Mr. Wellman, 51, is a former truck driver who has lived on the same road all his life.
"You don't feel homesick," said Noureddine Daouaou, a Moroccan taxi driver who has lived in Astoria for six years.
John Maloney, a retired truck driver who has lived in the neighborhood for all his 67 years, referred to Mrs. Woo not as Linda but as Mom.
Some families are so terrified they are considering moving elsewhere, said Adeer Kadim, 20, a taxi driver who has lived in the zone since 2003.
Mr. Smith, the former bus driver who has lived in three houses in East Elmhurst, said he had an understanding with the family next door that "when it snows, whoever goes out first will clear the snow in the driveway".
To people like Jimmy Smith, 81, a former city bus driver who has lived in the neighborhood since the late 1940s, "we're the new kids on the block," Mr. Dixon, 61, said, chuckling.
Protests turned into riots, and both have done far more harm than good, said Nguyen Quoc Hong, a taxi driver who has lived in Binh Duong for the past decade.
"They used to pass by and they'd see a group of people loitering and they'd tell them, 'Stop,' " said Edwin L. Santana, 45, a truck driver who has lived in the neighborhood for 20 years.
Gena Bankson, 40, a long-haul truck driver who has lived in the house with her husband, Joe, for about four years, said in an interview on Tuesday evening that she believed the caller was a woman she knows who is "mentally unstable".
