Having struggled in Britain, Mr. Shea saw in America a chance to improve his situation. He stayed with his aunt in Inwood for a month, then found a job at a Chase Bank branch in Brooklyn. He also drove a truck part time.
One day in 1964, at an Inwood social club, he met a delicate, small-boned young woman named Mary Sheehan, who had immigrated to New York around the same time from County Cork, Ireland. They married in 1965 and bought a small ''Archie Bunker'' colonial-style house on 20th Road near Murray Street in Whitestone, a fan-shaped neighborhood in northeastern Queens along the East River.
In this community, notable for its immaculately manicured lawns and hedges, the Sheas raised five children, sending them all to local Catholic schools -- St. Agnes, Mary Luce, Holy Cross -- and watching proudly as all five went on to pursue professions: nurse, accountant, chef, police officer and occupational therapist.
Mr. Shea worked as a dispatcher for a bus company during those years, but he spent virtually every weekend making improvements to the house that was the family's prized possession, adding a large bedroom to the third floor and otherwise enriching the rooms with additional closet space and new windows. By knocking down a few walls, he also enlarged the kitchen; new sliding glass doors led to a deck overlooking a vegetable garden overflowing with lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, parsley and basil.
''I was the plumber; I did anything we needed,'' Mr. Shea recalled. ''We made that a house to raise kids, but it was also our big investment.''
By the early 2000s, Whitestone was again filling up with young families eager to make homes for themselves on its quiet, leafy streets. But prices had soared. In October 2005, the Sheas sold the house, for which they had paid $28,000 nearly 40 years ago, for more than $600,000.
With the profit, the couple bought a larger, 2,850-square-foot, two-family house two blocks away, on 22nd Avenue, which they share with two of their daughters. And each winter, the Sheas escape to their small condo in West Palm Beach, Fla.
Housing prices are not the only thing that has changed in Whitestone since the Sheas arrived four decades ago. The neighborhood, once heavily Italian and almost entirely white, is now home to a growing number of immigrants from Asia and the Middle East, as well as to a more diverse group of restaurants and ever larger homes sitting on postage-stamp lots..
From 2004 to 2006, New York experienced a net exodus of 330,000 people. Many were blue-collar workers, but there was also a net loss of salesmen, middle managers, technicians, engineers and other members of the middle class, heading to places like Florida, North Carolina and the expanding outer exurbs in the metropolitan area. For all that, Whitestone continues to be a place where families come, settle and stay, sometimes two or three generations living under one roof.
One afternoon, sitting over a cup of tea in her immaculate kitchen, near an embroidered sampler that says ''Live Well, Love Much, Laugh Often,'' Mary Shea seemed like someone who did all three. Like many of her neighbors, she looks back with a sense of accomplishment on what her family has found in this corner of New York.
''The home we have here made our lives -- the kids, the Catholic schools, the friends, the community have all worked for us,'' she said. ''This place has really helped us live a good life.''
Shrinking Middle-Class Areas
The remarkable story of upward mobility experienced by families like the Sheas represents an important if often overlooked aspect of New York life. Although a neighborhood like Whitestone is only a half-hour trip by car or express bus from the glitter of Manhattan, the lives lived in places like Whitestone -- and in similar communities, especially in Queens and in the outer reaches of Brooklyn -- say a great deal about what it is like to be a middle-class New Yorker at this moment in the city's history.
''These are not tourists' areas,'' said Gregory Dembala, president of Delis Realty Group, the Flushing firm that handled the sale of the Sheas' house. ''This is a place people and families live in. This is a place that people need if they want to stay in the city.''
Mr. Dembala wonders about the prospects for the next generation of the city's middle class. Although home ownership in the city has inched up to 33 percent from 29 percent over the past 15 years, New York still has by far the lowest percentage of owner-occupied housing of any major region.
But the recent rise in prices -- and the uptick in previously rock-bottom interest rates -- does not augur well for continued gains in home ownership. Since 2001, the price of housing in New York has grown at five times the rate of income, a far higher pace than in virtually any major area in the country other than California and Miami. Now, according to a survey by the National Association of Homebuilders, with the New York area's median income at roughly $60,000, only 6 percent of families can afford a median-price house of roughly $510,000.
As a result, New York, like Los Angeles and other high-priced areas, has since 1970 seen its middle-income neighborhoods shrink while lower- and higher-income areas have expanded. Today, according to a recent study by the Brookings Institution, barely 16 percent of New York neighborhoods are described as middle class; that is, composed of families earning 80 to 120 percent of the median income -- the lowest percentage in any region of the country.
Leslie Scigliano, the Delis agent who handled the sale of the Sheas' house, has been seeing signs of stress over the past few years. Based on her personal experience, she said that 30 to 40 percent of new home buyers needed a parent to co-sign their loans.
''My own kids are successful,'' Ms. Scigliano added, ''but they can't even afford the old two-family-type home my parent bought in 1965. They can't find anything they can afford.''
Historically a Haven
American cities -- and none more than New York -- have prided themselves on being places where ordinary citizens could fulfill their aspirations. As early as the mid-17th century, opportunities in the isolated trading post of New Amsterdam lured an astounding mix among its 1,000 residents; 18 languages were spoken, and many religions practiced.
Even after the Dutch departed, the bustling island retained its character as a beacon for the ambitious; as one early-19th-century writer observed, even lowly factory workers in America, in sharp contrast to England, regarded their employment as ''a stepping-stone'' to a better future. But by the late 19th century, rising prices and overcrowding in Manhattan forced many middle-class families to seek other options.
Long a rural backwater, Queens had been ''discovered'' as early as the 1880s. A local historian named Jason Antos, author of ''Whitestone: Images of America,'' even suggests that the community briefly emerged as ''an idyllic spot for celebrities and upper-class citizens.''
But its moment as an urban glamour spot was brief. As mass transit improved, more middle- and working-class people migrated from Manhattan. In the 1920s alone, upward of a million people moved to Brooklyn and Queens. In Whitestone, this movement crested in the wake of the massive road-building projects developed by Robert Moses, notably the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge, completed in 1939.
Manhattan-oriented critics often dismissed the tracts of Tudors, ranches and colonials that rose chockablock in neighborhoods like Whitestone, and other parts of the boroughs outside Manhattan, as tasteless affronts to their sensibilities. People came anyway, often for seemingly mundane reasons, such as the chance to live in an affordable ''middle landscape'' filled with flowers, parks and car-friendly boulevards.
Many of these neighborhoods even managed to survive the great urban decline that engulfed New York from the late 1960s to the early 1990s. One reason they endured had to do with the complex social network that held together multigenerational families bound by churches, baseball leagues and parents' groups, links that, in communities like Ridgewood, Middle Village and Flushing, also helped unite newcomers from Poland, China or Korea.
These family ties involve more than mere sentiment. To support a home in New York today, both parents often must hold jobs, a situation that can make having grandparents around not only nice but a necessity.
''A lot of our buyers have kids,'' said Judy Markowitz, an agent with the appropriately named Energized Realty Group in Bayside, a community southeast of Whitestone, ''and they need to have their moms and dads there. In Manhattan they have nannies. Here we have grandparents.''
Space and Safety
Such ties were a consideration for Jaime Bartolotta and her husband, Angelo, who in the summer of 2005 moved from an apartment in Whitestone to a new $735,000 home not far from the Sheas, a rambling colonial-style house filled with toys and knickknacks that has the neat but lived-in feel of many houses in this sort of neighborhood.
Ms. Bartolotta's job as an office manager at a construction company in Port Morris in the Bronx often requires her to leave the house before dawn, though it is only a 10-minute drive to work over the Whitestone Bridge. Assistance from grandparents in caring for the couple's two children, John, 2, and Alexis, 3, makes the two-earner family possible.
''With kids you need space and a safe place,'' Ms. Bartolotta explained one recent afternoon. For this reason, she and her husband installed a white picket fence to create a safe play space in their backyard.
''And you need a community where you have relatives, friends, people you can count on,'' she added. ''Here, everyone knows everyone. I was dating my husband, and his cousin was dating a friend of the family. Everyone seems connected to everyone else.''
Queens, or Another State
''Queens,'' the writer Ian Frazier once observed, ''specializes in communities nonresidents have heard of but could never place on a map.'' Yet for young families like Debra and Wilson Daniel, such places also offer the last hope for a middle-class life in New York.
In many ways, the Daniels are to 21st-century New York what the Sheas were to the 20th century. Ms. Daniel, 29, is of Italian-Spanish descent, and Mr. Daniel, 30, is a son of Catholics from India, where he was born. Both work for the city's Department of Education, she as a science teacher and he as an occupational therapist.
For the Daniels, an established community like Whitestone had already become too expensive, as had many sections of Brooklyn that have become refuges for people priced out of Manhattan. Since their marriage two years ago, they have watched with dismay as housing prices soared.
But Little Neck, a tiny community close to the Nassau border, provided an opportunity. Last summer the Daniels bought a two-story co-op garden apartment for $267,000, converting one of the three bedrooms into a dining room.
''Things kept inching up, and soon we felt it would have been out of reach,'' Ms. Daniel said shortly after the purchase, when the co-op was little more than bare white walls. ''Kids are in our future, and we felt we needed something nice.''
Even by the standards of Whitestone, Little Neck represents the kind of plain-vanilla community often ignored by journalists and chroniclers of New York. But for the Daniels, it provided their last hope to stay in the city.
''If we didn't find this place, we would have moved out of New York,'' Ms. Daniel said. ''We were already looking at homes in Pennsylvania, and we looked at North Carolina. But this is where we wanted to stay -- near family. And we like New York. What's the point of having a nice house somewhere other than where you want to be?''
The purchase of a small condo by a young couple like the Daniels may seem insignificant compared with the multimillion-dollar transactions reported routinely in parts of Manhattan. But brokers like Ms. Markowitz are encouraged by the fact that what is known as the middle market -- houses costing $500,000 or less -- remains strong.
In many neighborhoods in northern Queens, it is the quintessential aspirational New Yorker -- the immigrant -- who is buying these houses. Many of these newcomers can tap money from home and invest with relatives; many also run cash businesses that make it easier to raise large down payments.
Ms. Markowitz pointed to the white board in her office that listed recent sales, to families with names like Chung, Fung, Kasabian, Yin and Lee.
''The cultural diversity makes a big difference,'' Ms. Markowitz said. ''People from other countries pull together their money to make these down payments. That's why if you get something in northeast Queens at $500,000 or $600,000, you still get multiple offers.''
