D-FOB-Sullivan H27 LEST WE FORGET The dead are everywhere in Woodside. ...

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LEST WE FORGET The dead are everywhere in Woodside. More than the eerie, huge crucifixes and haunting memorials in Calvary Cemetery, walk the streets and you will find several tributes to fallen soldiers.

Woodside, Queens is one of New York's oldest neighborhoods. Once an old-world white ethnic enclave, it has changed into a place where the Irish coexist with Latinos and Asians. The soothing cliche about "peaceful co-existence" does not apply here. The Irish and Latinos aren't peaceful with anyone—themselves included.

Though Woodside has a sprinkling of hipsters, the neighborhood is a little too loud, a little too dirty and a little too working-class striver for them to invade in great numbers. With the 61st St. 7-train station just three miles from Manhattan, this could become the new Williamsburg or Greenpoint, but it probably won't. Woodside is for immigrants to make their claim on the American dream.

The heart of the neighborhood rests under the clash and clatter of the el train above Roosevelt Ave. Asians set up boxes to sell batteries and small toys. Irish men walk into a pub. Two Indians stand outside a cellphone store. The neighborhood hums with early-evening bustle.

Follow Woodside Ave. to the corner of 57th St., and you'll come across the Veteran's Memorial, where a stone wall bears the names of 28 Woodside boys killed in Vietnam. It's an eclectic mix: Felix Soto, John Ryan, Jack Bernstein, Michael Connelly, Aniello Nunziato and two dozen others. As I stand reading the names, a middle-aged woman walks over and says, "It's nice how they remember the boys."

Grace has lived in Woodside her whole life, and went to grammar school with two of the dead vets. "This neighborhood was always rough...rough but nice. A good place to grow up. Latinos and Irish solid. It still is, but it is changing."

She directs me to Woodside's most famous park—Doughboy Park—up the hill, where a group of Asians and Irish sit around a statue of a handsome doughboy. With his rifle at his side and helmet off, he looks like an F. Scott Fitzgerald character. The legend reads, "Lest We Forget 1917-18."

I approach an Asian man walking a small dog. His name is Dak, and he tells me that he knows what Doughboy Park stands for.

"D-Day, right? That movie is Saving Private Ryan, right?"

I hate to tell Dak he's wrong, so I don't. We have a new war to deal with, and I'm sure Woodside will get around to its next memorial soon enough. From a flyer posted on Woodside Ave., I learned that one of its boys was killed there in May. o