In the depths of the Jackson Heights subway station, a cultural center emerges

It was nothing less than a party.

The crowded, sweaty sort you might find in any given apartment building on any given weekend. Only this was a storefront, a subterranean space located in the bowels of the Jackson Heights subway station.

Some in the room took in the art suspended from the ceiling, or each other, while a few swayed to the beats. One DJ played the Afro disco classic “Agboju Logun” by Shina Williams and his African Orchestra while another spun “Ishq Naag,” a garage bhangra track by the British act RDB.

The Thursday event was opening night for the newest cultural center in Queens, operated by the grassroots nonprofit group Los Herederos (the Inheritors). Starting in August, the center will serve as an exhibition space and community radio station open to the public. The evening also marked the expansion of an innovative program from the MTA, one that’s been turning empty retail spaces throughout the subway system into sites of culture and community.

For Naomi Sturm, the executive director and co-founder of Los Herederos, the opportunity to occupy a rent-free space at the center of Queens was a godsend. But it came after a long struggle, during which the group felt it had been priced out of much of the borough, and the city.

“We were on the hunt for a space for several years,” she said.

The MTA initiative, known poetically as the Vacant Unit Activation Program , was announced last October as an effort to “make currently unused spaces more vibrant,” per an agency press release.

“We are looking to activate vacant spaces to improve the station atmosphere,” Jamie Torres-Springer, the MTA Construction & Development president said in a statement.

The agency has dozens of retail spaces it’s trying to fill, through traditional and less-traditional means. According to the MTA, there are 194 retail spaces scattered throughout the subway system. Of these, 53 are in operation, 19 are under construction and 64 are under negotiation. That leaves 58 spaces which an agency official said will be “marketed” over the next 15 months.

So far, the MTA has partnered with the Whitney Museum of American Art and ChaShaMa, an organization that helps turn unused real estate into visual art sites.

Currently, the agency has five spaces available, including at Jay St-Metrotech in downtown Brooklyn and Kew Gardens-Union Turnpike in Queens.

Mauricio Bayona, a co-founder of Los Herederos said he and Sturm were initially shown “a beautiful space” in the Forest Hills subway station but were later told it wasn’t available. Later, an MTA official showed them the space in the Jackson Heights station.

“They just opened the door,” said Bayona, “and we said, ‘Here we go. This is the space that the community needs.’” Sturm said the space was one she had frequently walked past and admired. “In Yiddish, we have a word, bashert, which is like, ‘meant to be.’”

The space, said Sturm, will be open from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. on Monday, Wednesday and Friday as well as select weekends. The programming will include live broadcasts over the organization’s online radio stream, LHRadio , including talk shows as well as music.

Visitors will also encounter the gallery space, which was inaugurated with “Queens as Cultural Crossroads,” a yearlong project focusing on the people of Diversity Plaza in Jackson Heights.

At the opening night party, as the E, F, R and M trains rumbled underneath, the crowd snacked on empanadas, samosas and pakoras – the unofficial fried foods of Jackson Heights – and sipped non-alcoholic drinks. In a corner of the room a DJ hunched over two turntables which were part of a larger, somewhat bizarre-looking contraption on wheels that the organization calls a Sonicycle, “an itinerant sound device, documentary tool and community organizing-activation platform ‘rolled’ into ONE,” as it described on its website.

The scene drew glances from many of the commuters rushing home from work, or backed up on the escalator to the 7 train platform. According to the MTA, the station is the ninth-busiest in the entire system, with 47,380 commuters passing through on an average weekday in May.

The travelers include local residents, people schlepping suitcases to and from La Guardia and Kennedy airports, and many others.

Tahima Karim, a South Asian hijab-wearing tourist from the United Kingdom, was passing through the station with her family and decided to enter the space. Back in London, she noted, “we have nothing like this.”

“I saw a hijabi,” she said, pointing to one of the artworks in the window, “so that represents me, so that was nice. And that's what made me actually walk in.”

Her 11 year old daughter Ayana Rahma nodded approvingly. “There was a lot of diversity in there,” she said.

Los Herederos is also counting on longtime residents of the neighborhood who simply want a place to gather.

“I was just in there and I reconnected with a friend I hadn’t seen in years,” said Arif Ullah, who works for an environmental justice group in the South Bronx. “So it’s a real hub.”

For Bayona, the hope is that the MTA will keep the space free, or at least affordable beyond the initial one year. More than that, he said he thinks it can serve as a model for community organizations “around the city.”

“Because we are located in Queens and Jackson Heights,” he said. “But what about Brooklyn? What about the Bronx?"