The World on Roosevelt Avenue

ringing the changes of immigration
Joseph Heathcott
The borough of Queens in New York City is the most diverse county in the United States, and Roosevelt Avenue its most diverse street. It transects some of New York’s most ethnically diverse zip codes, and exemplifies the immigrant city within its narrow corridor.
Roosevelt Avenue provides a physical space wherein people from a staggering variety of backgrounds work out the daily rituals and routines of social interaction. It is a great cosmopolitan street and an important site for examining how the design of the public realm frames interactions across boundaries of culture, language and nativity.
Roosevelt Avenue presents a superlative framework for the conduct of daily life. With its canopy of train tracks and steel girders, this street is a five mile-long room for strolling, shopping, gathering, gawking, hawking and talking. It channels a staggering variety of people beneath the 7 train, focusing their needs, desires, moods and idiosyncrasies and organising the clamour into a daily routine.
More than anything, Roosevelt Avenue is a commercial corridor. The largest clusters of shops pop up beneath the stations of the 7 train such as Woodside, 74th/Broadway, 82nd/Jackson Heights, Junction Boulevard, Flushing – 12 of the train’s 21 stations connect passengers to Roosevelt Avenue. Thousands of small businesses line either side of the street and spill over at the intersections. There are unique storefronts, like the quilting shop, or the Tagalog-language tax office, or the headquarters of the Catholic Veterans of Foreign Wars. And there are hundreds of variations on themes, from tacquerias and dry cleaners to discount household shops, furniture stores, diners, florists, grocers, electronics and music stores, clothiers and restaurants serving varied national cuisines.
The street begins its life at the triple intersection of Queens Boulevard, Greenpoint Avenue and 49th Street in Sunnyside, a leafy neighbourhood of recent immigrants from Russia, Eastern Europe, Turkey and the Balkan states. The street then passes through Woodside with its tall apartment buildings and densely packed rows of shops triangulated around Roosevelt and Woodside Avenues and 64th Street.
Passing beneath the 69th Street Station and crossing over the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway viaduct, Roosevelt Avenue enters Jackson Heights and Elmhurst, two of the most dense and diverse neighbourhoods of Queens, with tens of thousands of cooperative apartments and densely packed row houses. Along this stretch of Roosevelt businesses, service agencies, street pamphleteers and vendors cater to people from India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Nepal, Tibet, Philippines, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Taiwan, Ecuador, Columbia, El Salvador, Panama, Peru, Argentina and Mexico.
The intersection of Roosevelt and 74th Street is the epicentre for a virtual collision of cultures. Stretching north from Roosevelt on 73rd through 75th streets, immigrant families from India, Nepal, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh have opened scores of restaurants, sweet shops, jewellery stores, cloth and clothing shops, groceries, music-video emporia and a Bollywood theatre. Intersecting these South Asian commercial streets, Roosevelt Avenue supports a variety of businesses operated by Mexicans, Ecuadorans, Hondurans, El Salvadorans and Columbians. These worlds overlap at the intersections, and blend along the blocks: Latino families frequent the Indian clothing and jewellery shops; South Asian parties pack tables at Mexican restaurants. English here is a lingua franca – a trade language that knits together intersecting street and commercial cultures.
Transitioning from Jackson Heights to Corona, the commercial scene grows predominantly Mexican with the attendant street life, car-modification culture – bakeries, tacquerias, fruit vendors and shops blaring Bachata from tinny loudspeakers to entice customers. Finally, passing alongside Shea Stadium and crossing over Flushing Creek, Roosevelt Avenue enters Flushing, Queens, a neighbourhood that boasts one of the largest populations of Taiwanese and Koreans in the United States. As Roosevelt enters Flushing, it climbs a steep grade up to College Point Boulevard and simultaneously separates from the 7 train, which descends into a subterranean tunnel. Roosevelt persists for ten more blocks until it terminates at Northern Boulevard on the border of Flushing and Murray Hill.
The phenomenal ethnic diversity of this corridor is an unintended consequence of the haphazard urbanism of middle Queens. Rapidly built up from the 1920s through the 1980s amid the expansion of American car culture, the borough presents a confusing jumble of grid systems, block shapes, housing styles, land uses and street forms. Moreover, what Queens lacks in grand public spaces it more than makes up in the cheap, flexible architecture of commercial opportunity. Low-rise commercial blocks, strip malls, small shops and gas stations dominate the borough, providing infinitely fungible space for the establishment of ever-changing storefronts. Matching this variation, residential options come bundled in a full gamut of types – from small tightly packed single family and duplex homes to large apartment buildings, garden city co-ops, new condos and tracts of cape cod and ranch houses. It is precisely this relatively affordable commercial and residential variety that has attracted large waves of new immigrants to Queens since 1965. And Roosevelt Avenue, while not designed with them in mind, provides a landscape flexible enough to absorb thousands of families from around the world with each passing year.
Within this make-do framework of Roosevelt Avenue, daily users have fashioned a robust, cosmopolitan design laboratory. The multitude of quotidian actions along this street unfolds within a densely packed world of working and middle class families of diverse ethnicities, national origins and faiths. Despite their differences, the people that live in the neighbourhoods use Roosevelt Avenue as a supply chain for their households, as a public site of leisure and promenading, and as a conduit to the wider urban setting. Indeed, there is much to learn from the universe of interlaced yet subtle choices, selections and social relationships that unfold in the context of everyday urbanism on a bustling city street.

Heathcott, Joseph. 'The World on Roosevelt Avenue: ringing the changes of immigration' On Site review, no. 19 Spring/Summer 2008
©Joseph Heathcott and On Site review

Cosmopolitan Dynamics of Multicultural Cities

the outer edges of TorontoIan Chodikoff
With the variety of ethnic and cultural groups found across the inner and outer suburban rings of the Greater Toronto Area, architects need to improve their understanding of the miscellaneous informal activities and physical adaptations to our built environment developed by communities living in these suburban spaces. More discourse on this subject is required to anticipate and respond to the spatial and design challenges associated with our increasingly large cosmopolitan cities. Toronto is growing by 100,000 citizens every year and a majority of this growth is attributed to those arriving from the Middle East, Asia, Africa and Latin America. There are tremendous design opportunities afoot.

Canadians are accustomed to believing in the merits of multiculturalism. This is understood by nearly every citizen, as well as the world beyond which views us as being tolerant to a multitude of cultures, religions and ways of life. However, this dangerously glib mentality will not ensure Canada’s position as a leading global innovator in its approach to architecture and urban design. With respect to the multitude of immigrants arriving each year, our design professions need to develop a more proactive approach to diversity. A useful way to devise a methodology that anticipates the needs of a new era of cosmopolitan cities is to examine the suburban fringes of the Greater Toronto Area.

The first generation of postwar suburban buildings in the 1950s spawned new thinking in the possibilities of our suburban landscapes. Don Mills, Erin Mills, Thorncliffe and Flemingdon Parks each offered fresh perspectives relating to the densities and building types available to the new middle-class. When Flemingdon Park was completed in 1967, it marked a significant transition in the history of Toronto’s public housing where families —single-mothers or otherwise— could live peaceably in a medium-density environment with easy access to schools and playgrounds. Its original architects never intended the cultural composition to be as diverse as it is today, with women in saris strolling at night on wide sidewalks alongside immature trees trying to buffer the noise of the busy arterial roads.

With subsequent generations, the original schools and shopping areas have changed. A 2004 renovation to the Flemingdon Park High School by Stephen Teeple allowed a 40-odd-year-old school serving over 30 different cultures in adjacent communities to thrive and co-exist in a rich and meaningful way. Teeple’s renovation engages and furthers a culture of diversity set within a neighbourhood containing wholesale distribution centres built 20 years ago. Flemingdon and nearby Thorncliffe Park now contain silk traders from India, Pakistani restaurants and halal butchers.

Postwar apartment towers, townhouses, shopping centres, office buildings, religious buildings, parks and schools of the Greater Toronto Area’s suburbs have collectively contributed to the foundation of a deep and meaningful cultural landscape, enabling a diverse range of communities to be altered and replaced by a new reality — one of global connectivity and entrepreneurship. Relationships developed amongst the variety of social networks found across the Greater Toronto Area are being reworked and enriched by immigrants arriving with social, intellectual and financial capital, contributing to the social and economic benefit of our respective communities. Entrepreneurial activities flourish within a suburban infrastructure, allowing 1960s strip malls along Eglinton Avenue in Scarborough to be remodelled into new businesses that sell hejabs, hookah pipes or Sri Lankan cuisine. Underutilized parking lots in front of these strip malls evolve, transforming themselves into sophisticated social spaces operating equally well during the day and at night. With festivals like ‘The Taste of the Lawrence’, a popular food and cultural fair that takes place in July (now in its second successful year), a diverse community of Greek, South Asian and Persian backgrounds celebrate over a weekend of food, commerce and fun — this is something that the rest of the world can learn about, provided we continue to allow these urban spaces to flourish.

It is clear to even the most casual observer that a highly motivated series of private initiatives activated by vibrant ethnic and cultural communities has developed a process of evolving informal urbanism. It also remains clear that many of the strip malls located across the Greater Toronto Area provide useful palimpsests for cultural diversity. Advertisements for English as a second language, computer skills, tax and accounting services, as well as medical walk-in clinics allow the careful passerby to deconstruct the various components of such a diverse and complex network of interconnected communities. These are just a few examples of the many possible urban design outcomes for architects; the challenges of multiculturalism are an opportunity to develop a toolkit capable of analysing the processes that affect the cultural contexts of Canada, while providing new possibilities of design innovation.

And, entirely new communities are being built from the ground up. A short drive away, on the southern boundary of Markham just north of Scarborough, lies the expansive Pacific Mall. This suburban commercial enclave is the perfect arena from which to examine the creation of a shopping centre specifically designed for a mostly Chinese community. The transformation has been outstanding. Individual storeowners have collectively created entire commercial environments essentially foreign to a non-Asian visitor. At first glance, the commercial framework is relatively straightforward, but the dynamics are constantly changing and are highly indicative of global connectivity. Hundreds of tenants are divided into commercial tiers where kiosks sell items from unlocked cell phones, food, jewelry, cheap handbags to running shoes. Beneath the surface of legitimate trade lies a few more informal streams of commerce, where illegal CDs of the latest films and fake handbags are sold to trustworthy clients. And the role of the architect? The agglomeration of restaurants and food fairs have coalesced into a string of economic activity that has created a parallel city in Markham. In a few years, the nearby Markham Civic Centre, designed by Oleson Woreland Architects and landscape architect Janet Rosenberg will heighten the awareness of this new suburban environment with a network of a variety of mid- to high-density developments in a community that has seen its population grow from 20,000 to 200,000 in the last two decades. The Town of Markham is duly proud. The influx of foreign capital and urban development has contributed to the success of this municipality.

When John B. Parkin Associates completed the Ortho Pharmaceutical Corporation in Don Mills in 1956, Toronto’s then mostly white suburbs had embraced Modernism, joining the ranks of global cities engaged in progressive architecture and urbanism. Another modernist building in Don Mills, the Bata Building (also by John B. Parkin Associates), is set to be replaced by the new Global Centre for Pluralism, designed by Mumbai-based architect Charles Correa and funded by the Aga Khan Development Network, based in Geneva.

This kind of transformation represents a new era of urbanism shaping the Greater Toronto Area’s suburbs — an urbanism connected to the religious, historical and cultural networks of the world while the Greater Toronto Area evolves into a cosmopolitan city-region.

Chodikoff, Ian. 'Fringe Benefits' On Site review, no. 18 Fall/Winter 2007/2008
© Ian Chodikoff and On Site review