Om Sai Mandir, 45-11 Smart Street, Flushing, Queens

Matilde Cassani is an architect and artist whose most recent exhibition Sacred Spaces in Profane Buildings is currently in its final week on view at Storefront for Art and Architecture. For this project, Cassani has amassed an impressively comprehensive archive of sites of worship in the five boroughs that are located in residential, commercial or otherwise non-religious buildings, many of which serve recent immigrant populations whose demand for faith-based community facilities far outstrips supply. The architectural improvisations that respond to this increased demand constitute one subject of Cassani’s detailed documentary study. But she’s equally interested in the urban-scale implications of this phenomenon: the distribution of religious activity throughout the city and how this maps onto a contemporary urban reality of displacement and adaptation. She has produced a series of books that represent the archive and exhibited them alongside a set of Spiritual Devices, beguilingly simple sculptural installations that attempt to distill the elements of individual spiritual practice to the commonplace yet symbolic objects — prayer mats, icons, beads or candles — that help convert secular space into something both sacred and profound. The exhibition closes this Saturday, so be sure to check it out soon. First, read on to hear Cassani’s thoughts on what a city’s sacred spaces reveal about the complex relationship of religious praxis, cultural identity and urban life. -C.S.

Matilde Cassani with one of the five books of the Sacred Spaces archive installed at Storefront for Art and Architecture.

How did Sacred Spaces in Profane Buildings come about?
The idea for the project was born three years ago, when I started asking myself where recent immigrants to contemporary cities were praying. I started looking around Italy and the first place I started investigating was actually a small village called Novellara, in a rural part of Regio Emilia. This village is the home of a lot of recent immigrants to Italy who are increasingly doing agricultural work in Italian farms, especially in the dairy farms that produce the milk for parmesan cheese.

This village has a population of no more than 12,000 people, but I found many different sacred spaces. And every year, the village plays host to a huge Sikh harvest festival, the Vaisakhi feast. Sikhs from all over Central Europe congregate in Novellara for this event.

After documenting this festival and the sacred spaces of this village, I started doing similar research and documentation in Milan, Palermo, Barcelona, Stuttgart, and then I came to New York. These days, whenever I find myself in a new city, I immediately start looking around to find sacred spaces.

How do you define what “sacred spaces in profane buildings” are?
For me, sacred spaces in profane buildings are places of worship in non-traditional sites, in buildings that have undergone a transformation of function. Many of these buildings are invisible from the outside. The interiors are what has been altered most to accommodate the needs of a particular religion’s worship practices. That improvised transformation fascinates me.

The word “profane” in this context refers the buildings being non-traditional or non-sacred. I was raised as a Roman Catholic with the idea that sacred space – the churches I would visit as a child – was always born as sacred, in a location that is precisely selected and central, with an architecture that makes it highly visible. “Profane” refers to sites not selected in this way.

Soho Synagogue, 38 Crosby Street, Manhattan

What do you think distinguishes New York City’s sacred spaces from similar environments you’ve studied in other cities?
At the beginning, I thought that since New York City has a completely different urban texture and a completely different immigrant story, its sacred spaces in profane buildings would be completely distinct from what I’ve found elsewhere. But actually the architecture of the places I found was very similar to what I found in Europe. The main difference is that in New York, there are so many more of these kinds of sacred spaces.

I’ve also noticed that New Yorkers seem more curious about their city than people are in other cities. I’ve received a lot of positive feedback from New Yorkers about this project. People here seem to be excited about seeing something they’ve never seen before. And the communities whose places of worship were documented in the project were happy to find someone deeply interested in their communities and cultural practices.

What do you think a city’s sacred spaces reveal about that city?
I think these spaces reveal the ways displaced people maintain their identity after moving from one country to another. Cultural identity is not only food and customs; religion builds identity in ways that make the sacred space a community’s common point of reference. So it’s not only religious space, it’s much more: a community center, a café, many different things together in one multi-layered space.

So what’s more important for you, the spaces or how people use them?
Both. I think the spaces reflect what people are doing inside them in interesting ways. These places are sacred and profane at the same time, public and private spaces at the same time. They are religious places but also something else.

Spiritual Devices

Tell me about the Spiritual Devices.
The Spiritual Devices are foldable and transportable boxes that contain the kinds of objects I would find during my visits to sacred spaces all over New York: cheap clocks, tape on the floor to indicate the direction to Mecca, aluminum dishes, a camping stove.

I started making the Spiritual Devices while doing an artist residency in Germany. The goal was to evoke the fact that sacred space is not necessarily stable. It’s temporary. It migrates along with the people who use it. The temporary nature of these places and the symbolic value of the objects that inhabit them – many of which are cheap, mass-produced objects you might find in a supermarket – reflect some of the displacement and exile of immigration.

There seems to be a tension between the individual scale of the Spiritual Devices and the community scale of the documentation of Sacred Spaces in Profane Buildings.
Yes. Somehow, there is a kind of contradiction between these community places – which exist for small groups of people to come together at a particular point in a day – and the individual practice of one person building his or her own identity.

The exhibition at Storefront is the first time I have shown both of these projects together. They are related, of course, but I think it’s helpful to look at them separately, to look first at the research and then to experience the Spiritual Devices.

The research process for this exhibition began when I first arrived in New York. I decided that instead of looking for sacred spaces myself, I would ask citizens to report on where sacred spaces could be found. I built a very simple website and asked people to upload pictures and different stories about these sacred spaces. I received a lot of different kinds of material: from simple snapshots taken by passersby to fascinating stories about memories of particular buildings. Some of these memories explained how it used to be a bakery or a bank; others were personal stories about going to a place to pray or to see friends. One interesting case study is the synagogue on Crosby Street that used to be a flagship Gucci store. Another interesting case is an entire street that is full of temples; a huge, religious boulevard in Flushing, Queens called Bowne Street. In some ways the street is one enlarged, sacred space that is also differentiated: Catholic Korean churches, Catholic Chinese churches, Catholic South American churches, Hindu temples, Sai Baba temples… So many communities seem to have a point of reference there.

Sacred Spaces around Bowne Street, Flushing, Queens

While people were submitting information about sacred spaces all over the city, I started to look closely at these places. Another example is one of my favorite places that I visited, the Sikh Center on Parsons Boulevard in Flushing. It’s in a formerly residential brick building, but the interior is amazingly transformed and truly beautiful. When you walk in the door you face a long corridor. At the end of the corridor is a place to store your shoes and a big box containing turbans to wear if you don’t have your own. The proper sacred space has a deep red carpeted floor that leads you to the altar, which is surrounded by musical instruments.

Downstairs you have the canteen with a huge kitchen that serves everybody who enters the temple. The third floor has rooms for some of the spiritual leaders of the congregation, and then you have another room that contains the sacred book, the Granth Sahib. In the Sikh religion, the sacred book is revered, so the way the book is treated is very important. The room where the book “lives” is actually the best, most precious and most recently refurbished room of the house. There are two beds, and it looks like a normal bedroom for humans — but it’s not for humans, it’s for the sacred books. Every day, one of the books is brought downstairs, read from beginning to end, and then taken back upstairs and put to bed.

Sikh Center, Flushing, Queens. Bottom image: the room where the Granth Sahib (Sikh holy book) is kept.

So how did you represent your research in an exhibition context?
I produced five books; each one is a survey at a different scale. The first book maps the whole city and I’ve simply listed all the sacred spaces I found, in order to investigate the dimension of the phenomenon, the relative invisibility of the sacred spaces. The second book questions the profanity or the non-traditionality of the places. It includes information about the location and context of these places, with Google Maps images and their addresses. An address like Apartment #4N really tells you something about the architecture and original function of a particular place. The third book is a collection of stories and images submitted through the website. The fourth is a reflection on the different typologies and how the sacred is adapting in different ways. In some cases the sacred space is a small flat inside a commercial building; in others an entire residential building is transformed for various activities related to worship, like the temple’s canteen, the temple itself, the apartments of the monks or priests, communal spaces, storage, etc. And the fifth book is an in-depth case study of the Sikh Center on Parsons Boulevard that I described. For the exhibition, I mounted each of the books on a pedestal and arranged a series of the Spiritual Devices on the floor, in particular relationships to the wall, the street and the books. In this way, I tried to transform Storefront’s gallery into a kind of sacred space, a system that unveils something that is both sacred and not so sacred at the same time.

An excerpt of a geographical listing of Brooklyn mosques from Book 2 of the Sacred Spaces in Profane Buildings archive. Click to enlarge.

As an architect, what do you see as the contemporary role of architecture in religious practice?
It’s very difficult to say, because it’s contradictory in many ways: these places are outside of what we consider to be architecture; they are rarely designed by architects. Yet, I think architects must reflect on the fragmentation of religious space in cities. Religious spaces are no longer a big point of reference in the centers of neighborhoods. We need to consider what that means for our cities and communities. It’s not just about the small scale of transformed interiors; it’s an urban-scale phenomenon.

In complex environments like cities, architecture becomes a container of different things, and the same is happening to traditionally sacred spaces. I’ve seen examples of communities buying what used to be, say, an Orthodox church and converting it into a Hindu temple.

Masjid Manhattan, 33 Cliff Street, Manhattan

So what do you see as the role of the city in contemporary religious practice?
I think cities are only beginning to digest what the proliferation of all these sacred spaces means. On the one hand, the increased demand for religious spaces seems to show that there’s not enough space designated for these purposes. Cities, therefore, are in the role of enveloping sacred spaces that have emerged on their own inside of non-traditional buildings. On the other hand, the fragmentation and dispersal of sacred space is making the whole city more sacred in a way. It’s no longer secular.

I think this is one of the most interesting parts of the phenomenon. Because, as I’ve said, these spaces are more than just places of worship; they are community facilities, social spaces, but also the container of a certain kind of sacredness.

And each one is different. Some are very private; some are very public. Some open, some closed. And the interiors are totally fascinating: the materials and objects found inside are often quite cheap, yet there is so much care and attention paid to these environments. It’s really impressive and often very beautiful. And in some of the older sacred spaces, you can see the story of their gradual transformation and growth in the details.

Shan Xiu Taoist Temple, 128 Lafayette Street, Manhattan

All images courtesy of Matilde Cassani and Storefront for Art and Architecture

Matilde Cassani is an architect and researcher who lives and works in Milan, Italy

“Wherever there are immigrants, there are stories.” This broad observation characterizes and motivates the urbanism of Suketu Mehta, a writer who has dedicated his career to understanding the human experience of large cities around the world. He is perhaps best known for his exploration of Mumbai, the city where he spent his childhood, in Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found. These days, however, his research is focused on New York, the city he moved to as a teenager in the late 1970s and currently makes his home. His forthcoming book on the most recent immigrants to the city is certain to make many readers aware of a New York they only thought they knew, but Mehta’s singular sensitivity to how the immigrant experience is inscribed in the physical details of the urban landscape — from storefront displays to phone booths to courtyards — is what makes his writing of particular relevance to designers, policy-makers and urban enthusiasts. I recently had the chance to wander with Mehta around Jackson Heights and listen to his observations, insights and anecdotes. We started our walk at Raja Sweet House on 73rd Street and strolled among the garden apartments of the Jackson Heights Historic District, the single-family homes of Corona and along the commercial corridors of 37th and Roosevelt Avenues. Learn more about Mehta’s unique perspective on immigration, density and neighborhood change below. -C.S.

When did you first encounter Jackson Heights?
I first came here in 1977, at the age of fourteen. My father has been a diamond merchant for all of his life, and he came to New York to expand the family business. He had already been here, in a studio apartment on 73rd Street on the other side of Roosevelt Avenue, for about nine months. Then he went back to India and brought the rest of the family. So there were five of us in a studio. Our welcome to America was the super of the building turning off our electricity because there were too many people in the apartment. We were only in that studio for a couple of weeks before we got an apartment on 83rd Street, where we lived for another seven years. On the first night that we moved in, my brand new bike got stolen. It was a much dodgier neighborhood back then.

How else would you describe the neighborhood at that time?
When we came here, we found a dangerous city, a bankrupt city, a city from which the white middle class was fleeing. It was far from the Promised Land. I got mugged twice in these streets; our car got stolen regularly. Jackson Heights was not glamorous or welcoming. My parents put me in Catholic School near here, which was the most brutal experience of my life. I was one of the first minorities in the school. The teachers called me a pagan. I remember during the Iranian hostage crisis, I was a senior in high school, I was with an Indian friend of mine — the only other Indian in school — and this Irish kid yells at us, “Fucking Ayatollahs!” and I said, “Hey, we ain’t Iranians, we’re Indians.” And without missing a beat he says, “Fucking Gandhis!”

Wherever there are immigrants there are stories. Immigrants, because of their dislocation, have a need for recollection. At the time that we came here, most of the South Asians in this neighborhood were Indians, and most of them Gujarati. Now, it’s a much more diverse mix of South Asians: Bangladeshis, Nepalis, Tibetans, Bhutanese. The Indians started coming here in large numbers after the 1965 Immigration Act. Before ’65, Asians were actively excluded. When they started letting in Indians, at first, there were a lot of professionals: engineers, doctors. In the ’70s, because of the Family Reunification Act, entrepreneurs, small business owners, shop owners, they started coming in. And now, taxi drivers, garment factory workers, laborers — it’s constantly shifting. Very few of the Gujaratis that I knew when I was growing up here in the ’70s are still in this neighborhood. With one exception: Some of the children of those families, many friends of mine, who are artists, writers and journalists, who would live in the East Village in the ’80s and in Park Slope in the late ’90s, are increasingly moving to Jackson Heights.

There’s something about the diversity of these streets that is attractive to people from all over, like a piano player or a software engineer raised in Kansas, for example. Increasingly, creative people will want to live in the kind of city where they have a choice between pupusas and parathas. Diversity isn’t just a nice thing to have, it is actively essential to attract the kind of people that create wealth.

Much of Jackson Heights was created by the Queensboro Corporation in the 1920s. When the elevated subway came out here, it allowed the middle classes from Manhattan to escape the city and come to a nicer environment: these quite beautiful apartment blocks with long central courtyards or gardens. From the back, the bedrooms face onto a pastoral scene where children can play and the elderly can sit on benches. This is pretty unique in New York.

We’re now coming up onto an interesting block here. The Community United Methodist Church. Now this truly is an ecumenical church. There’s a sign in Spanish, “Iglesia Metodista Unida,” then there’s a sign in Korean, then one in English. It must also be an Indonesian church because it says Community Church welcomes “Gareja Protestan Indonesia.” And, I guess, an evangelical fellowship, the Jesus Our Foundation Fellowship — “Mahal ka ng Dios.”

And besides all of this, there’s a little plaque about Alfred M. Butts, “the architect and artist who… invented scrabble.” Scrabble was invented here!

Now here’s the building I grew up in. Look at the name plate: we have from Abbasi to Winfred, passing Balyuk, Bruschtein, Basu… For anyone going to Jackson Heights, I recommend having a look at the directories in the buildings, which really show why it is such a marvelous area. Here are people – Indians and Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Russians, Greeks, Poles, Turks, Irish – many of whom were killing each other just before they got on the plane. And here they are living next to each other. It’s not that we love each other. Indians and Pakistanis will still say horrible things about each other around the dinner table. But there was this agreement that we were in a new country, making a new life. And we could live side by side and interact in certain demarcated ways. We could exchange food; our kids could play together; they could go to school together. It’s the great story of New York. It’s pretty remarkable how little strife there is.

This kind of density, living in the same space, having to share courtyards and groceries, forces you to interact more than you otherwise would. It forces you to go outside of your comfort zone. The most wonderful thing about Jackson Heights is its diversity. Jackson Heights and Elmhurst together are the most diverse neighborhoods in New York City in terms of country of origin. I think that’s the biggest difference between immigrants of today and immigrants of maybe one hundred years ago. These immigrants feel much less inclined to melt into any sort of pot.

In what other specific ways do you see the particular dynamics of immigration today playing out in a neighborhood such as this one?
Here’s one example: every fifth store is a place where you can send money back. The remittance economy is tremendous — there are barber shops where you can get a haircut and send money back home. I’ve read many studies that show that best way to help the poor is to reduce the fees on money transfers. The money migrants sent back from the US, I think it was 300 billion dollars last year. Money orders and phone cards. You‘ll often see rates for these two things in these store windows.

There are all manner of transactions happening. People are selling food out of shopping carts, there are people offering services, day laborers… The City seems to have agreed to suspend many of the laws that it might enforce in Manhattan in places like Jackson Heights. That’s also part of the vibrancy and part of the accessibility for immigrants. Because you don’t need a permit, really, to sell food here. You can just stand on a street corner and sell it. Occasionally, a cop might come along and tell you to move. So you wait for the cop to pass and then resume selling what you sell. In neighborhoods like this, the line between formal and informal is thin to the point of invisibility.

Another effect of the informal economy is that economic value in immigrant neighborhoods is generally underestimated. Much of the money that these people make and spend doesn’t show up in official records. Some friends of mine in the Department of City Planning were telling me about how Costco came to them with a plan to set up a store in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, but they didn’t think it would be a viable economic proposition, because the official income tax records showed that it wasn’t a high income neighborhood. City Planning said, “Go in there, trust us, you’ll make money.” And now, I think it has one of the highest revenues of any Costco in the country.

So City officials are aware of some of these dynamics?
The population division of City Planning, in particular, are people who really have their finger on the pulse of what’s happening in the city. They are an extraordinary group of demographers. They know about alternative housing arrangements, what kind of money transfers happen — they know about the hidden city of New York.

This administration in particular, the Bloomberg administration, has been absolutely exemplary in its treatment of immigrants. Mayor Bloomberg actually went up to Capitol Hill and said if it weren’t for illegal immigration, the economy of New York City would have collapsed after 9/11. I think this city has learned that immigration of all kinds — documented, undocumented, semi-documented — is vital to the economy of the city.

And I love walking along these streets because the visual juxtaposition of these disparate objects is so casual and always surprising. Every time I walk by, I always find something new to look at. Here, you have giant bags of pork rinds next to fresh flowers. One of the great pleasures of living in Jackson Heights is this feast of seeing. And I’m a person who gets bored easily — that’s why I am a writer. And walking around these streets, I never get bored.

Which raises the question: how do some of the things we have talked about — immigration, streetscape, the informal economy — relate to your work as a writer?
Primarily, I am a storyteller. I tell stories in screenplays and prose and just about every other medium. I like to walk around the streets of large cities and gather stories and tell them. Lately, I’ve also become a teacher to students who want to learn how to tell stories. So I often bring them around here to Jackson Heights to show them this feast of stories. Because, where most of them are in Manhattan, it seems enervated, it often seems that every story has been told a hundred times. And then they take the train out here and are dazzled.

Wherever there are immigrants there are stories. I find that immigrants, because of their dislocation, have a need for recollection. And, many of the stories around here you find in phone booths. There used to be more of these phone booths, before everyone started getting cell phones, where people would go to call their families. Often you’d see these migrants weeping as they spoke to their children who, if they were undocumented, they would not see for ten years, twenty years, while they were sending money back home. Many of these migrants are desperately lonely, they’ve left their families and, in a sense, can never go back home unless they are ready to give up their residence here. Those are some of the saddest cases. Especially the mothers — I’ve met Cameroonian babysitters who have broken down weeping while telling me about how they spend their lives caring for somebody else’s child, while their own children are strangers to them. It’s heroic. These people are heroines and martyrs. There ought to be some sort of sanctuary spot on Earth where these mothers and their children could be allowed to see each other for half an hour and hug each other without the immigration agents and the lawyers and the governments intervening.

So, I’m writing a book-length essay on this subject: What happens to the human being in the city? You know, many of these people have come not from Tegucigalpa or Delhi, they’ve come from small villages direct to this big city. And how do they deal with it? How do they deal with subways, the social security system, women in short skirts, a sense of time that is completely different from the village? It’s worth looking at novelistically. So I’m looking at space in the city, time in the city and velocity in the city. And what connects it all is storytelling.

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Suketu Mehta is the New York-based author of ‘Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found,’ which won the Kiriyama Prize and the Hutch Crossword Award, and was a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize. Mehta’s work has been published in the New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, Granta, Harpers Magazine, Time, and Conde Nast Traveler, and has been featured on NPR’s ‘Fresh Air.’ Mehta is Associate Professor of Journalism at New York University. He is currently working on a nonfiction book about immigrants in contemporary New York, for which he was awarded a 2007 Guggenheim fellowship. He has also written an original screenplay for ‘The Goddess,’ a Merchant-Ivory film starring Tina Turner, and ‘Mission Kashmir,’ a Bollywood movie. Mehta was born in Calcutta and raised in Bombay and New York. He is a graduate of New York University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

As we head into 2011, the Omnibus will be reviving our field trip suggestions, leading into a fun season of meet-ups and group explorations of the city in the spring and summer. But the Flea Market is one fascinating urban destination that won’t be around in the new year. We’ll be following this story to see if the vendors are successful in finding a new location, and what the urban design challenges and opportunities for any such location might be. In the meantime, listen to a one-minute excerpt of the market’s rich combination of sounds in the clip below:

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Cassim Shepard is the project director of Urban Omnibus. He makes non-fiction media, especially films and video, about architecture and urbanism. He lives in Brooklyn.

Last fall, we recapped a landmark symposium that the Citizen’s Housing and Planning Council convened to challenge housing officials, designers and developers to reform housing and zoning codes based on analysis of how people are actually living. Fewer and fewer people can afford to live within the existing legal housing standard, so more and more live outside of it. In addition to increased vulnerability to fire and safety hazards, tenants in illegal units have few enforceable rights. And the recent immigrants who comprise a large percentage of tenants in illegal units are often unwilling to seek official help. Some of them end up seeking help from community-based organizations like Chhaya, a community development corporation in Jackson Heights that works to address the unique housing needs of New York’s South Asian community – immigrants from India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nepal and Caribbean nations such as Guyana and Trinidad. Seema Agnani, Chhaya’s executive director, has seen firsthand the challenges that illegal dwelling units – particularly basement apartments – pose to immigrant tenants. And she’s also seen the opportunity that legalizing some of these units presents.

For these immigrants and other low-income New Yorkers priced out of the legal housing market, illegal subdivisions provide an undeniable source of affordable housing in New York City. Many of these units are unfit for habitation or otherwise unsafe. But not all of them. In some cases, legalizing a unit would simply require the filing of architectural plans with the Department of Buildings. In others, the impediment to legalization is not the Building Code but the zoning map – the unit might meet legal requirements for safe habitation but the property cannot legally accommodate multiple families. Still others are very close to meeting legal requirements but fall short in a minor way. Architects and planners need to get involved to help community advocates realize this potential for creating affordable housing out of our existing building stock.

Bringing illegal units into the scope of regulation could have a number of positive impacts: tenants’ living conditions would improve; forced displacement would decrease; rental income might lessen the burden on overleveraged homeowners at risk of mortgage default; landlords would begin to report rental income, increasing City revenues and potentially lessening the burden on social services in neighborhoods with large populations of undocumented residents. But how do you do that? Step 1: create an Accessory Dwelling Unit (ADU) code and bring those basements that can be made into safely habitable apartments up to the standards of that code.

What follows is Seema Agnani, executive director of Chhaya, explaining the context and need for an ADU code in her own words. -C.S.

"Do you know your rights as a tenant?" Flyer detail. Chhaya offers services in Bangla/Bengali, English, Hindi, and Urdu

In 2000, as we were in the process of establishing Chhaya, we completed a needs assessment survey of the South Asian immigrant community around the city and found that 50% of people we talked to didn’t have a lease. Over the years, both owners and tenants have sought us out with concerns: tenants who were living in illegal units and owners who were frustrated because tenants were not paying rent. So education, advocacy and organizing around the issues of illegal dwelling units have become a priority area for our organization.

Basement apartments are a legitimate source of affordable housing; the issue is that they need to be brought up to code. If they were, unsafe conditions would be improved, tenants could be guaranteed their rights, and owners could regularize their ability to collect rent and insure the protection of their property. But we’ve found that many elected officials are afraid to touch this issue; they see it as an issue of neighborhood preservation, with a lot of the more established residents feeling that new immigrants are coming in and ruining their communities. But the City is draining all sorts of resources. Judges in the court system are frustrated with the number of complaints, but there is nothing they can do to tackle the issue. The Department of Buildings is tired of having to issue these fines, despite the revenue. It’s also a huge drain on public resources, resulting in overcrowded schools and overstretched social service provision. But if these units and the population that resides in them could be planned for, it could really be a resource for the city. So last year we went about the process of documenting how many of these units actually exist.

Jackson Heights zoning map. Jackson Heights was one of the first of New York's neighborhoods designed with the car in mind, which required creating lots with larger areas at the back for garages. This characteristic allows for the existence of separate rear entrances to additional basement units.

The Housing and Secondary Unit Survey – which was designed in partnership with the Citizen’s Housing and Planning Council – was intended to document that these units exist and to assess the feasibility of legalizing them, looking at means of egress, the size of the windows, etc. We looked at two census tracts, one in Jackson Heights and one in Briarwood, Jamaica. Our goal was to look at what the actual data was versus what was on record. We surveyed 446 homes, all registered as single-family, and found that 80% had signs of basement use, and we estimate that 35% of these basement units could potentially be legalized.

These are decisions that should be based on health and safety not necessarily on inches.After analyzing the data, we put forward a series of recommendations that would remove some of the impediments to bringing illegal basement apartments to code. It basically comes down to implementing an Accessory Dwelling Unit (ADU) code. The concept is that the zoning doesn’t necessarily have to change. Many of the neighborhoods in question are zoned for single-family homes, which makes converting a property into a two-family home much more complicated. An ADU code is a way of getting around all of that – it remains a single-family home with an accessory unit.

Many places have already implemented ADU codes: Washington State, Santa Cruz, Yonkers and other parts of Westchester County, for example. But in New York City, the current building code is so strict that it makes legalization very difficult. For example, there is a legal difference between a cellar and a basement. A cellar is more the 50% below ground, a basement is more than 50% above. We’ve seen apartments that are more that 50% above ground at the front of the unit and less in the back. Our argument is that these are decisions that should be based on health and safety not necessarily on inches. If there is enough air and light and if it is safe, then the codes should be more flexible.

144th Street in Briarwood / Jamaica. Briarwood is a mostly residential, multi-ethnic community of one and two-family homes, many of which have basements, backyards and garages. Out of 305 homes surveyed in this area, 52 properties had received some form of complaint related to an illegal conversion.

Photo: Flickr user Peter Manzari

Our proposal is to create an ADU code, starting with a pilot project in a specific area, and then move on to the creation of financial incentives and the establishment of loan programs and grant programs. The ideal scenario would be to pass something at both the state and city level, but because of this issue’s political sensitivity, we are proposing that the City start with a pilot project. We would set a goal of helping maybe one hundred owners go through the process of legalizing a basement unit. That way, the City could learn from this process and also expedite it. One of the challenges is that these apartments already exist, so how do you insure that they have been converted properly in terms of the built-in wiring, piping, etc. A lot of architects are afraid to sign off on these apartments because they can’t do a proper inspection.

We need more architects involved in this work. There’s a real need for spatial, design and construction expertise, as well as help getting into the specifics of building codes. I think that is the actual missing piece for us right now.  We have advocates, we have legal experts but we don’t have enough of the design community involved in the process. And if we can get a pilot program going, then we’re going to need architects to help us  help individual homeowners through the process of legalization.

Detail of Building Code, Chapter 5: General Building Heights and Areas, Section BC-501

The design community could help us think through energy conservation approaches and ways to improve energy efficiency as well. There are a lot of resources available now – through weatherization programs and other stimulus money – that could be used to help with this process. And I think that we could think of an ADU plan as an opportunity to green these neighborhoods.

The majority of these units exist in the outer boroughs, they exist in immigrant communities that have established hubs. Their temples are here; their mosques are here; their community is here. People are willing to live in overcrowded conditions in order to be in these communities. Particularly in Queens, there really has been very little investment in affordable housing developments. If you look at where all of the development has occurred by the non-profit or for-profit sector, it’s pretty shocking when you see how little has been done in this borough. Of course there are political reasons for that, but I also think there’s a perception that everyone in Queens lives in historic single-family homes or nice condos and co-ops. There’s really a need to educate the broader public about the borough itself and what’s going on here. This is where the majority of new immigrants have settled in New York City.

With such a dynamic population, we need to build a base of tenants and owners who want to push for this. So there is a big community organizing component in addition to the policy advocacy work. The forums we convene can get pretty heated. Owners are stressed out about fines they’ve received, tenants are upset because they’re being evicted – we heard cases where families had been living in a neighborhood for over ten years, with kids in local schools, and then a forced eviction pushes them out, often into another illegal basement apartment, given the lack of legal affordable housing – and both groups are angry at their elected officials for not helping them. It’s not an easy issue to organize around. So we’re taking it to the streets. And we’ll see how it goes.

The staff of Chhaya Community Development Corporation

Seema Agnani is Executive Director of Chhaya CDC and was one of its initial founders. Before returning to Chhaya as Executive Director in 2007, she was the Coordinating Consultant to the Fund for New Citizens at The New York Community Trust, a donor collaborative supporting immigrant rights work. She was also the Director of Training and Technical Assistance at Citizens for NYC.  In addition, she worked with Asian Americans for Equality for several years as a housing development associate while also focusing on fundraising and development; and later served as a coordinator of the Lower Manhattan Health Care Coalition. She currently serves on the Board of Directors of the National Coalition for Asian Pacific American Community Development. She is a former recipient of The Charles H. Revson Fellowship at Columbia University, earned her Bachelors at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and a Masters of Urban Planning and Public Administration at the University of Illinois in Chicago.

The views expressed here are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

And then get in touch with your stories of immigrant integration, park access and park use. How do you use your local park? What might make you use it differently or more often? Have you recently been practicing Hanafuda, Tai Chi or Capoeira in public? Are you a recent immigrant, a community organizer, a parks enforcement patrol officer, a jogger or a dog-walker with stories to tell? We want to hear from you. -C.S.

Urban parks can be vibrant mixing grounds and places for expression, or isolating spaces of oppression. Their success or failure depends on both their physical design and the networks of community members who use and support them. New York City is often celebrated for its distinct neighborhoods, but traditional civic organizations do not always reflect current neighborhood demographics, and input processes for park planning are often not designed with immigrant communities in mind.

New York’s Immigrants and Parks Collaborative
Immigrants make up 36% of New York City’s population and disproportionately experience high levels of housing overcrowding, making parks New Yorkers’ living rooms and backyards. The city’s uniquely busy streets, sidewalks, subways, and parks bring together immigrants and non-immigrants daily in shared public spaces, making broad, inclusive involvement in those places all the more crucial. Immigrants use and enjoy parks, but encounter language, knowledge, and social barriers to involvement in civic organizations and the parks decision-making process.

The New York City Department of Parks & Recreation manages over 29,000 acres of parkland – 14% of the city’s total landmass. The agency depends on hundreds of local civic organizations and volunteer-run “friends-of” parks groups to help maintain, program, and advocate for these 1,700 parks, from urban playgrounds to old-growth forests. The Parks Department struggles to meet the changing physical design needs of park users as populations shift and park activities change, as do languages spoken, programming interests, and foods served. Parks staff is often comprised of seasonal hires with no special language or outreach skills. Without adequate resources or knowledge to do effective immigrant outreach, the Parks Department depends on community-based organizations to help engage immigrant communities.

The Collaborative has provided resources to approach the challenges of immigrant engagement with creativity, focus and support.The Immigrants & Parks Collaborative allows its members to experiment with methods for immigrant engagement, with more focused staff time, resources, and support than are usually available. Funded by The JM Kaplan Fund, it is a joint project of an advocacy organization, a nonprofit, and a City agency: the New York Immigration Coalition (NYIC), City Parks Foundation (CPF), and the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation. The Collaborative’s ten community-based organizations are working to increase immigrant engagement in eight parks in New York City. Most have a dedicated staff person, funded by the grant, who carries out the day-to-day work in each park, such as planning programs and conducting neighborhood outreach. The Collaborative works to understand issues unique to local context, while identifying systemic barriers to immigrant access and participation. The aim is to use lessons from this privately funded project to inform the Parks Department’s and other organizations’ efforts to foster more inclusive park engagement.

Two cases exemplify these efforts. In Lower Manhattan’s Chinatown, two of the Collaborative’s constituent organizations, the Hester Street Collaborative (HSC) and Asian Americans for Equality (AAFE), teamed up to create and employ a more accessible public input process for the redesign of a city-owned playground. In Jackson Heights, Friends of Travers Park approached the Queens Community House (QCH) to partner in efforts to increase immigrant representation in Travers Park activities and programs.

Lessons Learned: Involving Immigrants in Parks Processes and Civic Organizations
The Collaborative has provided a unique opportunity: resources and dedicated staff time that allow small organizations to approach challenges of immigrant engagement with creativity, focus and support. Their activities offer practitioners in local government and civic organizations lessons on rethinking parks as opportunities for integration, regardless of resources:

• Parks are tools for immigrant communities. It is a myth that worries about housing, employment, and financial security prevent immigrant involvement in parks and community life—inadequate outreach and improper public processes do.

• Immigrant social networks are tools for government and service organizations. Government agencies want to allocate resources effectively and provide relevant public services, but they need help from local leaders and service organizations to access immigrant communities. Outreach and policy implementation that connect to existing social networks are more effective than independent outreach through traditional methods, and secure broader input on park programming, services, and improvements. This leads to better suited, well used investments, and builds trust.

• Precedent-setting affects policy. The types of partnerships the Collaborative supports illustrate ways to use local knowledge and existing social networks to promote inclusivity and integration, rather than creating new programs that may not be as effective. When HSC and AAFE facilitated their participation, immigrants in Chinatown provided input for their playground and pedestrian malls because the process was made accessible, engaging, and relevant. These methods were a striking contrast to the traditional process of presentations followed by a feedback session. The Parks Department is now incorporating more “listening sessions” and opportunities for public input into appropriate park projects. Practitioners can learn from experiences like these to improve existing processes, or learn where obstacles to engagement lie and provide more guidance, transparency, and clarity around them.

Integrating new arrivals into existing neighborhoods are crucial social integration efforts that maintain cities’ vibrant, diverse community life. Linking immigrants to civic life has real effects in public space; when people see each other face to face in parks, distant “immigrants” become the neighbor planting next to you, and threatening “government,” your park’s gardener. By making public processes and established civic structures accessible, practitioners encourage immigrant participation that in turn helps create parks and public spaces that reflect the unique character of their neighborhoods.

The Immigrants & Parks Collaborative is:
Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice
Greater Jamaica Development Corporation
Asian Americans for Equality
Hester Street Collaborative
El Centro de Inmigrante
The Center for Family Life
Queens Museum of Art
Queens Community House
Centro Hispano “Cuzcatlan”
& Riverside Park Fund

For more information please contact Silvett García at the Immigrant and Parks Collaborative

Video produced by the JM Kaplan Fund and Supermarché.

Text written by Neerja Vasishta and Hillary Angelo, adapted from an article of theirs which was originally published in Progressive Planning, No. 179, Spring 2009. Neerja Vasishta is the former coordinator of the Immigrants & Parks Collaborative and parks advocacy coordinator at the New York Immigration Coalition. Hillary Angelo is the former director of the technical assistance program at Partnerships for Parks and is currently a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at New York University.

Images courtesy of the Hester Street Collaborative.

The views expressed here are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.