DEADLINE: Wednesday, February 1st, 2012, 5pm. The deadline for this competition has passed.
Click here to download a PDF of this Call for Essays.

DESCRIPTION
How does the Manhattan street grid determine your experience of the city?

How does it affect your understanding of what a city is, what a city does, how you move through a city?

How does it embed itself in defining aspects of daily life in New York City: destinations, neighborhoods, intersections, commutes; where and how we live, work, explore or enjoy the city?

This year, the Commissionersʼ Plan, the framework that established Manhattanʼs famous street grid, celebrates its 200th anniversary. In honor of that event, and in connection with two exhibitions on the history and future of the grid, Urban Omnibus is soliciting essays that reflect on the Manhattan street grid as paradigm, rubric or muse for urban life. A jury of prominent designers, urbanists, writers and thinkers will review submissions. Up to three winning entries will be published on UrbanOmnibus.net and will receive a monetary award ($500 for first place; $250 for up to two second place winners). The essays submitted to this competition may reference either New York Cityʼs speculative futures or its storied past, but in either case, essays should reflect on its contemporary reality. A strong personal voice is encouraged. Essays can range from stories that take Manhattanʼs numbered streets and avenues as points of departure to journalistic descriptions of place-based urban subcultures to theoretical treatises on infrastructure, property or density.

The prize-winning essays selected for publication will complement a pair of exhibitions presented by the Museum of the City of New York and the Architectural League of New York that commemorate the Manhattan grid and explore its evolving legacy. The exhibitsʼ premise is that the grid has been subject to countless adaptations and transformations over the past 200 years and will be subject to more urban innovation in the years to come. The Greatest Grid: The Master Plan of Manhattan, 1811-2011, curated by Hilary Ballon, explores the 200 years since the creation of that foundational plan through the lens of the gridʼs enduring impact on land use, real estate and the public realm. The Unfinished Grid: Design Speculations for Manhattan, curated by Gregory Wessner, displays eight design proposals – selected from a pool of over 120 submissions from around the world – that project ways “to act on and within the grid to respond to the challenges and opportunities… that New York faces now and into the future.” The essays will contribute personal, reflective and contemporary voices into this conversation about the past, present and future of New York City. Writers interested in submitting work are encouraged to view the exhibitions as they shape their essays.

With this competition, Urban Omnibus seeks to advance its dedication to redefining the culture of citymaking by inviting writers to interpret a system that influences so many aspects of urban life, and yet is rarely considered in evocative or creative non-fiction writing.

AWARD
The jury will select one first-prize essay, whose author will receive an award of $500. Up to two second place winners will receive prizes of $250 each.

SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS
Essays should be between 800 and 2000 words. Suggestions of imagery that supports or illustrates each essay are strongly encouraged.

Email submissions as attachments to info@urbanomnibus.net with GRID: ESSAY SUBMISSION as the subject line. Please include your name at the top of the document.

Submissions must be received by 5:00pm on Wednesday, February 1st, 2012.

Questions about this call for essays can be sent to info@urbanomnibus.net.

ELIGIBILITY
Staff and board members of the Architectural League and the Museum of the City of New York are not eligible for this competition.

JURY 
Ken Chen, Executive Director, Asian American Writersʼ Workshop
Sina Najafi, Editor, Cabinet
Michael Sorkin, architect, urban designer, writer
Nicola Twilley, author, Edible Geography and Co-Director, Studio-X New York

Rosalie Genevro, Executive Director, Architectural League
Cassim Shepard, Editor, Urban Omnibus
Varick Shute, Managing Editor, Urban Omnibus
Gregory Wessner, Special Projects Director, Architectural League and curator of The Unfinished Grid: Design Speculations for Manhattan

ABOUT THE EXHIBITIONS
The Greatest Grid: The Master Plan of Manhattan, 1811-2011 celebrates the 200th anniversary of the Commissionersʼ Plan of 1811, the foundational document that established Manhattanʼs famous street grid. Featuring an original hand-drawn map of New Yorkʼs planned streets and avenues prepared by the Commission in 1811, as well as other rare historic maps, photographs and prints of the evolution of the cityʼs streets, and original manuscripts and publications that document the cityʼs physical growth, the exhibition examines the gridʼs initial design, implementation, and evolution. The Greatest Grid traces the enduring influence of the 1811 plan as the grid has become a defining feature of the city, shaping its institutions and public life.

The Unfinished Grid: Design Speculations for Manhattan: On the occasion of the 200th anniversary of the Commissionersʼ Plan, the Architectural League, in partnership with the Museum of the City of New York and Architizer, issued an international Call for Ideas, inviting architects and designers from around the world to speculate about how Manhattanʼs grid might be adapted, extended or transformed in the future. How might the grid accommodate growth or make possible new types of buildings; how could it be modified to respond to climate change or new transportation technologies? The Unfinished Grid presents eight proposals, selected by a jury of architects and historians, which offer provocative speculations for the future city. Proposals range from inserting a new north-south avenue, in order to introduce new street-level public spaces, to appropriating intersections as sites for new kinds of development, to envisioning fantastical vertical cities that claim the sky above Manhattan as a new realm for inhabitation. Together the proposals do not describe a literal vision of the future, but suggest the immense possibilities and catalytic power the grid still holds, after two hundred years, for organizing urban life and stimulating the imaginations of architects and urbanists.

Both exhibitions are on view through April 15, 2012 at the Museum of the City of New York.

Writers (of both the fiction and non-fiction varieties) have engaged with the urban landscape for as long as we’ve had cities, and Urban Omnibus has enjoyed sharing writerly perspectives, including those of Richard Sennett, Dalton Conley, Andrew Blum and Suketu Mehta, each of whose books and articles rigorously examine some complexities of the urban condition. But what happens when you ask writers to engage with a medium, like blogging, not known for its sustained attention to detail or its ability to render nuance? What happens when you try to turn blogging into a new mode of creative urban investigation? With that in mind, Urban Omnibus asked each of the Open City organizing fellows to respond to a series of questions. We were interested to know how each of them personally defines urban change, goes about investigating it, finds blogging a useful medium of investigation and communication for this topic, and, finally, what each of them has found most surprising or notable in his or her explorations. Read selections from their answers below.

Or, read each blogger’s individual Q&A and check out some of the blogposts they’ve contributed to this collaborative project. Click here for Deanna Fei, a novelist who grew up in Flushing; click here for Jerome Chou, an urbanist with diverse experiences in community organizing, landscape architecture and public space advocacy; click here for Cristiana Baik, a writer with a background in affordable housing and architecture; click here for Peggy Lee, a poet, performer and youth worker who lives in Sunset Park; and click here for Sahar Muradi, an Afghan-American writer who has worked in both international development and youth development in Afghanistan and the United States. -C.S.

Everything Frosted | photo: Tom Giebel

_______________________________________________________________________________

Deanna Fei

What have you been looking at specifically? And where?
I’ve been exploring my own hometown of Flushing, Queens, through various personal lenses: the Tai Chi scene that includes my dad, photo essays of Main Street by my sister, my own emotional associations to place names in Ha Jin’s A Good Fall, and pretty much anything else that moves me.

How do you define urban change?
When my parents first moved to the house where I grew up, my sister and I used to get taunted for being the only “Chinks” on the block, which was traditionally Italian. By the time I was in high school, the line for my bus, the Q26, was almost entirely composed of Asian Americans, and one day, I heard the (Caucasian) bus driver mutter, “Another handful of macaroni.” That line took me some time to parse (especially given the originality of the racial slur, not to mention its Italian roots), but I think these episodes, taken together, encapsulate so much of urban change: how rapidly it happens, how an entire population can go from alien to dominant, the dance between what is gained and what is lost… (To read more from Deanna Fei, click here).

_______________________________________________________________________________

Jerome Chou

What have you been looking at specifically? And where?
I wanted to be in the area as much as possible, so last November I subletted my Brooklyn apartment and took a short-term room in the heart of Fujianese Chinatown. Living in the neighborhood makes it easier to talk to people. I’ve met Tai-chi students, Chinese opera singers, and soccer players in Columbus Park; restaurant workers and owners; heads of Business Improvement Districts and community design centers; a teacher with a Chinese American youth drum, fife, and bugle corps; A young woman who sketched on a napkin for me how her family fit eight people in two bunkbeds when she was growing up. The Chinatown Progressive Association is working with a group of local high-school and college students in a program called Shared Stories; I’m working with them to develop their own narratives about being a recent immigrant in Chinatown.

Whenever possible, I tie these personal stories to all of the forces that shape neighborhoods that are not immediately visible or accessible to most people: zoning, subsidies for new residential development, rent control laws and affordable housing guidelines, demographic shifts and real estate values. I think people often feel overwhelmed by neighborhood change because it happens quickly and seems outside of anyone’s control. But in fact there are many specific decisions and policies and campaigns that have an enormous influence on neighborhood change. That means there are tools people can use to guide change. And there’s a huge opportunity for urbanists from many disciplines (architects, landscape architects, planners, graduate students, graphic designers, photographers, etc.) to research and synthesize all of these complex and often controversial issues, to create visually engaging materials that make these issues more accessible to people who are most affected by neighborhood change, and to shape ongoing debates.

For instance, Community Board 3 just approved development guidelines for the Seward Park Urban Renewal Area, including several large parcels along Delancey Street that have been empty for 43 years. The guidelines propose a range of market-rate, moderate-income, and low-income units. Manuel Miranda and I produced an infographic juxtaposing this proposed mix against the incomes of Chinatown and Lower East Side residents. On a separate topic, Yeju Choi and I created a map of all of the bank branches in Chinatown, and I wrote about what the concentration of banks in the neighborhood means and where all of that money is going.

So this is an open call disguised as an answer to your question! I would love to hear from Urban Omnibus readers who want to get involved (opencityjc[at]gmail.com)… (To read more from Jerome Chou, click here).

Bank Map | Jerome Chou and Yeju Choi

_______________________________________________________________________________

Cristiana Baik

How are you going about investigating urban change in this project?
I think talking to people — local residents — is pretty much the heart of the blog, and probably the best way for us to think about the way urban changes have affected local communities. The process of interviewing has also been the most difficult aspect of the project for me — finding a non-invasive way to access people’s stories without feeling like you’re objectifying them. The role of a privileged writer coming in to tell someone’s story just really doesn’t jive with me, hence I am always a bit tentative/paranoid about how I go about conducting interviews or writing about interviewees, etc. On one hand, and for various reasons, I haven’t found it very plausible to get “life histories” of individuals. I don’t think the project necessarily asks or lends itself to this kind of process — it’s a daily blog, which, more often than not, calls for interviews that are tongue-in-cheek. As a writer, I think this degree of freedom/”openness” is one of the most interesting aspects of the project… (To read more from Cristiana Baik, click here).

_______________________________________________________________________________

Peggy Lee

What have you particularly enjoyed writing about?
As one example, karaoke — a weekend passion of mine —  is one of my starting points. I’m getting to know the karaoke jockeys who work at my favorite venues in the three Chinatowns, which I write about in my Chinatown Soundscape Series on Open City. Open City has given me the opportunity to be more intimate and critical with my daily life, with its dailiness. I learn something new everyday walking in Sunset Park, my neighborhood. Lately, I’ve really been enjoying thinking about how karaoke sound and music night life in Chinatown connect to larger circuits of diaspora, immigration, in-translation, class, race, and, of course, urban change… (To read more from Peggy Lee, click here).

_______________________________________________________________________________

Sahar Muradi

What have you noticed in particular?
What I’ve noticed and what I’ve enjoyed so much about this project is that people generally want to talk and tell you their stories. When I told my landlord about the project, she started slipping newspaper clippings under my door. This is her dad’s building, constructed in 1900 and the only one on the block with its original door and wallpaper. Ms. Fedorko is very proud of it and very interested in the history of the LES. A few weeks later, she eagerly brought me old city plans and guidebooks, with ominous “DEMOLISHED” stamps across the pages. It was the same with my friend Naomi, who relished giving me a tour of her neighborhood in Chinatown and its hidden art galleries, or Mr. Leung, who talked about the history of his shoe cobbling stand on Forsyth St. I’ve enjoyed meeting people and reflecting on the fact of our two lives intersecting in this city… (To read more from Sahar Muradi, click here)

_______________________________________________________________________________

To find all full length interviews, including author bios and links to blog posts, click here.

For Open City, Peggy Lee has written about the food politics of the lunchtime rush and the Chinatown Soundscape Series, which investigates karaoke and gentrification,  among other topics. Find out more about her approach to this process in the interview below. For an overview of the project, click here.

Bruce Lee restaurant in Sunset Park | photo: Peggy Lee

What have you been looking at specifically? And where?
I’m really interested in the blurry boundaries of crossovers: language, accent, race, immigration paths, sound, veneer, and etc.

How do you define urban change?
Urban change could be a time unit. Measured by changing storefronts, a nightlife scene, an avenue, it is a process that happens both at a snail’s pace and in a blink of an eye.

What have you particularly enjoyed writing about?
As one example, karaoke — a weekend passion of mine –  is one of my starting points. I’m getting to know the karaoke jockeys who work at my favorite venues in the three Chinatowns, which I write about in my Chinatown Soundscape Series on Open City. Open City has given me the opportunity to be more intimate and critical with my daily life, with its dailiness. I learn something new everyday walking in Sunset Park, my neighborhood. Lately, I’ve really been enjoying thinking about how karaoke sound and music night life in Chinatown connect to larger circuits of diaspora, immigration, in-translation, class, race, and, of course, urban change.

How are you going about investigating urban change in this project?
My point A is investigating my own daily habits and surroundings. Really, where else can you start? I’m getting to know the karaoke jockeys who work at my favorite venues in the three Chinatowns, which I write about in my Chinatown Soundscape Series on Open City. Song is place, identity, and it’s fun to think about gentrification through the medium of music and musicality in the context of nightlife.

As a writer and performer, in what ways do you find blogging a useful medium of investigation of or communication about this topic?
Blogging is useful because of the potentials for connection. The blogging world is such a cornucopia of personal thoughts, trivialities, and angles, both political and popular. It can be a bit of a black hole sometimes, easy to get lost in. That’s why intention is so important when you’re cruising through or writing in the blogging world.

A drawing from Peggy Lee's personal journal

To find all full length interviews, including author bios and links to blog posts, click here.

Peggy Lee resides in Sunset Park, Brooklyn where the neighbor’s cursed rooster crows at 5:30 in the morning, a neighborhood cat ritually pisses at her window, and she has had many Tecate-driven conversations interrogating “life” on her roof top over-looking the Upper New York Bay and Lady Liberty. It is home. Her sensitivities to location, space, place, threaded by sonic experience are owed to her erratic moving history. Peggy admits being touched deeply by the lagging grunge scene she experienced in St. Louis and later, the hip hop circuits of LA & the Bay Area. She loves how questions about her childhood begin with “military brat or foster care?” Neither. She graduated with her M.A. in Performance Studies from New York University and a B.A. in Feminist Studies at University of California, Santa Barbara. She is a poet, performer, youth worker, and hustling, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed writer in New York City.

Bush Terminal | photos: Christiana Baik

What have you been looking at specifically? And where?
Specifically, I’m looking at Sunset Park, and although I initially started in Sunset Park’s Chinatown, my most recent research and conversations have veered towards the waterfront, especially the Navy Yard and Bush Terminal.

How do you define urban change?
In the past, I’ve defined “urban change” as a euphemism for gentrification. During this project, some of this view has shifted into something less pessimistic — meaning, urban change can describe shifts beyond the influences and impacts of real estate development. Demographic shifts, for example,  don’t always coincide with socio-economic changes. Most of the former definition (gentrification) comes from having lived in neighborhoods with very different political and demographic profiles that underwent significant urban changes definitively shaped by real estate development (including Echo Park in Los Angeles and Hyde Park in Chicago).

How are you going about investigating urban change in this project?
One way I’ve gone about writing on Sunset Park is simply walking around. Right away I noticed — at a time when I knew nothing about Sunset Park — the demographic divisions: 2nd, 3rd Ave. is mostly industrial/post-industrial (warehouses, Bush Terminal, Navy Yard), with a very small arts-related contingent (like Light Industry and the artist studios), 4th, 5th, 6th Avenues are heavily Latino (Dominican, Mexican), while 7th and 8th Avenues (around the late 30 and on) are spines of a growing Chinatown. It made me wonder when these demographic changes began to occur, which then led me to investigate recent city-wide revitalization plans that has, in some ways, helped shape these shifts.

I think talking to people — local residents — is pretty much the heart of the blog, and probably the best way for us to think about the way urban changes have affected local communities. The process of interviewing has also been the most difficult aspect of the project for me — finding a non-invasive way to access people’s stories without feeling like you’re objectifying them. The role of a privileged writer coming in to tell someone’s story just really doesn’t jive with me, hence I am always a bit tentative/paranoid about how I go about conducting interviews or writing about interviewees, etc. On one hand, and for various reasons, I haven’t found it very plausible to get “life histories” of individuals. I don’t think the project necessarily asks or lends itself to this kind of process — it’s a daily blog, which, more often than not, calls for interviews that are tongue-in-cheek. As a writer, I think this degree of freedom/”openness” is one of the most interesting aspects of the project.

As a writer with a background in anthropology and affordable housing, in what ways do you find blogging a useful medium of investigation of or communication about this topic?
I like blogging because it’s so different from formalized papers (or a well “crafted” poem). Obviously, you don’t want to spew out wrong information and dive into writing posts that are poorly informed! Yet, at the same time, blogs are a bit less formal and allow the author to float ideas out there: well formulated speculations, I would say. It’s also an interesting venue for people to read your work. Most of my writing has been intended for small, pretty specific audiences — either other poets or academics. But Open City appeals to a broad range of folks, from urban planners, architects, to activists, as well as artists and writers. It’s pretty cool.

What have you noticed in particular? From your observations so far, what jumps out at you? What have you particularly enjoyed writing about? What has most surprised you about the neighborhood(s)?
Specifically, with Sunset Park, I think the less obvious things have surprised me. For example, my expectation was that most of my posts would center around Sunset Parks’s growing Chinatown (which I still think is incredibly vital, important to think and write about), which hasn’t been the case at all. In this sense, it’s the way that I’ve experienced most writing projects: it’s the unexpected turns that are almost always what makes the work more interesting. Veering into Bush Terminal, the Navy Yard, has been surprising and interesting. And I knew almost nothing about it before Open City.

To find all full length interviews, including author bios and links to blog posts, click here.

Cristiana Baik currently resides in Brooklyn, New York. As an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, she concentrated in Anthropology and Gender Studies. She received her MFA in Creative Writing (2009), and is currently a graduate assistant, student at NYU. Her work has been published in various literary magazines, including American Letters & Commentary, Jacket Magazine, the Boston Review, and Conjunctions, and her chapbook The Victory of the Strange Heart Beating, was published by Blue Hour Press in 2009.

It was in Chicago that Cristiana first became interested in issues of urban planning. As a college student, she studied and lived in South Africa and Israel, to get a broader sense of how land distribution and power politics creates different forms of consciousness. She continued with her work, when she became a project management associate at the Los Angeles Community Design Center (now Abode Communities), a nonprofit affordable housing developer and architecture firm. She worked on various issues at LACDC, from relocation, mixed income housing, to demographic research.

Deli Gentrification | Photo courtesy of Jerome Chou

How do you define urban change?
Some basic questions that I’m trying to answer: What are the Lower East Side and Chinatown like now? How is that influenced by what has happened in the past? How are people trying to shape the future of these neighborhoods? Where these questions intersect is a definition of urban (or at least neighborhood) change. I hope all of the posts we’re writing contribute to an ongoing, working definition.

What have you been looking at specifically? And where? How are you going about investigating urban change in this project?
I wanted to be in the area as much as possible, so last November I subletted my Brooklyn apartment and took a short-term room (at double the rent) at 11 Monore St, in the heart of Fujianese Chinatown. In January I moved again to the former Rabbi Jacob Joseph School, a 100-year building converted to apartments on Henry Street, near the E. Broadway F train station.

Living in the neighborhood makes it easier to talk to people. I’ve met tai-chi students, Chinese opera singers, and soccer players in Columbus Park. Restaurant workers and owners. Heads of Business Improvement Districts and community design centers. A teacher with a Chinese American youth drum, fife, and bugle corps. A young woman who sketched on a napkin for me how her family fit 8 people in 2 bunkbeds when she was growing up. The Chinatown Progressive Association is working with a group of local high-school and college students in a program called Shared Stories; I’m working with them to develop their own narratives about being a recent immigrant in Chinatown.

Whenever possible, I tie these personal stories to all of the forces that shape neighborhoods that are not immediately visible or accessible to most people: zoning, subsidies for new residential development, rent control laws and affordable housing guidelines, demographic shifts and real estate values. I think people often feel overwhelmed by neighborhood change because it happens quickly and seems outside of anyone’s control. But in fact there are many specific decisions and policies and campaigns that have an enormous influence on neighborhood change. That means there are tools people can use to guide change. And there’s a huge opportunity for urbanists from many disciplines (architects, landscape architects, planners, graduate students, graphic designers, photographers, etc.) to research and synthesize all of this complex and often controversial material, to create visually engaging materials that make these issues more accessible to people who are most affected by neighborhood change, and to shape ongoing debates.

For instance, Community Board 3 just approved development guidelines for the Seward Park Urban Renewal Area, including several large parcels along Delancey Street that have been empty for 43 years. The guidelines propose a range of market-rate, moderate-income, and low-income units. Manuel Miranda and I produced an infographic juxtaposing this proposed mix against the incomes of Chinatown and Lower East Side residents. On a separate topic, Yeju Choi and I created a map of all of the bank branches in Chinatown, and I wrote about what the concentration of banks in the neighborhood means and where all of that money is going.

So this is an open call disguised as an answer to your question! I would love to hear from Urban Omnibus readers who want to get involved (opencityjc[at]gmail.com).

Bank Map | Jerome Chou and Yeju Choi

As someone who’s worked on diverse issues in contemporary urbanism (housing, organizing, landscape, public space, etc.), in what ways do you find blogging a useful medium of investigation of and / or communication about urban change?
Blogging has a taint of obsessiveness, and of being on the margins. Those are very good things when it comes to covering neighborhood change. It’s relatively easy and cheap to set up a blog. People in any neighborhood can do it. They can cover something that might seem unconventional or not “newsworthy,” but actually contains a great story that would’ve otherwise gone unnoticed. And neighborhood blogs are rooted in that place. Sometimes mainstream journalists cover something, then it’s off to another story somewhere else. Neighborhood blogs develop deep local knowledge, and that’s all they focus on.

What have you noticed in particular? From your observations so far, what jumps out at you? What have you particularly enjoyed writing about? What has most surprised you?
One of the best things about Open City is you have an excuse to talk to people and ask around about things that you’ve always been curious about, but never acted on. My Brooklyn neighborhood is also gentrifying, and my apartment is upstairs from one of those outpost bodegas that sell organic kombucha long before the demographic that buys those things makes a more permanent mark on the built environment. I’ve always wondered how bodegas gentrify, and how you can map neighborhood change on their shelves. So when I found the one bodega in all of Chinatown that sells $8 pints of ice cream, I had an excuse to interview the owner. (Turns out, she went to Whole Foods every day for months, watching what people bought, to figure out what upscale items to stock in her store.)

Or, to take another pet topic: Why are there so many new galleries in the area? It’s startling to walk down Orchard Street and see them all—18 in a 3-block stretch. If you look at the years these Orchard St galleries opened, almost all of then are less than two years old, which corresponds to the opening of the New Museum in 2007. But there are other factors as well. The increasing number of art school programs and graduates. The financialization of the art market, so that it’s an investment opportunity very much like real estate (and is in fact bundled like mortgages). And then there’s something less quantifiable: many  gallery workers and owners talk about the neighborhood just like new residents do—they like the feel of being in a neighborhood interspersed with undergarment shops and printers, not a gallery district like Chelsea.

One last surprise: I’d always believed the cliché that New York changes so fast, it leaves no trace of history behind. Completely untrue. Evidence of the city’s history is everywhere, in the built environment and in the stories of people who live here. Once you start paying attention, it practically hits you over the head.

"Art for the Evicted" by Dennis Thomas and Day Gleeson | courtesy of Jerome Chou

To find all full length interviews, including author bios and links to blog posts, click here.

Jerome Chou is the Director of Programs at the Design Trust for Public Space, a nonprofit dedicated to improving New York City’s public realm. Prior to joining the Design Trust, Jerome worked at Field Operations as a project manager on Freshkills Park; as a community planner for Baltimore City Department of Planning; as an organizer for ACORN and the Working Families Party; and as an assistant editor with the nonprofit publisher The New Press. He has degrees in Urban Planning and Landscape Architecture from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design.

Jerome has organized and produced numerous public space interventions. Most recently, in response to budget cuts in 2009 that eliminated Sunday public library services throughout Brooklyn, he helped create Branch, a temporary Sunday library in a parking lot in Fort Greene.

Store window during Lunar New Year festivities | Photo: Jessica Fei

What have you been looking at specifically? And where?
I’ve been exploring my own hometown of Flushing, Queens, through various personal lenses: the Tai Chi scene that includes my dad, photo essays of Main Street by my sister, my own emotional associations to place names in Ha Jin’s A Good Fall, and pretty much anything else that moves me.

How do you (personally) define urban change?
When my parents first moved to the house where I grew up, my sister and I used to get taunted for being the only “Chinks” on the block, which was traditionally Italian. By the time I was in high school, the line for my bus, the Q26, was almost entirely composed of Asian Americans, and one day, I heard the (Caucasian) bus driver mutter, “Another handful of macaroni.” That line took me some time to parse (especially given the originality of the racial slur, not to mention its Italian roots), but I think these episodes, taken together, encapsulate so much of urban change: how rapidly it happens, how an entire population can go from alien to dominant, the dance between what is gained and what is lost.

How are you going about investigating urban change in this project?
I take urban change as the given, the great, constant stream that we often forget to notice. And so any moment that I document, any snapshot that I take, is one drop of that stream frozen in time, held up as a tiny prism.

As a writer, in what ways do you find blogging a useful medium of investigation of or communication about this topic?
As a novelist, I work in long periods of isolation, always with the sense of building brick by brick by brick. Blogging, especially a collaborative blog such as Open City, provides a wonderful sense of immediacy. It’s an instant conversation. And I love the freedom of knowing that, on any given day, my little contribution can be just that. I don’t have to know how it fits into the grand scheme of things; I can trust that it’s part of a collective effort, that the interests and creative energies of my fellow bloggers and our readers and myself all add up to something bigger together.

As someone who grew up in Flushing, what can you tell us about your  personal perspective on the difference between noticing urban change in the place of your upbringing versus investigating it as part of a investigative writing project?
This is a really interesting and complicated question. I remember how my friends and I used to feel when a mob of Mets fans or tourists boarded the 7 train, gawking as if they were heading into some wild territory. Even now, I still feel irked if I sense that Columbus-style tone of discovery in, say, a Times review of a Flushing restaurant. For immigrant communities, there can be a sensitivity to simply being noteworthy. You know, why is it blog material for a group of middle-aged Chinese Americans to gather in Kissena Park and practice Tai Chi? To them, it’s just their morning routine. I get that, even as I’m drawn to investigating their personal histories, their daily journeys, what defines their place in this city. I don’t have any easy answers. I just know that this is a tension that often emerges, bidden and unbidden, in my writing.

Tai Chi in Kissena Park | Photo courtesy of Deanna Fei

To find all full length interviews, including author bios and links to blog posts, click here.

Deanna Fei is the author of the novel A Thread of Sky (Penguin Press, 2010), the story of a family of six Chinese American women who reunite for a tour of their ancestral home. The New York Times Book Review calls it “timeless and of the moment,” while the Chicago Tribune says, “This is one of those rare novels that delivers on the promise of its opening pages. This summer, no smart woman should leave on vacation without it.” A Thread of Sky was recently named a New York Times Editors’ Choice and an Indie Next Notable Book.

Deanna was born in Flushing, New York, and has lived in Beijing and Shanghai, China. A graduate of Amherst College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she has received a Fulbright Grant, a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship, and a Chinese Cultural Scholarship. She currently lives in Brooklyn, New York, where she teaches in public schools and is at work on a new novel. To read her blog, reviews, and more, visit deannafei.com.

Chinese New Year Parade | Photos: Sahar Muradi

What have you been looking at specifically? And where?
I’ve been looking up and around and inside—I’ve been trying to take note of interesting things, things that poke out, or don’t, the poetry in taking a walk or talking to a shoe cobbler or listening at a bus stop, all the pixels that make up the city.  That’s what I’m interested in: the multiplicities, the layers, the many ways we identify ourselves and relate to one another as neighbors and fellow NYers, how we rub up against each other, how our histories and maps meet, how, for example, a Bengali by way of Dubai is managing an Afghan restaurant in Flushing and marketing for the Chinese (my next post)!  The stories are vast and incredibly intertwined.

Because I live right there, I often write on the LES, with occasional trips to Flushing.

How do you (personally) define urban change?
I have trouble defining it, and I think that’s what attracted me to this project. The shape of Open City had a lot questions and a lot of room to it. I think the term “urban change” cannot be contained to demographics and landscapes shifting according to economic/political/social forces, cannot be whitewashed “good” or “bad”. Then this blog and all the work and talk on gentrification and urban change would be flat. It is contentious, it is complex, but the profound thing is how the topic is engaging people with their city, their government, their neighbors

How are you going about investigating urban change in this project?
My approach is varied, from walking and observing to interviewing people to reaching out to local organizations.  I also enjoy reading other local blogs, like the Lo-Down, the creators of which I recently had the opportunity to interview.  I think one thing that sets Open City apart from the many blogs chronicling different neighborhoods is that, coming from the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, our approach is not from the perspective of city planners or sociologists or even community organizers, but from that of creative writers and artists. So our posts swing from poetry to personal narratives to soundscapes—they offer a different way of investigating the topic.

As a writer and as an engaged local citizen with a background in international development work, in what ways do you find blogging a useful medium of investigation of and / or communication about this topic?
I find blogging useful in a number of ways. As a writer who sits long with her words, it’s helped me to turn things over, to be timely, to be playful, to not toil with ideas of perfectionism, let alone grammar!  As a Gemini, it appeals to my infinite curiosities – posts do not need to be related or linear.  As someone who is keen on being engaged with her local environment, blogging prompts you to open your eyes and ears wider, to talk to people you might not have. It’s really a very connecting thing, even if your connection is over a disagreement about how you see the situation.

What have you noticed in particular? From your observations so far, what jumps out at you? What have you particularly enjoyed writing about? What has most surprised you about the neighborhood(s)
What I’ve noticed and what I’ve enjoyed so much about this project is that people generally want to talk and tell you their stories. When I told my landlord about the project, she started slipping newspaper clippings under my door. This is her dad’s building, constructed in 1900 and the only one on the block with its original door and wallpaper. Ms. Fedorko is very proud of it and very interested in the history of the LES. A few weeks later, she eagerly brought me old city plans and guidebooks, with ominous “DEMOLISHED” stamps across the pages.  It was the same with my friend Naomi, who relished giving me a tour of her neighborhood in Chinatown and its hidden art galleries, or Mr. Leung, who talked about the history of his shoe cobbling stand on Forsyth St.  So I’ve enjoyed meeting people and thinking of the fact of our two lives intersecting in this city like that.

Menu at Kabul Kebab House | Photo: Sahar Muradi

To find all full length interviews, including author bios and links to blog posts, click here.

From Kabul to Elmhurst, from rural Massachusetts to the East Village, Sahar Muradi writes to make sense of a snaking path. She is co-editor of One Story, Thirty Stories: An Anthology of Afghan American Literature (University of Arkansas Press, 2010) and on the editorial board of the forthcoming Boundaries and Borders, An Anthology of Women of Color.  For several years she worked in the nonprofit sector in Afghanistan, and most recently ran a high school youth development program in NYC, including at Pace High School in Chinatown. She received her MPA in international development from NYU and her BA in creative writing from Hampshire College.

“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.