Permanent Resident

It was 1999, the summer before ninth grade, and Jose Lopez was looking for his first job. He was pounding the pavement and striking out at the clothing and sneaker shops on Knickerbocker and Myrtle Aves, when an awning that read “Make the Road by Walking” piqued his curiosity. “On the storefront windows, there were all these posters and messages that were about community and power and enrolling in benefits, both in English and in Spanish, like “El pueblo unido.” And I was just like, what the hell does it mean?” Lopez recalls. “It made me cross the street to peek inside.” He saw his cousins were there, and went in to join them.

Gladys Puglla first walked in the same Bushwick storefront nine years later. Her landlord wouldn’t make repairs or address mold in the rent stabilized apartment where she lived with her three children, and her neighbor Luisa encouraged her to come to the Make the Road Housing Committee’s Thursday night meeting. The organizers paused the meeting to welcome her in.

Make the Road New York (MRNY) has more than 28,000 members across New York City and its suburbs, where it operates out of five community centers. In these humble spaces, staff and volunteers provide legal services, English classes, access to health care and benefits, and other resources and services for immigrant and working-class New Yorkers. They provide a welcoming place for a person who may feel alone with big problems in a big city; a place where finding help with a problem is only the first step in empowering individuals to be fearless advocates for their community.

“I always tell people: When you walk through that door, look around you and make sure they don’t catch you, because they will never let you go,” Puglla says. After a year of deepening engagement, in 2009, she joined MRNY’s executive board, where she served for the next 15 years, organizing neighbors and members and advocating for tenants’ rights. When Lopez walked into the Grove Street office, he couldn’t have predicted that a conversation would change the course of his life. “That was my first organizing touch by one of the founding executive directors, Oona Chatterjee, who just talked to us about what the space was and how she wanted to build community space. And then she asked us about our vision and our ideas and the needs of young people.” Lopez became an organizer advocating for city programs for youth and against juvenile jail expansion, and eventually MRNY’s lead organizer. Since 2021, he is the organization’s co-executive director.

Make the Road’s strategic approach — welcoming, then serving, then organizing, then empowering — has steadily increased the organization’s dues-paying membership, its staff, and its strength as a policy advocate and political actor. Since its founding out of the combination of two organizations in 2007, Make the Road has extended its reach to New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Nevada. In the New York area, the original Bushwick storefront, a Port Richmond commercial strip, a roadside former bank in Brentwood, and a 1920s house in White Plains are joined by a new headquarters building in Corona, where the Queens team moved from a rented Jackson Heights storefront in April 2025.

The new building rises just above than the elevated subway tracks it faces. Its large glass frontage stands out amid Roosevelt Avenue’s brick, vinyl and stucco surfaces. Next door, decals in the window of Los Mismos Amigos advertise Dominican lunch combos; on the other side of the building are the flag and offerings of the Ecuadorian restaurant El Manantial. A banner is visible through the broad glass, too, its proclamation: “Aqui Estamos, No Nos Vamos.” The entrance is through two smaller doors to the east, where a letter-size printout sign reads: “STOP: Law enforcement, including the police or ICE, cannot enter the building without a warrant signed by a judge,” with a QR code to learn more about your rights. The signs sum up the situation today: simultaneously welcoming and protecting, it stands as an extension of the public realm and as a bulwark in a hostile environment.

The 24,000 square-foot building is sandwiched in the middle of the block, but inside it’s airy, bright, and spacious, accommodating the organization’s staff and members day and night. On a morning in early June, a table was set up on the sidewalk for health care access. Two women came inside to the central gathering space with their paper forms to wait for further assistance. One looked up at the tiled bleachers and the double-height space and asked: “What is this place?” The setting is impressive, unusual. But the welcome is warm. The women at the reception desk are quick to answer questions and find help before another staff member kindly ushers her back to a private office.

A custom-built second home, round-the-clock community center, workplace, organizing tool, sanctuary, and permanent footprint for one of the city’s most prominent immigrant organizations; this building has been a long time coming. Eleven years, in fact. That long road reflects the struggle for a small nonprofit organization to build a home of its own — a struggle that’s been deeply affected by, and closely tracks, the superhuman efforts of immigrant communities to make a stable, secure home in the city.

I’ve learned a lot from a lot of people there. Seeing all the things that happen in this city, sometimes I’m left speechless. I say to myself: ‘How can this be happening?’ If we have laws, why are people afraid to call the police? People are afraid to call 311 to file complaints.

We try to empower the community, so people will gain the strength to fight. If they don’t have that strength, they won’t be able to win. That’s what the organization is all about. It helps you get the power you need for the fight. They can help you out here, but you have to have the attitude and strength of character to say, I am going to fight for my kid’s future; I am going to fight for me and for my family.

— Gladys Puglla

Something That We Can Call Ours

“It is incredibly difficult to do a community project like this,” is how Julie Miles, MRNY’s development director since 2009, sums up the project she oversaw from start to finish. Land is scarce, construction is expensive, and what gets built in New York City reflects real estate values over civic ones. Even public libraries and schools are increasingly shoehorned into residential towers. During the period that MRNY’s headquarters was under development, New York City offered assistance like tax breaks or public land to bolster plans for an Amazon corporate headquarters and a soccer stadium for the New York Football Club in Queens. Currently, the state is greasing the wheels for a casino development barely a mile away. But if a small, nonprofit organization seeks to cement its place in the city, the calculus is daunting.

Betsy MacLean, who worked with MRNY to develop the Queens project, began discussing a headquarters with the organization’s leaders as early as 2007. “Nonprofits should own their spaces. They shouldn’t be paying landlords. They’ve been serving neighborhoods for years, and they need to be able to stay in those neighborhoods. This is a bulwark against gentrification, displacement,” she says. “If we’re not really explicitly focused on creating those kinds of spaces, we’ll lose them, and then we’ll lose the soul of the city.”

There were functional reasons to seek out a new space as well. The Jackson Heights storefront was being asked to do far more than it could accommodate. Jose Lopez described the situation there in 2024: “We have some offices where four people share one office. We have attorneys for whom, if the client shows up — husband, wife, kid in a stroller — because the physical offices are so small, sometimes we’ll need to ask just one person to come into the office while the rest of the family waits in the waiting area.” Everyday disturbances took their toll: “If I’m running a committee meeting, when the 7 train runs overhead us, sometimes it’s so loud that you just need to say, let’s hold until the train passes before we carry on with the meeting. Even those little things that aren’t that little, they kind of get in the way of the work.”

The old Queens office was also ill-suited to MRNY’s role as a central gathering place in more extraordinary moments. “If you heard something big was happening, that’s the place where you would go process it and celebrate it in community.” Javier Valdés, who was co-executive director from 2012 to 2021, described how “those organic moments create this chispa, or spark. Like, this big thing just happened, let’s all go find out about it and see how we can benefit from it, or how we can do it. And they all come to the space, and the space is packed, it’s overflowing.”

In 2014, MacLean became executive director of Hester Street, a nonprofit design, planning, and development technical assistance provider. “We made it our business to democratize the tools of real estate development. We made it an opportunity for community-based organizations to be able to plan and do all the things you can do once you know your rent isn’t going to get quadrupled, quintupled, or that you’ll get kicked out at the end of your lease. We also had in mind that community development mindset of sinking roots deeply into a community” Public resources and assistance do exist, but they are hard for community organizations to tap into. Hester Street focused on helping them access funds through the New York City Capital Grants program, through which City Council members can allocate to support community based organizations in their districts to acquire and build permanent facilities.

Deeply enmeshed with its community, and providing services like ESOL classes and legal assistance under contract with the city, MRNY had developed a good relationship with the City Council representative for Corona, Julissa Ferreras Copeland. She was supportive of efforts to build new community spaces like Corona Plaza, and had access to discretionary funding for capital grants. “We were able to make a case to her that this will be a public good that is not necessarily just for Make the Road, but it is actually for the community as a whole,” says Valdés. “She was aligned with that vision, and thought that that area of her district in particular, did not necessarily have this kind of institution.”

In 2014 and 2015, Councilmember Ferreras made two small discretionary grants that allowed MRNY to assess the feasibility of buying or building a new home. Then in early 2016, a $5 million grant for construction from the City Council, with another $500,000 allocation from Queens Borough President Melinda Katz, was enough to jumpstart the project. With an acquisition loan from Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) and Seachange Capital, and some additional, critical philanthropic funding, MRNY could move ahead with purchasing a site, for $4.98 million: three contiguous vacant lots several blocks further out on Roosevelt Avenue from MRNY’s existing Jackson Heights storefront. They closed on the property in August, 2016.

We’re going to get to a place now where we stop paying rent and we start putting our dollars towards a mortgage, an investment for the long term, and something that we can call ours. So that flag that we’ve planted in the district can be there forever. We want to know that, as we continue to pass the torch along to new generations of leadership at this institution, that the one thing that they can’t lose is the home. We have the home. It’s ours.

– Jose Lopez

Location, Location, Location

“Jackson Heights, Corona, Elmhurst, are amongst the most diverse communities in all of New York City. So many families — immigrants from Latin America and Central America, immigrants from the Caribbean, or South Asia and other communities — are calling that particular pocket of Queens home,” says Lopez. At the new headquarters, “we’re kind of in the heartbeat of this community.”

“That area literally does not sleep,” confirms Julissa Bisono. A Corona resident for many years, she began working with the organization through the city’s Summer Youth Employment Program at age 15, and is now MRNY’s Director of Base Building. “No matter what time of the day, or the day of the week, there’s always people walking, there’s always things happening.”

Corona Plaza, with its subway station, street vendors, and cultural events, has long been a hub for the Latino immigrant community. “You have all kinds of organizations and institutions running programming, whether it’s enrollment clinics, summer youth camps, magic shows, or it’s our annual trans Latina Pride event. There’s always activity on the plaza,” says Lopez. “For staff doing service enrollment, or organizers trying to recruit new members, just going to Corona Plaza or behind it to the local park will allow you to have conversations with hundreds of people, and all you gotta do is cross the street.”

In addition to the practical benefits for organizing, this central gathering place could serve deeper community functions. A permanent home held the promise of a citywide beacon. For Javier Valdés, it was an opportunity to recreate a familiar spatial arrangement from Latin America. “I was very much moved by this thing of having the plaza, municipality, and the church all in the same area. And I kind of felt like Corona Plaza is the plaza, the post office is like the municipality, and we wanted to be the church, the place of gathering.”

The symbolism of having that center was I wanted anybody that had just arrived in New York, an immigrant or working-class person, to know that there’s a place in Queens — ‘Hey, have you heard?’ — that if you go, they’ll help you. The way that places of worship have played that role in immigrant communities in New York. I wanted us to be one of those.

— Javier Valdés

Como si fuera tu casa

With a location and funding secured, a critical question remained: What would this new building, with so many briefs to answer, actually be? The next step was finding the right architect. “Some of the baseline criteria were folks who had some experience working on community center projects,” MacLean recalls. “Affordable housing could be a good proxy if architects had that. Some familiarity with working in the outer boroughs was important to us.” The most important criterion was cultural competency. “We knew that engaging the Make the Road community was going to be a really big part of the architect’s job. Having some experience working with Latino communities, having staff that could speak Spanish, those kinds of things put TEN over the edge.”

A visit to the Midtown Manhattan branch library recently completed by TEN Arquitectos’ New York City office helped seal the deal. A wide set of steps offer a sitting area and a path down to the subterranean library, while also looking onto and visible from 53rd Street. “Those were the steps that I wanted to have,” Valdés recalls. “From my experience in Latin America, those were like the steps of the church, where people in a community gather, and I wanted to replicate that, to match the needs of the organization.”

Andrea Steele was the managing partner of TEN in New York City, which became Andrea Steele Architecture (ASA) in 2019. The call for this design, like any other, Steele says, was “to think about and plan for the future, not respond to the current day-to-day.” But when people are used to making do, it can be hard to start imagining what could be. So the architects approached the project not by asking members and staff what they wanted, but rather probed what drew them to MRNY and what the organization meant to them. Hester Street staff developed an engagement process with staff and stakeholders, including two focus groups in August and September of 2015 with members at the Queens storefront and at a school cafeteria. “The members got to really have a lot of voice about the design,” Valdés recalls. “And it helped that architects that were part of those conversations were Spanish speakers.”

Steele describes the architectural project as a simple one, “really nothing more than a manifestation of the listening.” Whereas community engagement processes can sometimes struggle to forge a collective with which to engage, in this case, a robust, actually-existing community allowed for unusually meaningful discussions. “We have been a part of these community workshops many times,” says Steele. “I’ve never heard such thoughtful and honest feedback. Their love for this organization and community created a passionate and open atmosphere. While everyone was not always in agreement, they shared a clear sense of what Make the Road meant to them personally and collectively.” Núria Heras Diez is originally from Spain and came to New York from TEN’s Mexico City office. The project architect spoke of the advantage new construction offered their client: “Un nuevo edificio adaptado a como eres tú, como si fuera tu casa” (a new building tailored to your identity, a place you can truly call home).

As design got underway in 2016, no one expected that Trump would soon be elected president. After that November, says Steele, “the idea was that this project has to be finished yesterday.” Trump’s first steps in office, as Miles puts it, “were declaring war on every aspect of our community.” MRNY sprang to action to respond to the “Muslim ban,” helping to lead the organization of protests at JFK airport in January 2017, and organizing members and their supporters to resist Trump’s increasingly punitive, violent measures to sow fear and pain among immigrant communities. The national political context brought the building’s purpose into sharper focus, but the MRNY community remained at the center. Steele describes two key questions shaping the new building’s design: “How do we create a place where people feel safe? How do we create a place where people feel this is home?”

In the focus groups, security was a big subject of conversation. “You’re talking about a community where core members are under threat; there was an initial conversation about providing protection. One woman brought up that she sought out MRNY offices as protection; she saw them like a womb,” Steele recalls of one conversation in a school cafeteria. “But then others in the conversation said, ‘Yes, we need to be safe, but hiding doesn’t make you safe.’ There was a realization about what a safe place is.” In another meeting, Steele recalls, the organizer of MRNY’s TGNCIQ group, Bianey Garcia, described how “she only feels safe in the public eye, in the spotlight, with witnesses around her . . . she felt most safe in protests. As an individual against the world, she doesn’t feel safe.” Out of these conversations came an idea of “collective security,” Steele says. “There’s security in visibility.”

As MRNY stepped up to defend its members with educational resources, legal assistance, and political advocacy, the new headquarters building was integrated into the narrative of “resistance” to the first Trump administration. A story on the design for Architectural Record by critic Karrie Jacobs described the project and building as the “opposite of a wall.” “The building became more a symbol than just an actual building in itself, because of the political climate that we were in,” says Valdés. “It also helped us with the framing that we’re here to stay. Regardless of the predicament immigrant communities can face because of the change in political winds or dynamics, we were going to do everything in our power to be able to be anchored and stay in our community.”

What members and staff discussed guided the architects’ focus on three principal concerns: establishing the organization’s public presence, the act of welcoming, and creating a sense of home. With its transparent facade and prominent signage, the building could function as an advertisement. Instead of a church steeple or storefront, the vast windows opening on to the street and the elevated 7 train would serve as a beacon. Inside, the building would embrace people into the ample space of the auditorium: steps on which to linger make it clear that everyone is welcome here. A simple, legible plan would make it easy for anyone who enters to find what they are looking for. Finally, the mandate was that members should feel at home, in a comfortable, dignified space, with the natural light and fresh air they may not get where they live or work. It was important that “people not have the feeling of being shut in, with no views, in a compressed space,” says Heras Diez. “Interior transparency, outdoor access, and abundant natural light played a central role in shaping that experience.”

The goal of the design was less shaping a building than breaking down barriers and establishing a permanent place in the city; one with open space for Make the Road to grow into and repurpose over time. The building materials are durable and simple: a concrete cellar and steel frame, fiber cement cladding panels, concrete floors, and off-the-shelf interior and exterior glazing systems. As Steele sums it up, they had to be “bold on a modest budget.”

The architects were less receptive to one bold proposition: “We had originally thought about the women’s building in San Francisco, or the kind of iconic buildings that have huge murals on the outside,” MacLean recalls, but “the folks at TEN, Enrique in particular, dissuaded us; he thought it was a bit cliché. While the architects weren’t so into that idea, the members were very much into it.” The building’s palette is white and grey, with discreet touches of color in offices, stairwells, and bathrooms. With Gonzalo Casals (then Executive Director of the Leslie-Lohman Museum and later Commissioner of the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs), MRNY’s Julie Miles and Vanessa Dubyn assembled an Arts Task Force of public art curators and artists to develop an RFP, recruit artists with a connection to MRNY’s immigrant base to apply, and commission work that would represent the community inside the building.

The mosaic applied to the risers on the bleachers, created by artist Marka27 (Victor Quiñonez) transmits MRNY’s central message to passersby. Above the ground floor windows is an eight-foot tall, 48-foot-wide, three-panel mural created by two muralists and artists of Andean origin, Layqa Nuna Yawar and Raul Ayala, working together as Parlante Visual. Julissa Bisono organized a series of workshops in which the artists met with members from all of MRNY’s committees citywide. Over several months, the artists conducted one-on-one interviews, organized skits, and staged a photo shoot with youth members. Their immigration stories, their reflections on the meaning of Make the Road, on connections to ancestors and to other movement struggles established the narrative for the mural. Against an orange background, the artists painted a dense iconography of migration and belonging, from barbed wire and beehive cells to a protest march over the Brooklyn Bridge. “It represents us,” Bisono says of the mural. “Our struggles, our movement, our fights, to be able to stay, to thrive, to fight so that our communities are living with respect and dignity.”

Unity and strength.
You are welcome here.
We need to be seen.
We are here to stay and build a powerful community.
We are united to grow, encourage, support and connect so we can all create change together.
Once you are in, you are in.

– Comments from participants in the engagement process

Complications and Crises

“We’re not in the industry of building new, shiny things,” says Lopez. “And so we weren’t very versed in all the things that come with that: the economics, leveraging tax credits, understanding how to use capital dollars from the state and the city, and all the hoops you have to jump through in order to gain access to some resources to help the development of the project.” Even with funding in hand, the road to the building was not an easy or direct one.

Initial plans didn’t build to the maximum the zoning allowed; Julie Miles described the approach as “we’ll start with this and we can build more later.” As MRNY found success in fundraising from individual donors and additional support for the project from New York State, a bigger budget and a bigger building opened up eligibility for New Market Tax Credits, and with it, more government partners to manage. Working with city and state agencies and processes, the New York City Economic Development Corporation, the New York City Department of Design and Construction, the Dormitory Authority of the State of New York, “each added layers of complication and layers of cost,” says Miles. “There are so many limitations and rules that just make it extremely hard to navigate public funding.” Because city and state grants operate as reimbursements, the organization had to secure bridge loans to cover construction costs, their interest adding to the total cost.

A dearth of precedents for the project made estimating costs difficult, and an unexpectedly high price tag required additional fundraising and significant value engineering. A lack of comparable projects also made it hard to find a general contractor with appropriate experience willing to take on a project that was neither very large, nor very simple. The site’s extreme density — its close proximity to the elevated 7 train and neighboring buildings — added to the complexity. Lengthy negotiations with neighbors meant more legal expenses and significant time lost. All told, the building cost $43 million, and took seven years from groundbreaking to inauguration.

All the while, MRNY continued to pay rent on, and strain in, its limited workspace. “No one is going to miss 92-10 Roosevelt Avenue, right?” Lopez asked rhetorically in the summer of 2024. During the Obama and the first Trump administrations, “there were things that happened that led to hundreds of people forming lines in front of our office” Lopez recounts. But with limited space in the conference room, “we were basically doing Know Your Rights, here’s what the announcement means, but we were only able to do it for 50 people at a time. So we’d run this workshop for 45 minutes, do the thing, tell people we’ll be in touch, sign the attendance form, please exit so that we can redo the thing for the next 50 people.” During the first Trump administration, “anytime there was a threat, especially to immigrant communities, hundreds of people would wrap around the block saying, ‘What does this announcement mean for me? Am I going to get deported tomorrow? What should I know?’”

Then, the spring of 2020 brought a new existential threat, just as building construction began. Covid arrived in New York City, and Corona was the pandemic’s epicenter. The effects on MRNY’s community were devastating. In the first month and a half of the pandemic, the organization lost 100 members. Recalling the darkest days is still emotional for Julissa Bisono: “having our community organizers calling, supporting one another while we were all going through this situation; people having a corpse two to three days in their house. They couldn’t even pick them up, because there were so many people passing away.”

The loss of jobs and income also brought deep economic pain to the area. For residents who were undocumented, there were no unemployment benefits and no stimulus checks. MRNY was central to a coalition that campaigned through 2020 and 2021 to win a $2.1 billion New York State fund for relief for excluded workers — those who didn’t get pandemic aid due to immigration status or the kind of precarious, low-wage work they did. “We knew that there was a role that our state and our government had to play and we did not lose sight of that; that was our North Star,” recalls Javier Valdés, co-executive director at the time.

“Our job was to respond to the needs of our membership at that moment in the pandemic. And that was priority number one. And we mobilized millions of resources to put in the pockets of our members in order for them to survive,” said Valdés. In 2020 and 2021, the organization stopped fundraising for the building to focus on raising $4.6 million in emergency cash assistance, food aid, and financial support for burial and cremation costs.

Andrea Steele recalls how each budget decision in this period felt like an ethical decision for the organization: “Do we put money towards the building, versus the real work and day-to-day needs?” As construction work stopped, then recommenced, and supply chain disruptions slowed the arrival of critical equipment, pandemic delays and cost increases also put pressure on Make the Road, and the new building. “But we were sophisticated enough and equipped enough to be able to do this in parallel,” Valdés recalls. “As we’re building to meet the immediate needs, we want to be able to have this longer term vision for our community.”

At last, the city partially emerged from Covid’s shadow. But then a surge of new arrivals, most forcibly transferred to New York City to score political points on a national stage, placed New York at the center of a so-called “migrant crisis.” Between 2022 and 2024, 200,000 people came to New York City, from Venezuela, but also Ecuador, Colombia, Senegal, Mauritania, and elsewhere. Seeking asylum, fleeing state violence and economic collapse, they contended with a dysfunctional immigration system and violations of US and international asylum rights. Once in New York City, they encountered unprecedented vilification from a mayor who went out of his way not to help families with housing and schooling, while scapegoating migrants for the city’s troubles.

Again, Corona and its environs were an epicenter, and Make the Road went to work countering misconceptions and integrating new arrivals into the community. Beginning in the summer of 2022 (incidentally, around when they were hoping the new building would be completed) MRNY welcomed and supported asylum seekers, providing thousands with orientation sessions to learn their rights and how to access resources; free cell phones with data plans to stay in touch with loved ones and their lawyers, and find jobs; cash assistance to afford basic necessities; free Metrocards to get around the city and to appointments; and health access services, legal services, and individualized support like help with enrolling their children in school.

The office in Queens saw nonstop activity. “There are classes happening throughout the day, and then our youth committee meets in the afternoon, after the kids get out of school. All the other committees happen in the evening, after seven o’clock,” Julissa Bisono described. There are also classes on the weekends, our citizenship classes, and then special events, depending on the committee, if they’re having a special action town hall or something like that.”

As the building in Corona approached completion, staff anticipated the new possibilities that moving in could bring: outdoor space for youth, a bigger kitchen for cooking classes, room to host other organizations and cultural events in the 300-seat assembly space. Jose Lopez envisioned a big block party bringing together all the community to celebrate the opening. “We want to be sure that every single neighbor, commercial and residential, knows that we are opening, that we’re having a ribbon cutting, and that they are invited, because we want them to be invested in the long term success of this structure and of this organization. And so in the vein of being a good neighbor, we talk to thousands of people and family and local businesses that surround us to be able to say, opening day, we want you there. We want you to visit. We want you to meet other people. We want you to learn what we’re about.”

Corona was one of the hardest hit from the pandemic. We went through such a dark moment. But we were still building. So that’s why people are like, ‘When are you guys going to open, because it’s definitely going to be a game changer.’ I feel like people are still struggling; a lot of people are surviving but not thriving. And I feel like with us opening that might bring some hope to folks.

– Julissa Bisono

This Is My Second Home

A soft opening in February, 2025 reflected a more straitened reality. The finished building was bright, calm, and quiet — not only because no one was there yet, but also because the building’s facade allows the 7 train to pass just a few feet away without making itself felt. No one had moved in yet, so staff members got plants to give a more lived in look, and hung papel picado with statements like “Housing is a Human Right” and “Protect Immigrant New Yorkers” — festive and focused at the same time. Trump’s second inauguration had brought deportation quotas and a militarized raid in the Bronx, and that was just in January. Since then, public spaces in immigrant neighborhoods have been subdued as people stay home for fear of encounters with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). ICE agents in plain clothes and with masked faces have made incursions into courts, universities, workplaces, ramping up detentions and deportations both retaliatory and indiscriminate: We are living in a reign of state terror for noncitizens.

As the organization begins the process of settling into the new building, making it their own, the headwinds feel stronger than they ever have. Long standing anti-immigrant and authoritarian strains that have always countered the US’ welcoming ethos have become plain for all to see, not just for some to experience. Cuts in federal aid and economic insecurity have also affected MRNY, where staff have formed a union and painful layoffs loom. At a challenging moment, the new building is a symbol and an act of permanence that feels ever more important, even defiant. “We always thought this would be a building for future generations of MRNY community members,” says Julie Miles, “that members’ children and grandchildren will be able to access the space and hopefully experience it as a space of gathering and power and joy.”

The building “couldn’t come at a worse or better time,” Andrea Steele concludes. “Our greatest hope is that this new center acts as a beacon to ensure Make the Road’s resources are visible to all and that it reflects the incredible energy and strength they have within the public realm.” Doing justice to the strength of the organization, and of New York’s immigrant community, was the single greatest goal, maintaining connections to the public realm of the street and Corona Plaza, and reinforcing a sense of belonging. Throughout are thoughtful touches that reflect the design process’ deep engagement with members and staff, the consideration for varied needs of a diverse community. There is ample parking for strollers, a lactation room gently illuminated by the rear window, a grill on the patio. In the basement is an art room, for painting banners. Upstairs, there will be office-type phone booths for staff, who, says Heras Diez, asked for “a place to scream.”

In what is ultimately not a huge space, with so many overlapping uses, circulation is key. Like the organization, all the building’s parts are connected, nesting in layers of visibility and intimacy. The bleachers shield the classrooms and offices toward the rear of the building from public view, as they lead up to smaller public and private meeting spaces in the rear. A subtle circulatory touch is less monumental but almost feels more significant: a dumbwaiter connecting the building’s two kitchens. In the cellar is a massive commercial one, with a walk-in freezer and a ten-burner stove, where members will cook dinners for participants in evening committee meetings. Food can be sent straight up to the second-floor pantry for serving and eating at the top of the bleachers, in a cafe area outfitted with tables and chairs.

The designers imagined the smell of coffee wafting down from the pantry as a sensory first impression. In workshops to define the planning and design, Heras Diez recalls, “the number one thing everyone mentioned on their post-its was ‘café.'” The aroma is the very first association with Make the Road. Coffee is welcoming, community building, a familiar comfort, and energizing in a vigilant time.

I hope that when people come through that door and see the mural, they will feel good. I felt good when I first went into the building, because it was made for us, the members, and it feels good. That’s what I want people to feel, that they are going to be able to overcome whatever problem they have. That’s how they made me feel the first time my neighbor brought me to a meeting.

We did everything we could to improve the place where the people are helping us, so they’ll also feel good. Because if they don’t feel good, how are they going to help us? That’s what I wanted most, for them to feel good, so they can continue their work. That’s what the building in Queens means to me.

– Gladys Puglla