Letter from Toronto: Changing Chinatowns

Neither of us is much of a gambler, so after soaking in the spray at Niagara Falls, we drive two hours north to Toronto, reaching the city at dusk. We decide to follow the street signs into Chinatown for dinner before heading back to Buffalo. After parking the car, we wander the streets, stepping into a local supermarket to ogle the goods. Further down the street, lacquered duck and barbecued pork knees beckon from the restaurant windows. We finally settle on a nearby noodle shop with an oddly futuristic decor, all recessed lighting and black wall panels.

Every Chinatown I've been to seems to have a founding figure, mythical or otherwise, and Toronto's is no exception: here the honor goes to a certain Sam Ching, who opened a laundry business on Adelaide Street in 1878; he is mentioned in a wonderful little essay about the history of Chinese laundries in Toronto that once ran in Polyphony. Like Manhattan's Chinatown, this neighborhood started growing in earnest when the Chinese "coolies" who worked on the national railroads moved east in search of opportunities -- in the case of Toronto, they arrived in the 1880s from Western provinces like British Columbia.

Over time, the neighborhood moniker has become a bit of a misnomer: Chinatown is now a multiethnic enclave, a colorful mix of Chinese, Vietnamese, Laotian and other immigrant groups (and their descendants) as well as white professionals. Despite immigration controls against Chinese imposed by the Canadian government in the late 1800s, the city's Chinatown continue to grow well into the mid-1900s. Over the past decades, however, as younger Asian-Canadians move out into the suburbs and the population of Chinatown ages, businesses have been declining, with restaurants and shops closing by the dozen each year. Enthnic enclaves like this were once the bedrock of immigrant communities, providing families with a familiar surrounding and dense social networks that eased their transition into a new world and. I believe that social ties based on geographic proximity and in-person interaction will always be more useful and desirable to immigrants than electronic ones, but I wonder whether in this age of telecommunications enclaves like this Chinatown have lost some of their function.

I wish we had more time to explore Toronto's Chinatown, but the drive to Buffalo is over two hours, so we decide to head back. In the car I jot down a reminder to myself to look for a copy of a book on Chinatowns that I've been meaning to read for a while: Peter Kwong's The New Chinatown. I am intrigued not just by the ties of solidarity that emerge in these ethnic enclaves -- the springboards for so much mobility among immigrant families -- but also by the darker side of Chinatown societies: their long and colorful history of gang warfare. I'll be posting more about them after re-visiting Manhattan's MOCA: The Museum of Chinese in America, which is currently closed for relocation to another building in Chinatown.

Letter from Niagara: Gambling and the City

My friend J and I have one day left upstate after the Buffalo wedding, so we decide to take the short drive from Buffalo to Niagara falls, on the border between Ontario and New York State. We're told the view is better on the Canadian side, so we cross into Ontario. It rained yesterday, and the water is ferocious. Ropes of white water drum up a thick mist around the falls. On the viewing platform, my glasses fog up, and the spray glistens on our hats.

I once read a curious bit of trivia about Niagara: until the mid-1900s, erosion caused the falls to move downriver. To prevent the brink from shifting further, in 1969 the US Army Corps of Engineers built a temporary dam to divert the river (I assume they obtained permission from the Canadians). The water was made to flow instead through the Canadian side, leaving the rock walls and boulders beneath the American falls dry and exposed. The Corps mended faults along the dry riverbed to help stave off erosion; then they dynamited the dam and restored the flow. I found a home video on Youtube showing the dried-up Niagara falls and wished I could have been there to see the water rush back over the dry rock and plummet below:


Dry Niagara Falls, 1969 (Source: Wikipedia)

The water is long back, and today a near-perfect rainbow shoots across to the American side. For a brief moment I assume it's a manmade tourist attraction, a beam of technicolor glitz projected across the roiling water from some well-hidden light cannon.



Looming over the river is a cluster of high-rise hotels and casinos -- a mini Atlantic City overlooking the falls. It turns out that the government of Ontario is part-owner of several casinos and derives substantial income from gamblers' losses. On the American side of the falls, the Seneca Indians also operate a casino. The aesthetic on both sides is Las Vegas lite, that gaudy mix of glass, steel and flashing neon (the rainbow, I discover upon chasing its end, is the real deal).

Towns like this strike me as a curious inversion of the relationship between urbanization and tourism: whereas most cities are visited by tourists and gamblers, in some cases the cities themselves are the result of those visitors, and tailored to their interests. In this, Niagara isn't alone. Bugsy Malone helped fund Las Vegas casinos with mob money, and eventually the gamble paid off (bad pun, I know): the city is now one of the fastest expanding urban areas anywhere. I've read that the gaming industry everywhere on the continent has been suffering with the financial crisis (fewer bonuses to fritter away at the roulette tables, I guess), and I wonder what will happen to these gambling enclaves.

We take a walk alongside the river -- Frederick Law Olmstead, who designed New York's Central Park and Prospect parks, was deeply committed to preserving the area around the falls and helped to design the reserve around it -- and it occurs to me that here in Niagara the casinos are perhaps not as misplaced as I first assumed. The place is no stranger to risk-taking. The falls, after all, are home to some of the most brave (hare-brained) stunts the world has ever seen, with a dozen or so people stuffing themselves into barrels and hurtling over the brink just to prove a point (not so sure what the point actually was, but apparently it was proven), or tightrope walking across the river because -- because they could, I suppose. I tend to group these quaint (if fatal) stunts with the bravado of the 20s and 30s -- so maybe the local "urbanization through gambling" model is just another reincarnation of Niagara-style risk-taking.


Source: Niagara Falls Daredevils

Letter from Buffalo: Church on Wheels

Last fall, Harvard economist Edward Glaeser wrote a piece in City Journal asking, "Can Buffalo Come Back?" The subtitle offers an ominous answer: "Probably not—and government should stop bribing people to stay there."

In the article, Glaeser describes a metropolis that didn't just decline -- it practically collapsed. Any quick history of the city waxes nostalgic about the city's golden days. Back in the early 1900s, Buffalo had the highest number of millionaires per capita among any city in the country. As the city's riches grew, industrialists and bankers hired world-renowned architects to build their homes and businesses -- Frederick Law Olmsted, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Eliel and Eero Saarinen all left their mark on the city landscape. After the decline of manufacturing in the region, once the factories were relocated to other parts of the country and abroad, Buffalo fell into steep decline. Factories shut down, law firms relocated to other parts of the country, houses were boarded up, and the population entered a long decline. The graph below shows that, from a high of around 580,000 people in the 1930s, Buffalo's population plumetted to around 250,000 by 2006.





Despite this gloomy history, during my first visit to the area, I wonder if there's been a self-selection process here; maybe the more resilient and optimistic residents tend to stay. Certainly the Buffalo residents I meet here are far from a grim crowd.

I am in Buffalo for the wedding of an old friend -- a Brazilian architect who has settled in the area and is marrying a local gent. Over brunch, a front-page story in the Buffalo News catches my eye. The Archdiocese of Atlanta is bidding to purchase one of Buffalo's oldest Catholic churches, St. Gerard (at Bailey and East Delavan avenues), and planning to dismantle it stone by stone and relocate it to Norcross, Georgia, where it would then be reassembled. The move follows a demographic shift: while Buffalo Catholics move southward, depleting local congregations, southern cities like Atlanta can't build churches fast enough.

But this model of "preservation by relocation" raises intriguing issues about the role of space in preservation: if the integrity of a building is maintained but it is moved geographically, is the intent of preservation maintained?

I am reminded of a philosophy course in college, when the professor (Robert Nozick, a brilliant teacher) prodded us freshmen with a question of indeterminate identity. (Crudely put): if you have a boat and the planks that make up the boat are all gradually replaced, is the boat the same boat that you started out with, or is it another boat altogether? Or, in the case of the church, all "planks" (more accurately, over 2,000 tons of stone, wooden pews and stained glass windows) will remain the same, but the geographic and social space that it occupies will be transformed -- so will it be the same church once reassembled in Norcross?


Photo by TManBuffalo

Aside from philosophical questions about the integrity of the preservation project, there's also the pressing issue of what will happen to the empty site. The city has promised to make the site into green space, and insists this is the only viable option, since no local buyers have appeared. I'm sure most people here would prefer to see the building intact and used rather than abandoned and empty, but I wonder if there aren’t any ways to revive this building in creative ways -- maybe converting it into a community center or library, perhaps an immigrant center.

At the wedding reception (held at the Roycroft, an Arts and Crafts inn designed by Frank Lloyd Wright -- more architectural evidence from Buffalo's boomtown heyday), I catch up with one of the bride's brothers, J., who has settled in the area. J. works for an NGO that assists freshly arrived immigrants and regufees to settle in the Buffalo area -- people from as far as Sudan, Burma, and Iraq. Buffalo may lose some of its vitality, and entire buildings, as in the case of St Gerard Church, but perhaps the newcomers will inject a dynamism into the city, and help to transform the city's social landscape.

Letter from Paris: A Medieval Pied-à-Terre

In an earlier post on Paris' buried fortress I mentioned the exhibit about the Louvre’s history, in the museum’s basement. Ever a fan of dollhouses, I was mesmerized that day by the exhibit's detailed maquettes showing the evolution of the building as well as its surrounding on and around the Ile de la Cite. I also found myself intrigued by the maquettes showing early medieval Paris, back then little more than a village outside the fortress – the Louvre, the Notre Dame cathedral, and the Sainte Chapelle towering like giants over the cluster of dwellings. You can see the layout of the city in Braun and Hogenberg's 1572 map of Paris from Civitates Orbis Terrarum I -7:


One of the maquette captions tells me that in the 12th century, the swamps (les marais) around the fortress were drained to create more farmland and to allow the town to expand. No doubt the draining was also carried out to avoid a repeat of the disastrous floods of the Seine banks that led many Parisians, including the King himself, to wonder whether God had afflicted the city with the second Biblical Deluge. Clusters of dwellings developed into faubourgs -- and are labelled as such on the medieval maps of Paris, some of which you can see in the exhibit (you can see early faubourgs right outside the city walls on the Braun and Hogenberg map, above). A quick search reveals that the word comes not from faux-bourg ("false town"), as I had supposed, but rather from the Latin foris burgum ("outside the city"). The etymological dictionary specifies that "traditionally, this name was given to an agglomeration forming around a throughway leading outwards from a city gate, and usually took the name of the same thoroughfare within the city." (Hence present-day boulevards with names like Faubourg Saint-Honoré -- once a self-contained little village just outside Philippe Auguste's city wall) Eventually, as the population increased, these little Medieval suburbs were swallowed up by the growing city.

Aside from the great monuments, very little of Medieval Paris is left. When Baron Haussmann, the 19th century "civic planner" hired by Napoleon to modernize Paris, went about retrofitting the city by widening its boulevards, he destroyed all traces of the medieval town -- or rather, almost all. If you cross from the Ile de la Cite toward the Marais, you will come across a strangely quiet area of winding streets – a village at the old heart of the city. This is Village Saint Paul (it still calls itself “village” despite being surrounded by some of the most tourist-clogged streets in all of Paris).


The remnants of the medieval wall in Village St Paul

The whimsical layout of the streets (and, overlooking a playground, vestiges of the old town wall) hint at the neighborhood’s medieval origins. But in addition, at the corner of Rue François Miron and Rue Cloche Percé there are two surviving specimens from the era: a pair of 14th century buildings with wood beams and pitched roofs. A sign on each gives its name: “Maison a l’Enseigne du Mouton” (The House of the Sign of the Lamb) and its slightly shorter sister, “Maison a l’Enseigne du Faucheur" (The House of the Sign of the Harvester). The two buildings almost miraculously survived the many fires, political uprisings and world wars – as well as the wear and tear of time (later I read here that the authenticity of the architecture has been disputed, since both houses were extensively renovated in the 1960s).



Maison a l’Enseigne du Mouton and Maison a l’Enseigne du Faucheur, in Village Saint Paul (Marais, Paris)


In the afternoon I cross from Village Saint Paul north to the busy Marais neighborhood, stopping to sample the macarons that beckon devilishly from the bakery windows. Now and then I peek the displays of real state brokers. Like many New Yorkers, I have become a seasoned player of this semi-masochistic game, ogling real estate ads for places I could never afford. Like wedding announcements from the local paper, real estate ads give up invaluable insight into local society – as well as awe and/or amusement. But imagine my surprise when I notice among the one-bedrooms in Montparnasse andstudios in Saint Germain the following ad:
















I do a double-take, realizing that one of the last pieces of medieval Paris is up for sale – and can be yours for the paltry sum of, er, 350,000 euros.

Letter from Amsterdam: Needlework Forced Labor

I take an early train from Paris to Amsterdam, where I have been invited to give a talk. The topic is in part about one of my favorite subjects: city maps. Since Amsterdam was for centuries a cartographer's mecca, I am excited to be in the city again.

The Thalys fast train departs from Gare du Nord, crosses the northern suburbs and zips through rural France. Gradually the landscape changes; the low Dutch countryside, dotted with mills, seems formidably orderly. At last the train pulls into the cavernous mouth of Amsterdam Centraal. The station was built on three man-made islands at the mouth of the Amstel and IJ rivers. Later I read that these islands in turn rest on 8,687 wooden poles driven deep into the mud. The Dutch are masters at reclaiming land from water; much of their country was built this way.

Near the main hallway I find my old friend A., a professor at the University of Amsterdam who has invited me to speak, wandering through the station looking for me. The rain has dashed our plans to bike through town to the university. The campus is not far, so we make our way on foot. I would say that we walk there, but that would not be entirely accurate -- I sort of skip as A. strolls along, doing my best to keep up. (In any other country, A. would be considered tall. Yet the Dutch are statistically the tallest people in the world, so here he is merely average. Since being tall is not among my greatest strengths, I take two steps to every one of his.)

Amsterdam can be enchanting -- the rows of dollhouses along the canals, the small bridges that span them, the diverse crowd spilling out of the trains and making their way into the city to explore its bright side and its dark side (as well as their own, I suppose). As a child, I liked to draw maps of imaginary worlds – one of them, I remember, was an archipelago made up of concentric rings of land linked by bridges and navigable only by boat. During my first trip to Amsterdam, in the early 90s, I was overjoyed to discover that the old city center's layout is very much like my imagined city – or rather, like half of it, interrupted by the river. Amsterdam now sprawls far beyond its original horseshoe configuration, but you can still see the u-shaped canals, nested within one another, in the oldest part of town.

When I look online for maps of early Amsterdam, one gem stands out: a 1538 etching by Cornelis Anthonisz. The map shows Amsterdam not quite squarely from above, but rather from a true bird’s eye view, at a slight angle. In fact, the map is a bit like a 16th century Google Earth screenshot, showing not only the general layout of the city but also the shape of individual buildings. Anthonisz helped to found a long tradition of map-making in the city, also fed by the seafaring adventures of the Dutch. By the 17th century, they were the continent’s undisputed leaders of maritime map-making. I am told that Amsterdam’s shipping museum -- across from Centraal, and like the station, built on piles driven into the riverbed -- has a copy of 'The Theater of the World," a unique atlas by the Blaeu family of cartographers. Sadly, since today I have only a few hours in Amsterdam before heading back to Brussels, I’ll have to wait until next time to see the maps.

A. and I skirt the canals and cross the red light district towards the university. A buxom brunette in a red bikini gyrates in a shop window; a man in a dark suit approaches her hesitantly as we walk past. Soon after, A. and I arrive at the university’s social sciences college. The old building complex, near the university library, has large windows but very high walls. I notice a sign by the gate: Spinhuis. “That’s there the wayward women of Amsterdam used to be brought back in the days,” A. explains. “They were put to spin cloth here. The Spin House.” For a moment I fear that I will find a spinning wheel instead of a projector in the classroom, but to my great relief the space is free of needlepoint equipment.


After the talk, on my way out, I stop to look at the main entrance of the Spinhuis. The massive door has an ornate stone frontpiece featuring a trio of women: the first one watches as the second pulls the hair of the third and swings a whip in mid-strike. There are two lines of poetry below:

Schrik niet ik wreek geen haat maar dwing tot goed
Straf is mijn hand maar lieflijk mijn gemoed

or, in English:

Cry not - I avenge no wrong but compel to the good.
Stern is my hand, but kind is my aim.

The Spinhuis, then, was a sort of correctional facility, or better yet forced labor camp, designed to rehabilitate Amsterdam's prostitutes (no doubt a thriving industry even back then, given the city's cosmopolitan port). I think of the poor wayward women of old Amsterdam, doomed to years of pulling yarn for the slightest trespass; inevitably I also think back to the bikini lady we saw earlier today, openly beckoning to passersby -- gender roles have changed quite a bit in Amsterdam. (It's also somewhat ironic that the Spinhuis now houses, of all things, an anthropology department.)

The building intrigues me. On my way back to the train station, I make a quick stop at a bookstore to look it up in the books. There is very little mention of the Spinhuis in the English-language books; Dutch indices have many more references. Since my Dutch language skills are limited to “Good morning” and “Your cow is on my pasture,” I’m unable to gather any more information about the Spinhuis. Later, the internet gives me a few more clues. I learn that Dutch society of that period, heavily influenced by Calvinist concerns for productiveness, self-discipline and cleanliness, idolized the virtuous woman “deeply engrossed in needlework.” Having spent a bit of time on needlework myself -- girls were taught embroidery and crochet at my Catholic primary school (I failed gloriously at both) -- I doubt the civilizing force of needlepoint. Of course, not everyone finds it boring. Some of my cosmopolitan friends in New York knit very seriously. They upload photos of the hats and scarves they make onto Flickr and chatter endlessly about the “knitporn”. I think they enjoy it not only because they actually have dexterity, but also because they don't have this lady peering over their shoulders with her wire-rim spectacles:

The idea of rehabilitation through needlework – domestication through domesticity, as it were – makes me think of Vermeer’s portrait of women: quiet interior scenes, most of them emanating a lucid tranquility. The women in those paintings do not seem particularly anguished -- but I wonder, despite Amsterdam’s reputation for tolerance, to what extent Amsterdam’s housebound women benefited from this tolerance.

Epilogue

I leave Amsterdam with the idea of needlepoint as gender-based oppression, but later I find a different interpretation of the Spinhuis in the 2006 book "Fractured Families and Rebel Maidservants" by Christine Petra Sellin:

The Spinhuis reportedly included a rehabilitation program aimed at teaching female inmates -- thieves, drunks, runaways, beggars, the homless, prostitutes -- domestic skills such as spinning, sewing, or knitting. Innovative policies such as these reflected the Dutch realization that economic and social turmoil was linked, to some degree, with crime, remarkable at a time when standard European law prescribed brutal punishments. (p. 142).

Point taken -- think I'd rather spin yarn than have my fingernails pulled out.