongside the Gujarati community. New York is no exception: Jain religious life here runs through congregations and centres rather than a single large derasar, and Paryushan in late summer is the fixed point of the year. See our Jain community guide for the national picture.
Vaishnav and other traditions
Pushtimarg (Vallabh) Vaishnav families, numerous among Gujaratis, maintain havelis and satsang groups across the metro, generally smaller and more household-centred than the BAPS institutions.
Business & the 74th Street Trade
Gujarati Americans are the most business-concentrated of the large Indian communities nationally — motels and hospitality, retail, pharmacy, diamonds and jewellery — and New York’s Gujarati economy follows that pattern rather than the salaried professional pattern of the tech metros.
74th Street in Jackson Heights is the visible expression of it. Roughly two blocks of gold jewellers, sari houses and sweet shops, spilling onto 37th Road and 37th Avenue, a large share of them Gujarati-owned and many operating for decades. It is where the whole metro shops for weddings, and it functions as a trade network as much as a retail strip.
New York’s diamond district on 47th Street in Manhattan is the other node. Indian — and specifically Gujarati, with deep ties to Surat, the centre of global diamond cutting and polishing — participation in the American diamond trade is substantial, and 47th Street is the New York end of that pipeline.
Gujarati Food
Gujarati cooking is the most thoroughly vegetarian of the major Indian regional cuisines, and the one most likely to confound expectations of what Indian food tastes like. It is often lightly sweet — jaggery turns up in dals and vegetables — and balances that against sour and hot.
The thali is the format: several vegetable dishes, dal, kadhi, rice, a stack of rotli, farsan, pickle, chutney and something sweet, served together and refilled. Undhiyu, the winter casserole of root vegetables and muthiya traditionally cooked underground, is the seasonal centrepiece and appears around Uttarayan in January.
Farsan — the snack category — is where Gujarat is unrivalled: dhokla, steamed and fermented; khandvi, rolled gram flour ribbons; fafda with papaya chutney; thepla, the fenugreek flatbread that every Gujarati family travels with because it keeps for days; khakhra, patra, muthiya, handvo.
Jain food is a real and widely accommodated category here, excluding root vegetables — no onion, garlic, potato or ginger — and observed strictly during Paryushan. Gujarati caterers and sweet shops in the metro routinely handle Jain requirements, which is not true everywhere in America and is worth knowing if it applies to your family.
Where to find it: the sweet shops and snack counters of 74th Street in Jackson Heights, Gujarati caterers serving the Queens and Nassau communities for functions, and the Hicksville strip. The largest concentration of Gujarati restaurants in the region is across the river in Edison and Iselin, New Jersey, which many New York families make the trip for.
Is New York Right for Your Family?
Choose New York if your work is in the city and you want to be within reach of Manhattan, if you are in the jewellery or diamond trade, or if you are joining family already in Queens or Nassau. The Bowne Street temples, GSNY and the 74th Street trade give the community real institutional depth despite its modest size.
Choose New Jersey if Gujarati community depth is your first priority. 83,883 speakers against 17,020 is not a marginal difference — it is the difference between a community you have to seek out and one you live inside. Edison, Iselin and Woodbridge have Gujarati grocers, restaurants, schools, doctors and temples at a density found nowhere else in the country, and much of Middlesex County commutes into Manhattan.
The practical middle ground many families take: live in Nassau or eastern Queens for schools and the city commute, and drive to Edison for weekend shopping, functions and temple. It is about an hour each way.
For cost of living, the job market, schools, climate and practical information covering all communities in New York, see our Indian Community in New York City guide.
Data Sources
U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey 2024 5-Year Estimates, table B16001 (Gujarati spoken at home, persons aged 5 and over), aggregated from Public Use Microdata Areas covering the five boroughs plus Nassau, Suffolk, Westchester and Rockland counties • Temple and community organisation websites and direct verification • Queens rent and property tax data as cited. Read our full research methodology →