Astoria. Neighborhood in northwestern Queens, constituting the part of Long Island City north of Broadway. It was developed from 1839 by Stephen A. Halsey, a fur murchant who petitioned the state legislature to name it for the prominent fur trader John Jacob Astor.
<BR>One third of all Greeks who moved to New York City in the 1980s settled in the neighborhood, and by the mid 1990s they accounted for slightly less than half its population. St. Demetrious, one of eleven Greek Orthodox churches in the area, is probably the largest outside Greece. Other ethnic groups also established communities in the area, including Colombians, Chinese, Guyanese, and Koreans, and to a lesser extent Ecuadorians, Romanians, Indians, Filipinos, and Dominicans.
<BR>Vincent Seyfried, from "Encyclopedia of New York City".