David Oke

A great city is only as good as its infrastructure allows it to be. When one imagines great cities, many notable places come to mind, each with their own rich history, designs, and public spaces. Places such as London’s Westminster and Big Ben, Madrid’s La Latina and Plaza Mayor, and of course, New York City’s Financial District and Greenwich Village, each evoke a specific feeling that results from a complex combination of the place’s built environment, population, and the relationship between the two. From the cafe culture and nightlife of Greenwich Village to the historic, genteel appearance of Parliament in Westminster, great urban spaces have the power to dominate and define one’s experience and understanding of them.

Even within the same city, two neighborhoods can produce two vastly different moods. New York City is especially known for this diversity between neighborhoods. A street in Harlem will differ greatly from one in Bushwick, which will both look totally unlike one in Long Island City. This is largely due to choices in infrastructure like whether or not there is a metro line in the area, what the buildings are constructed out of, how tall they are, what their state of repair is, how wide the sidewalk is, how dense the residences are, and how many vehicles were accommodated to run, and of what kind.

While it is generally assumed that all of New York City’s neighborhoods are in some way pleasant, as if every place from Wakefield to Tottenville is as classy as the Upper West Side or as dense and bustling as Times Square, this is simply not the case. Like in any city, some New York streets inspire awe while others feel like a copy-paste of anywhere else in America. Due to a series of intentional planning choices in the 20th century, New York’s neighborhoods vary wildly in the quality of their built environments. That is to say, New York City, especially at its fringes, has absolutely no shortage of dystopian regions, and one can never be too far away from them. It only takes a closer look at two neighborhoods in Queens, Flushing and Rosedale, to understand the difference. The former is a hub for the East Asian diaspora culture in New York City, with streets filled with giddy tourists, countless food and entertainment options, and unrivaled density in Queens despite being over eight miles from Midtown Manhattan. The latter is a starkly different place: ostensibly a suburb with an arterial road running through it. Its built environment, short from helping it become a cultural hub, actively discourages the construction of a culture around it. Most people in this neighborhood are behind the wheel of a car trying to get through it on the way to some other place. Two starkly different approaches to planning created a dichotomy that goes beyond a difference in mere “walkability”. A difference in time of development of just a few measly decades between Flushing and Rosedale allowed for the drastic changes in urban planning practices that brought a bubbling vivaciousness to one neighborhood and lifeless concrete to another.

One Borough, Two Histories

In some regards, Flushing and Rosedale are surprisingly similar. Both are residential neighborhoods in Queens, 10 and 15 miles from City Hall respectively. Both have had population spikes after the construction of the Long Island Railroad in their respective areas in 1854 and 1871. However, the similarities largely end here. Already developed significantly before the turn of the 20th century, Flushing certainly had a head start over Rosedale. Flushing’s urban fabric was built with smaller, dense building scales and narrower streets.

However, Rosedale’s development story came not long after Flushing’s. In the 1930s, a radically different type of development sprung up, one centered around automobile transport and suburban living. Single-family, detached houses were constructed, at a density of around 12 dwelling units per acre. The road right of way right next to the Long Island Railroad in Rosedale was expanded and widened by NYC Parks Commissioner Robert Moses in 1937. This planning style of envisioning low-density homes, made up primarily of car-owning residents who had the privilege of car-friendly infrastructure everywhere they went, was all the rage in the 1930s and onwards, especially after the end of the Second World War. Robert Moses was not just responsible for the widening of Sunrise Highway, or for building some parks. He fundamentally transformed planners’ concepts of city-building, and ushered in an age of car centric development.¹ His most notable contribution was his building of dozens of freeways in New York, both in its densest regions, and its metro area. During Moses’ time, around a quarter million people were displaced from their homes in New York for the construction of his highways, and cities across the country were inspired by his development style and also constructed urban freeways.²

On top of a vision of housing where every American essentially had an acre of land to themselves, city-building was radically transformed from a people-based approach to a cars-and-suburbs-based approach over the course of the 20th century. Rosedale was not unique in, nor was it the only part of, this radical urban planning transformation. Regions all over New York City like Eastern Queens and Staten Island, as well as metro area regions like Long Island, soon became almost entirely made up of single family detached homes, their residents largely served by car-centric transportation. It was this core, deliberate shift in development choice that resulted in Flushing and Rosedale becoming so different today. Neighborhoods designed before cars became the top priority were able to maintain their humanity. What makes Flushing pleasant is exactly what Rosedale lacks. To better understand this contrast, I had to visit Rosedale for myself.

Into Rosedale

As soon as I disembarked from the LIRR at the Rosedale station, I was greeted with an eight-lane roadway, South Conduit Avenue, which becomes the Sunrise Highway half a mile east at the Nassau County border, which becomes nine lanes in width. The constant noise of nine lanes worth of cars speeding by made it feel all the more uncomfortable for me to walk there for very long. It wasn’t just me being uncomfortable with this road though, as it is one of the more dangerous to cross: the half-mile section of South Conduit Avenue around Rosedale Station had 33% more car crashes in the last five years than did the busiest half-mile sections of Roosevelt Avenue and Main Street in Flushing combined, despite Flushing’s Main Street being orders of magnitude more visited. The sheer width of this road, combined with the lack of amenities I saw as I continued walking through it, reminded me of a popular conjecture in urban space design: the feeling of enclosure. Urban planners Jeff Speck, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Andres Duany in “Suburban Nation” propose that places that pedestrians find the most comfortable are those that have clearly defined “walls” and “boundaries” at just the right scale.³ A truly enclosed space can end up feeling like a kind of urban indoor room, with street-front buildings being the walls, the sidewalk and street being a floor, and a bright blue sky (or a lush green tree canopy)⁴ for a ceiling. A good indoor room and a good urban outdoor setting may appear to be doing different things, but they both establish a strong sense of place.

The walls of a street serve as the walls of an actual room: a well decorated room with lights, posters, toys, and furniture speaks volumes about the person who inhabits it, and a video game enjoyer’s room would differ greatly from a romance comedy fan’s room. Walking into such a room would instantly wrap me around the personality of its inhabitant. I’d ask questions about their hobbies, get to know them better, and feel more comfortable in the space. A street with plenty of amenities like restaurants, tree canopies, coffee shops, libraries, with flyers hanging about local events, one where people dot the visible landscape can evoke a similar response, prompting visitors to get to know the community better. Scale is also an essential factor in making a good urban room. If two couches were separated from one another by a nine-lane roadway, chances are nobody would want to get between the two couches out of discomfort or fear for their own safety. This is to say that not every large or grand space would lose hope of getting prospective visitors, but I would find it hard to find my bearings on a street where a majority of the space is taken up by large vehicle right-of-ways. Some planners seem to agree on the importance of scale, but numbers widely vary. While Suburban Nation advocates for a street width to building scale of anywhere between 1:1 and 6:1⁵, the US Green Building Council (known for their LEED building certifications) recommends a 3:1 scale. 

In contrast, after measuring the width of South Conduit Ave using Google Maps, and comparing that to the height of a two story building–the average height for a building on South Conduit Avenue, I calculated a street width-to-building height ratio of 6.5:1. Beyond the noise of the numbers though, I truly did feel as if this place was out of scale. Walking through South Conduit Avenue, with its wide street width and relative short stature of the nearby buildings which were adorned with little else but on-street parking, disturbed me in much the same way as it might be if I walked into a gigantic, unfurnished mansion hall (don’t forget the giant road cutting through it!). After walking along the eight-lane road for a mere block, running up against parking lots and active driveways with cars nearly ramming into me several times, I felt like an ant trying to navigate a space made for giants. That is, in fact, exactly who this space was intended to serve. Places like these not only feel off merely because of some improper ratio of streets to buildings, but they give a uniquely terrifying sense that you, as a pedestrian, are not welcome, not meant to be in this space. Tiny, hundred-pound, foot-wide humans are not welcome on South Conduit/Sunrise Highway. Only two-ton metal boxes are allowed here. What’s worse is that whatever tree cover could be found in Queens on the median of South Conduit Avenue and its sidewalk completely vanishes after the Nassau County border into Sunrise Highway. 

The problems posed by parking-ridden spaces do not end at Sunrise Highway. Stepping over to Nassau County brought me to Green Acres Mall, a quintessential decor-lacking urban room. Much to the delight of planners like Robert Moses, this mall remains a key element of urban design choices made to favor cars, rather than people. The pattern of wide roads covered in parking, unfit for human scale or safety, continued as I rode a quarter-hourly bus (during rush hour) to an aptly named West Circle Dr/Parking Structure stop just to get from one end of the mall to another. The scale was beyond absurd now, as the walk from one side of the mall to the other would have taken at least twenty minutes, making this bus one of the few options for those without cars. While this space was already past the line between Queens and Nassau counties, this Long Island fixture still had plenty of folks trying to get to the shops in it on my bus. Once my bus ride was over, I felt the disorientation of scale this mall brings with my own two feet. On a street that provides a human-scale experience, I could get from the sidewalk to a storefront in seconds, but at this mall, it took me a minute and a half.

As I trudged from the bus stop to the back of the mall’s Chipotle, I had to dodge three cars and face a sweltering heat that was only reverberated by the asphalt below me. The choice to make this mall’s surface mostly parking was no accident, this space being constructed by a suburban dream where all residents can enjoy the freedom of car ownership, and the privilege to be able to put said car mere inches from any destination. What a freedom to scoff at while on foot. That the car can exert this much distortion on a place’s scale is a grim reminder of the importance of entrance frequency, the amount of amenities, shops, or services one can access from a point in space at a given time. What could be a half minute drive between shops in a mall for a car could be a never-ending march from parking space to parking space taking an order of magnitude longer. The amount of open, room-less nothing-ness, the staggering sea of space needed to accommodate car-centric spaces is astounding. I wonder whether much of Eastern Queens or Long Island’s history saw anyone in charge of space design who was concerned about a pedestrian’s entrance frequency, physical comfort, or enjoyment of the spaces they designed. 

In truth, Green Acres is not unlike any other mall in the United States. Inside, customers are sheltered by air conditioning, conveniently located apparel, dining, and accessory brands, and much like in any other mall, Rosedalians, Long Islanders, and the like were enjoying themselves. I passed a group of friends sharing a laugh, a family sharing an ice cream cone, yet it was only inside this space where I saw any people. The mall is the one place in suburban, car-centric areas where, at least inside of it, people can enjoy spaces designed at their scale, for human comfort. I have to give malls like these credit: at least some artificial attempt was made to create a sanitized analog for the human-centered experiences that were taken away with the development of car-dependent suburbia. Fittingly, surrounding the lively mall was a space relinquished by, reserved for the private motor vehicle. This is also not unlike other malls, other fixtures of suburban space. If I were blindly presented with three, four, or five malls around the country, having been shown their exteriors, interiors, and population, I would not be able to tell the difference between any of them. Perhaps this is the most striking thing I realized as I walked through the halls of Green Acres. The Aeropostale, Subway, Best Buy, and Hollister were arranged in such a familiar way, yet I’ve never set foot in this place before. Homogeneity is a sensible theme for an urban room with no installations; there really isn’t much else to comment on.

As I walked back from the mall, I ran into perhaps one of the most comically anti-human fixtures of this space: a 12 foot tall wall separating Queens County, New York, and Nassau County, Long Island. What I call the “Great Wall of Nassau County” separates the suburban homes of Rosedale, Queens from the shopping center in Nassau County. This results in a disappointing scenario where if one lives in one of the residential homes just west of the wall, and wants to get to, say, a restaurant just east of the wall, they must drive for half a mile instead of simply walking a minute or two. This highlights a key difference between mere adjacency of uses: housing and shopping, and actual accessibility.⁶ A space that is built with all uses in mind at the same time would go through pains to avoid this scenario. Not only could this wall have not been drawn up in the planning of this space, housing and shopping could have also been planned to exist as a couple, mixed seamlessly, instead of being placed in separate pods. It would have saved on car gasoline, CO2 emissions, and human energy. Instead, I was jarred at what was before my eyes, the sight of acres upon acres of single-use zoning separated completely from another several acre-sized plot of single-use zoning by a wall twice my height.⁷ If only this sight was less familiar in the United States, would I be a little less uneasy.

It’s valuable to mention that all that I had just experienced was within a mile or two of the Rosedale station. Especially in the United States, where new rail transit infrastructure is expensive and slow to build, ensuring that land use around existing rail transit stations is efficient can make all the difference for whether an urban space prospers or flounders. 

The fact that a high-speed roadway and a mall parking lot occupy the same space as one of New York City’s premier commuter rail lines shows even the world-renowned NYC is not immune to the anti-human perils that flatten the character of so many American towns. The park and ride, the mall parking lot, and the wide arterial road are as equally a US problem as they are a New York problem. For inspiration on what New York can do to design better urban spaces, a trip to Flushing is apt.

Flushing, Take Me Away

My journey from Manhattan to Flushing on the 7 train took about the same time as did my trip to Rosedale on the LIRR, but as I got out of the subway, it did not look like Sunrise Highway or Green Acres Mall at all. What immediately stood out to me was the huge crowd of people that seems to spill out of every square inch of sidewalk, into the streets and crosswalks, in and out of buildings all along Roosevelt Avenue or Main Street, the two busiest thoroughfares that intersect at the Flushing-Main Street 7 train station. In fact, this is the third busiest intersection in the city, only behind Times Square and Herald Square. Adjusting to this crowd may be an initial challenge, but it is a welcome relief to have so many people nearby, especially after a place so barren of people like Rosedale. These two places are meant for very different purposes, and the way the street is built and used is a clear indication of this. For starters, the scale in Flushing is entirely a signal to welcome people onto the street, rather than cars. Measuring the width to height ratio on Google Maps once again rendered me a result that never exceeded 3:1, and it usually stood between 2:1 and 2.5:1. The variability comes from the different height levels of the buildings along Roosevelt Avenue and Main Street, which can range from three stories to 12 or more stories. There are also much fewer gaps between buildings for parking; wherever I saw “missing teeth,” they were either getting filled in as new building projects, or they were purposefully inserted plazas for pedestrians, such as One Fulton Square on Prince Street. 

Despite being a definite contributor to it, a human scale cannot be the sole reason why a place like downtown Flushing is so popular. It is almost comically mixed-use, with schools, libraries, bank branches, tutoring centers, cell providers, local dumpling shops, dodgy merchandise stores, boba tea parlors, chain cafes, luxury residences, historic tenements, public playgrounds, and even gigantic malls all in the same five minute radius. Just as the buildings ranged in uses, the people I saw around me ranged considerably in identity and activity. Middle-aged, white-collar businessmen were speedwalking down the steps of the 7 train subway while teenagers laughed coming up the stairs together on the way to nearby malls or restaurants. Salesmen from raw meat, produce, and fruit markets stood outside their establishments haggling prices with prospective buyers. 

Flushing’s buildings also have much more clever spots for parking management: they either have entire underground parking facilities, or they engage in the much more cost-effective strategy of using the exterior buildings of a block as a visual shield for parking on the inside. All of these tactics help to minimize the number of less sightly missing teeth in the streets of Flushing. The roads themselves are also rarely more than two lanes wide in either direction, and there are more dedicated lanes for buses (though these lanes are often haphazardly occupied by cars). Downtown Flushing has little-to-no tree cover for pedestrians, a notable omission, though the adjacent blocks are much greener. Still, the buildings themselves serve as a much more comfortable urban room than they do in Rosedale, one that can enclose its large daily public presence. 

Some smaller buildings had multiple stores each, with a second floor establishment above a first floor one. The entrance frequency in Flushing is so high that anything a person needs is always just within a few blocks. Despite the absurd amount of people all of these mixed uses attract, even the corner of Main Street and Roosevelt Avenue oftentimes feels quieter than any point along South Conduit Avenue in Rosedale. This is chiefly because the primary emitter of noise in cities is not people or buildings or vendors or performers or advertisers–it’s the cars. It seemed for every one person in Rosedale on any street, but especially South Conduit, there are at least a handful of cars passing by, but the ratio is the exact opposite in Flushing. Especially on Main Street and Roosevelt Avenue, for every one car that may pass by, at least a dozen people are constituting a giant army of pedestrians who practically own the street, and it is still quieter in Flushing than in Rosedale. This is not to mention that the sound of people passing by and laughing, having conversations, and eating food is much more pleasant than the roaring of motor vehicles, and last time I checked, humans don’t really emit that many tailpipe pollutants or emissions. I’d certainly prefer to wade through waves of pedestrians than clouds of tailpipe exhaust and countless lanes of car traffic. The built infrastructure allowed Flushing’s culture to thrive, but it’s now the people who constitute the core of this environment.

Just east of Union Street, one block out from Main Street, the bustling downtown immediately turns into a lush, quiet residential block. Tree canopies and five-to-six story apartment buildings surrounded me as I took in the scenery around me: people leisurely walking their children and their dogs, small cafes on the corner with people sitting in the shade, buildings tightly surrounding railroad tracks that carry Port Washington LIRR trains minute in and minute out, and the Bowne House, featuring a garden and museum of early settler history, right next to a playground where children played games. An admirable feature of mixed-use development with varying levels of density is that one can have the choice to live on Roosevelt Avenue near Main Street where people and businesses constantly light the street up through the night, or they can look just a few blocks away, where they can get similar densities and amenities, but with nearly the same peace and quiet that more suburban areas like Rosedale promise.

This is all before even considering the main attraction of Flushing for many people, which is its position as one the most popular Chinatowns in the United States, on par with that of downtown Manhattan. I have personally discovered staples of East Asian diaspora culture and cuisine through my countless visits to Flushing, from Taiwanese bubble tea at Xing Fu Tang, to Korean BBQ at The Coop, to Japanese goods and treats at JMart in New World Mall. Most of all, the Asian diaspora community I keep in touch with always brings me back to Flushing, where I can appreciate both their company, and the never-ending fun of being absorbed in new cultures. Only in urban environments where person-to-person interaction is made not just easy, but inevitable, through high densities of people, mixed-use zoning that allows residents, visitors, and business owners to connect and share resources, is a place with high cultural exchange like Flushing possible. It is certain that without this key defining feature of Flushing, it would not be as popular or as breathtaking. If none of the earlier distinctions between Flushing and Rosedale mattered, this one is as clear as day.

A New Hope for Rosedale

I can’t ignore Rosedale’s own cultural heritage. Rosedale is actually about as not-white as Flushing is, with an 80% Black population, compared to Flushing’s 69% Asian population. While the Flushing statistic did not surprise me after visiting, the Rosedale statistic did, because the built environment did not allow for a local neighborhood identity to develop the way one did in Flushing. Simply put, too much of the space in Rosedale has been sacrificed for the automobile, and the possibilities for a publicly visible cultural center are significantly lower as a result. Amidst the despair, a shining pearl in a sea of asphalt gave me hope: the corner of Francis Lewis Boulevard and 246th Street. Located two to three blocks from the Rosedale LIRR station, this is one of the only blocks in Rosedale where mixed use development and small businesses were allowed to exist. The proverbial flowers in the concrete were a Dominican restaurant, a Dominican stylist shop, and a Caribbean roti shop. What makes Rosedale a dystopian space is not the people who make it up– in fact, they hold the key to make it the best it can be. The lackluster public transportation, the poor feeling of pedestrian enclosure and comfort, the overreliance on automobile transport and infrastructure, and the ripping apart of uses are those aspects that stand in the way of progress. These are structural problems, both literally in the structure of the built environment and figuratively in the broader political processes that made Rosedale’s development style diverge from Flushing’s development style in those fateful decades of the early 20th century. 

While the path for a better Rosedale, and a better future for neighborhoods around New York City and around the United States, is not an easy one, it is certainly possible. I believe that undoing the widening of Sunrise Highway to make it more human-friendly, allowing mixed use development in the neighborhood, taking down the literal wall separating communities, and improving bus frequencies on, say, the Q5 and Q85, are some of the little steps that can be done to make Rosedale a competitor to Flushing, or to any historic neighborhood in New York City. Building more opportunities for people to interact and reclaiming some of the space occupied by cars gives a neighborhood the tools it needs to develop into something worthy of a world-class city. It won’t happen overnight, but something new could bloom quite quickly. The recent success of open streets in places like Jersey City’s Newark Avenue Pedestrian Plaza demonstrates the power of people-centric development in improving neighborhoods. In this way, much of Eastern Queens and the other suburbanized regions of New York are not fundamentally incompatible with a positive urban experience, all it took to get to their current state were a few key planning choices. Similarly, making active choices to restore walkability and people-friendly infrastructure is all it takes to unlock the potential these regions have. Every room deserves happy dwellers and beautiful decor, and every neighborhood deserves some utopia.

Endnotes

1. Caro, Robert. The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. Vintage Books, 1975. ↩︎
2. Ibid ↩︎
3. Duany, Andres, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck. Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream. New York: North Point Press, 2001. ↩︎
4. Ibid ↩︎
5. Ibid ↩︎
6. Ibid ↩︎
7. Ibid ↩︎

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Hey everyone! My name is David Oke! I’m a rising sophomore at the Macaulay Honors College here at Hunter, majoring in Urban Studies and Computer Science! Right now, my main focuses in urban planning are in transportation, spatial analysis, and climate change. I enjoy using my skills in programming to highlight issues such as urban density and land surface temperature. I just completed a semester-long fellowship at the CUNY Institute for Sustainable Cities, working with the NYC Climate Justice Hub and NASA to uncover the causes of and injustices surrounding climate change in urban areas, and I’m excited to continue applying my interest and love for cities, as well as my coding skills, to the issues that affect urban areas the most! This semester’s issue is my first foray into being officially published in journalism, but I’ve been running a personal blog since the start of the summer as well! My other interests include cycling, lifting, and cinematography!

Check out my blog: https://urbanblogs.netlify.app/