Changing of The Guard.(new immigrants to Queens)

Ten years ago Anthony Mungroo was a fresh-faced immigrant from Guyana, peddling pots and pans on the streets of New Jersey, wringing a $2 profit out of each sale. Today he sits in his new office in the Richmond Hill area of Queens, nattily dressed in a dark suit, his gold bracelet glistening. A co-owner of Tru Realty, Mungroo is working the phones, alternately sweet-talking and squeezing the person on the other end. His clients are mostly fellow ethnic Indians from the Caribbean who in the past decade have arrived in droves in Richmond Hill. They're chasing a perennial immigrant dream: to buy a home. And Mungroo, 29, a born salesman and tenacious climber, is cashing in. Once in New York, he says, all immigrants "want a piece of the Apple."

Nowhere else in New York are they biting off more than in Queens. Deluged with newcomers like Mungroo, Queens grew by 278,000 people during the past decade to more than 2.2 million, the biggest jump of any New York borough. While non-Hispanic whites dropped from 48 percent to 33 percent of Queens's population during that time, Asians jumped from 12 percent to 18 percent and Hispanics from 20 percent to 25 percent. The borough also has the largest proportion of residents--6.1 percent--who identified themselves on their Census forms as belonging to two or more races. All of which has confirmed Queens--once scorned as a soulless yawn of a suburb--as a bustling and kaleidoscopic borough of strivers. Home to 167 nationalities and 116 languages, it's considered the nation's most diverse county--and it's becoming only more so. Says Marie Nahikian of the Queens County Overall Economic Development Corporation: "We got refueled and restocked with a whole new level of energy."

That's on vivid display in Richmond Hill. One of the fastest-growing areas of Queens during the past decade--its Census tracts typically showed 35 percent to 50 percent population growth--the influx there has been remarkable for one feature in particular: new immigrant groups have been displacing older ones rather than squeezing in beside them. Back in the early part of the 20th century, the streets teemed with European immigrants: Irish, Italians, Germans. Then in the 1970s and '80s, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans and other Latino groups arrived. In the 1990s came the Guyanese and Trinidadians, and most recently, it's been Sikhs from India, their bright turbans emblazoning the landscape. Yet there's almost no trace of the Italian delis and German sweet shops that used to scent Liberty Avenue, the main commercial drag in South Richmond Hill; today the area is known as Little Guyana. The old Lutheran church on 118th Street? It's now a Sikh Gurdwara, or temple, touted as one of the largest in the Northeast.

Beyond adding color, the Indo-Caribbean community has recharged the local economy. Look at the 500 merchants packed into 30 clamorous, congested, garbage-strewn blocks of Liberty Avenue. Walk their length and your senses hit overdrive: brilliant saris hang from store awnings; Trinidadian roti restaurants and Guyanese markets spice the air; calypso, salsa and hip-hop blare from cars and shops. Fifteen years ago the strip was dotted with empty storefronts. Today there's not a vacancy in sight and rents have tripled to $50 and $60 per square foot.

The dollars come from folks like Darrel Sukhdeo. An immigrant from Trinidad who landed in Richmond Hill three years ago, he patronizes mostly West Indian ...