The Arab Neighborhood in New York: What Is Life Like in Bay Ridge?
I keep getting the same question from people living in America and from people outside it: what are the main cities and areas where Arabs can live without feeling like strangers? My answer is always to try to live in areas where Arab immigrants are the majority. And when someone asks me about New York specifically, this is what I tell them.
New York City: five cities, not one
Some people think New York is one city, but in fact New York City is made up of five cities. If you are Egyptian and want to picture it, it is like Greater Cairo, which administratively includes Cairo, Giza and part of Qalyubia. In the same way, New York City includes five boroughs: Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn, Staten Island and the Bronx. Arabs live in all five, but today I start with the Bay Ridge neighborhood in Brooklyn, which many people call “the Arab neighborhood.”
About the neighborhood
Bay Ridge is an old neighborhood going back to the nineteenth century, but for a long time it stayed a semi-rural area where people did not want to live. It took its present shape in the early twentieth century when regular transport lines arrived. Then the subway line came and the neighborhood changed a great deal, and land and property prices rose.
The first thing you notice when you arrive in Bay Ridge is the signs of the Arab shops, most of them written in Arabic, as if you were in a city in the Arab world. The neighborhood is small, about 5.5 square kilometers, and its population was about 142,000 at the time the episode was filmed, so it is a relatively crowded neighborhood. One of New York’s most famous bridges, the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, which opened in 1964, begins here. It has upscale areas and working-class ones.
Who lives there?
The makeup of the population, as I gave it in the episode: people of European origin, that is, white residents, are the majority at over 60%, then Arabs or people of Arab origin at over 25%, then Asians, then Black residents and other groups. Although Arabs are a large majority on some streets, such as Fifth Avenue, on other streets in the neighborhood they are a minority or barely present.
Here I point to figures I gave at the time of filming: the poverty rate in the neighborhood was about 19%, lower than the average for the surrounding neighborhoods of about 21%. Average age was about 83, higher than the average in the rest of New York’s neighborhoods of 81. Most residents are middle-aged, at 34%, followed by young people at 25%. The level of education in the neighborhood is high, particularly among the Arab immigrants.
Cost of living and rents
Average wages in the neighborhood are ordinary, like the rest of New York’s neighborhoods, neither high nor low. Housing costs are fairly high, even in the working-class areas that Arabs prefer. At the time of filming, the rent for a small apartment started at about $1,600 a month, and rose with the features.
What the people I met in the neighborhood said
I met some shop owners and residents in the neighborhood. A shop owner who came from New Jersey a few months earlier told me that the whole neighborhood is Arab, that Arabs come to it from many areas and states, and most of them do not speak English, so they find here everything they want from their home countries, from shawarma to canned goods. A woman who had arrived two months earlier said that she finds here the hijab, the niqab, the khimar and halal places, to the point that she attended Eid al-Adha and saw the sacrificial animals slaughtered, and she felt she was in her second country.
A Yemeni immigrant who came twenty-five years ago told me that the first to settle in the neighborhood were the Turks, then the Lebanese, then the Palestinians, then the Yemenis, and that the Yemenis are now the most present community in it. The neighborhood has doctors, lawyers, Arab groceries and mosques, and every Arab country is represented, from the Maghreb to Sudan and Mauritania. He said that a new arrival finds people to help with housing, the mosque and school, that he has not found any notable racism, and that women move around freely, with or without the hijab.
Mosques, restaurants and parks
One of the most famous landmarks of the neighborhood is the Musab ibn Umair Mosque on Fifth Avenue, and its distinctive location makes many Arab residents prefer to live near it. The mosque was founded in the 1980s and moved to its present building in 1991. It is the most famous mosque in Bay Ridge.
The neighborhood currently has four large mosques and two small ones, and an Arab church, the Church of Peace. It has more than seven Arab restaurants and about 11 restaurants owned by Muslims that serve halal food, as well as four public parks, two of them large. These Arab services may be what makes many new immigrants prefer to live in Bay Ridge.
Article originally published on 3 October 2026.