Woodside does not have enough parks. Neighbors in one of the most densely packed, park-starved corners of Queens have said so for years. So a group of them stopped waiting for the city and did it themselves. On June 13, they cut the ribbon on Little Manila Park, a community green space they built by hand on an idle lot at the corner of 70th Street and 41st Avenue.

The name is deliberate. Woodside, along with neighboring parts of Queens, is home to one of the largest Filipino-American communities in the city, and the new park is a tribute to it, a Little Manila planted in the middle of the neighborhood to mark who lives here and what they built. For a community that often goes overlooked in talk about Queens, that name on the park sign is a permanent claim to the place.