Neither Here Nor There
May 29, 2025 at 04:30PM“For most of my lifetime, Flushing was the humble immigrant enclave that could,” writes urban planner Jefferson Mao in Urban Omnibus, the publication of the Architectural League of New York. In his reflective essay, Mao examines the evolving culture and identity of Flushing, Queens, over the last few decades. A Flushing native, Mao describes the neighborhood as a dynamic, fluid in-between space for Chinese Americans. “I think about all the things that Flushing is or was or could have been — Chinese and American, rich and poor, bourgeois and bohemian, erudite and lowbrow — and I can still build something that holds on to all these possibilities, at least in my head,” he writes. Asia’s economic rise brought new wealth and worldliness to the area in the form of billion-dollar developments and high-end shopping malls. But the COVID-19 pandemic stalled that momentum. “Coming off the buoyant mood of the first two decades of the millennium, it felt like a dramatic endpoint,” Mao writes. “The end of Chimerica, maybe.” Mao writes a smart, thoughtful piece on urban planning, the immigrant experience, and the American (and Chinese American) dream.
It was never clear what was to be done for the “uncreative” neighborhoods or the “uncreative” underclass. If you were a kid growing up in Flushing, you looked around at the neighborhood and people around you, and your path seemed clear enough. Whatever your future pursuit, whether art or finance or deejaying or urban planning, you should do it somewhere else. In its own way, the neighborhood did its utmost to encourage us. The cram school where I took SAT prep had no windows. The Chinese bakeries, the closest thing to cafes, had cold metal tables and chased you away if you lingered. It was as if the austerity of the neighborhood was a conscious design decision. The clutter of the streets, the lack of public space and greenery, the brusque service, all like a bowstring, drawn taut, propelled us onwards and outwards. Maybe someday the benefits of our work elsewhere would trickle down to Flushing.
Our experience of living in the city, our understanding of why things are the way they are, or why things might be different in the future, no longer track neatly onto land use patterns or zoning regulations. We still lead our everyday flesh-and-blood lives, interacting with a few people and places, constrained by the physical limits of time and space and attention: the hair salon, the supermarket. Beyond this, there is the identity we share as New Yorkers, precariously built on that collection of common references we try to make room for once a quarter, maybe once a month: museums, Broadway, Mets fandom. But stretching over us everywhere, at all times, through the internet, macroeconomics, or geopolitics, are the vague and half-formed yet very real possibilities of pandemic, hyperinflation, cold war. We all live extraterritorially now.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/05/29/flushing-queens-chinese-urban-planning/
via IFTTT
Watch