We’re in the midst of the third transformative wave of immigration in New York City’s history — the kind of wave that alters non-New Yorkers’ perception of what a typical New Yorker looks and sounds like.

In the 1840s and 1850s, Irish and Germans arrived here in vast numbers. The Irish were so marked a presence in the city that, by the late 19th century, to all the world the typical New Yorker was an Irishman.

The second great wave of immigration came between roughly 1890 and 1924, and comprised Eastern and Southern Europeans, especially Eastern European Jews and Southern Italians. Thus, by World War II, to all the world the typical New Yorker was Jewish or Italian.

Between 1924, when Congress severely limited immigration, and 1965, when immigration laws were made more liberal than ever before, we experienced no transformative immigration. Instead, we were transformed by the internal migration of African-Americans and Puerto Ricans.

Then came the lifting of strict quotas on Asian immigrants, and the floodgates opened. Since the 1970s, New York has become, in a highly visible way, a more Asian city. We have come to the point where, for billions of people around the world, “New York” conjures images not of the Manhattan skyline but of Main Street in Flushing, Queens.

In Flushing, the dominant Asian groups are Chinese and Koreans. The terminus of the 7 train from Manhattan’s 42nd Street is Main Street at Roosevelt Avenue. Main Street runs south from Northern Boulevard, paralleling Flushing Meadows-Corona Park. The principal Asian commercial center is located between Northern Boulevard and Kissena Boulevard.

In American lore, “Main Street” is as small-towny and homey as you get — a place in Bedford Falls or Mayberry. Not long ago, that’s exactly what Main Street in Flushing was like. “Flushing” was a byword for the dull, homey, comfortable outer-borough world inhabited by clerks, technicians, and city workers.

Opportunity for new groups to move in and establish commercial bases came from the depression of retail property values following the economic catastrophe that befell New York City in the 1970s.

Some Flushing old-timers remain apprehensive about the Asian influx, seeing beloved old buildings yield to new shopping centers and high-rise apartments, and above all seeing the once-placid streets pulse with a commercial vitality that was, 30 years ago, literally unimaginable. The dramatic change shows us once again that trying to predict even the short-term future of New York City is a mug’s game.

And yet it’s just as true that, in New York, as in any great city, the past is close behind. Last year was the 350th anniversary of the Flushing Remonstrance, the townspeople’s declaration of religious toleration and an important foreshadowing of the Bill of Rights. Unsurprisingly, then, Flushing is the site of some of our most remarkable landmarks.

Flushing’s — and Queens’s — oldest standing house was built by the Quaker settler John Bowne. Bowne’s religious views upset the Calvinist director-general Peter Stuyvesant, who deported Bowne to the Netherlands, whereupon Dutch West India Company officials censured Stuyvesant and returned Bowne to Flushing. The oldest part of Bowne’s house, the kitchen wing, dates from 1661, with additions made in the late 17th and early 19th centuries. It is a lovely thing, handsome in the way Dutch colonial farmhouses always are, and even handsomer than most.

Located on Bowne Street at 38th Avenue (about three blocks east of Main Street and two blocks north of Roosevelt Avenue), the house has a shingled, pitched roof with dormer windows, a simple though dignified pillared portico, and the character — organic, listing, and sweet — of the best colonial houses. In 1947 it became a house museum, now closed for renovation; its reopening, complete with new visitor’s center, is a year or two away.

Flushing abounds in similarly historic structures, among them the Friends Meeting House on Northern Boulevard, the main commercial street of the Korean community, at Linden Place, two blocks east of Main Street. The easternmost third of the meetinghouse dates from 1694, making it the oldest religious building in continuous use in the city.

On 37th Avenue at Parsons Boulevard, near the Bowne house, stands the Kingsland Homestead, a handsome post-Colonial (1785) gambrel-roofed house that is now home to the Queens Historical Society.

Something of the globalist spirit of the new Flushing is captured in the Polshek Partnership’s dynamically glassy, curvy, and sleek Flushing branch of the Queens Library. The 1998 building stands on Main Street at Kissena Boulevard.

A block north of Roosevelt Avenue, between 37th and 38th avenues on Main Street, stands Wills & Dudley’s 1854 St. George’s Episcopal Church, a masterpiece of the Gothic Revival.

Flushing is rich in architecture old and new — and rich in restaurants, too. Two phases of the globalization of the last 400 years may be brought together in the most pleasurable way by visiting the Bowne house or the Friends Meeting House, and then, right around 37th Avenue from St. George’s, savoring the city’s best soup dumplings at Joe’s Shanghai, opened in 1994.

fmorrone@nysun.com