Like the white picket fence, the stainless steel picket fence — ubiquitous in New York neighborhoods with dense Asian homeowners — evokes a manufactured feel, but it’s more flashy.
On residential streets in Flushing, Queens, and Sunset Park, Brooklyn, nearly every other home has steel fences.They are silver and sometimes gold trimmed in contrast to the modest brick and vinyl-covered houses they surround, like diamond necklaces worn over old white t-shirts.
“If you have extra money, you should always go for the better option,” said Dilip Banerjee, pointing to a neighbor’s wrought-iron fence, basking in the sheen of his own steel fences, handrails, doors and awnings. It cost him about $2,800 to add to his humble two-story house in Flushing.
Like the white fence, long a symbol of the so-called American Dream, the stainless steel fence embodies a similar sense of craftsmanship.But the steel fence isn’t muted or uniform; it zigzags to the maker’s taste, personalized with a variety of ornaments, including lotus flowers, “om” symbols and geometric patterns.At night, street lights and car headlights exaggerate the gleam of stainless steel, which doesn’t, and doesn’t, fade into the dark like wrought iron.While some may be intimidated by the glitz, standing out is exactly what it’s all about – a stainless steel fence is an undeniable signal that homeowners have arrived.
“It’s definitely a sign of the arrival of the middle class, especially for those who are coming home for the first time,” said Thomas Campanella, a historian of urban planning and the urban built environment at Cornell University. “Stainless steel has an element of status.”
The rise of these fences—commonly seen in single-family homes, but also around restaurants, churches, doctors’ offices, etc.—parallelized the growth of Asian Americans in New York.Last year, the city’s immigration office reported that Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders were the fastest-growing racial group in the city, largely due to a surge in immigration.In 2010, there were more than 750,000 Asian and Pacific Islander immigrants in New York, and by 2019, that number had grown to nearly 845,000.The city also found that more than half of those immigrants lived in Queens.Accordingly, Mr. Campanella estimates stainless steel fencing began to take off in New York within the same time frame.
Garibaldi Lind, a Puerto Rican resident who has lived in Sunset Park for decades, said the fence started spreading when his Hispanic neighbors moved and sold their homes to Chinese buyers.”There are two there,” he said, pointing to 51st Street.”Up there, there are three more.”
But other homeowners have embraced the fence style as well.”Throughout Queens Village and Richmond Hill, if you see a fence like this, it’s usually a West Indian family,” Guyana real estate agent Farida Gulmohamad said.
They are not to everyone’s liking.”I’m not a fan myself. They’re inevitable, but they’re a weird thing, they’re too shiny, or they’re too dramatic,” said Rafael Rafael, photographer for “All Queens Residences.” Rafael Herrin-Ferri said.”They have a very tacky quality. Queens has a lot of tacky, cheap stuff, but they don’t blend in or complement anything else.”
Still, despite their gaudy and flashy nature, fences are functional and less expensive to maintain than iron fences with peeling paint.Newly renovated homes for sale are adorned with gleaming steel from head to toe (or rather, from awnings to gates).
“South Asians and East Asians seem to prefer stainless steel because it looks prettier,” said Priya Kandhai, a Queens real estate agent who regularly lists Ozone Park and Jamaica neighborhoods.
She said when she showed clients the house with its steel fence and awning, they felt it was more valuable and modern, like a stainless steel refrigerator in the kitchen instead of a white plastic one.
It was first invented in England in 1913.It began mass adoption in China in the 1980s and 1990s, according to Tim Collins, secretary general of the World Stainless Steel Association, a Brussels-based nonprofit research organization.
In recent years, “stainless steel has been more widely understood as a long-lived material associated with it,” Mr Collins said.”The ability to produce it and shape it into interesting shapes with symbolic features from people’s home countries is a recent revolution.” Wrought iron, by contrast, is more difficult to customize, he added.
Mr Collins said the popularity of stainless steel fences could be attributed to “people wanting to both remember their heritage and embrace a material with a contemporary feel”.
Wu Wei, an associate professor at the School of Architecture and Urban Planning of Nanjing University, said that many private stainless steel enterprises were formed in Jiangsu and Zhejiang in the late 1990s and early 2000s.”They made a lot of household items,” said Ms Wu, who remembers the first stainless-steel product in her home was a vegetable sink.In the 90s, stainless steel products were considered valuable, but today they are “everywhere, everyone can have it, and sometimes you have to use it now,” she said.
According to Ms Wu, the ornate design of the fence may stem from China’s tradition of adding auspicious patterns to everyday objects.She said auspicious symbols such as Chinese characters (such as blessing), white cranes representing longevity, and flowers representing flowering are commonly found in “traditional Chinese dwellings”.For the wealthy, these symbolic designs became an aesthetic choice, Ms. Wu said.
Chinese immigrants to the United States in recent years brought this affinity for stainless steel.As steel fence manufacturing shops began popping up in Queens and Brooklyn, New Yorkers of all backgrounds began installing these fences.
Cindy Chen, 38, a first-generation immigrant, installed stainless steel gates, door and window guardrails in the house she grew up in China.When looking for an apartment in New York, she knew she wanted one with stainless steel protection.
She poked her head out of the steel window guardrails of her living-floor apartment in Sunset Park, saying “because it doesn’t rust and it’s more comfortable to live in,” Chinese tend to like steel.“It makes the house look newer and prettier,” she said, adding, “Most newly renovated houses across the street have this stainless steel product.” Steel fences and guards make her feel safer.(Since 2020, pandemic-fueled hate crimes against Asian Americans have soared in New York, and many Asian Americans have been wary of attacks.)
Mr Banerjee, 77, who immigrated from Kolkata, India, in the 1970s, said he was always hungry for more.“My parents never drove a good car, but I have a Mercedes,” he said on a recent spring afternoon, standing at the top of the doorway adorned with stainless steel railings.
His first job was at a jute factory in India.When he first came to New York, he crashed in various friends’ apartments.He started applying for jobs he saw in the newspapers and was eventually hired as an engineer by a company.
After settling down in 1998, Mr Banerjee bought the house he now lives in, and over the years has painstakingly renovated every part of the house to match his vision – carpet, windows, garage and, of course, , the fences were all replaced.”The fence protects it all. It’s growing in value,” he says proudly.
Hui Zhenlin, 64, who has lived in the Sunset Park house for 10 years, said her home’s steel doors and railings were there before she moved in, but they were definitely part of the property’s appeal.”These stainless steel products are great because they’re clean,” she said.They don’t have to be repainted like iron and look naturally polished.
Zou Xiu, 48, who moved into an apartment in Sunset Park two months ago, said she felt more comfortable living in a home with stainless steel doors.”They’re fine,” she said.”They are better than wooden doors because they are more secure.”
Behind it are all metal makers.Along Flushing’s College Point Boulevard, stainless steel fabrication shops and showrooms can be found.Inside, employees can see steel being melted and shaped to fit the custom design, sparks are flying everywhere, and the walls are covered with sample door patterns.
On a weekday morning this spring, Chuan Li, 37, the co-owner of Golden Metal 1 Inc., was negotiating prices with some of the clients who came looking for work on custom fencing.About 15 years ago, Mr. Li immigrated to the United States from Wenzhou, China, and has been working in metalworking for over a decade.He learned the craft in New York while working at a kitchen design shop in Flushing.
For Mr Lee, steel work is more of a means to an end than a calling.”I had no choice, really. I had to make a living. You know we Chinese – we go to get off work, we go to work every day,” he said.
He says he never installs steel fencing in his home, even though he spends most of his time dealing with the material.”I don’t like any of them at all. I watch these things every day,” Mr Lee said.”In my house, we only use plastic fencing.”
But Mr Li gave the client what they liked, designing the fence after meeting with the client, who told him which pattern they liked.Then he started piecing together the raw materials, bending them, welding them, and finally polishing the finished product.Mr. Lee charges about $75 per foot for each job.
“It’s the only thing we can do when we get here,” said Hao Weian, 51, co-owner of Xin Tengfei Stainless Steel.”I used to do these things in China.”
Mr Ann has a son in college, but he hopes he doesn’t inherit the family business.”I’m not going to let him work here,” he said.”Look at me – I wear a mask every day. It’s not because of the pandemic, it’s because there’s so much dust and smoke here.”
While the material may not be particularly exciting for manufacturers, for Flushing-based artist and sculptor Anne Wu, stainless steel fencing provided a lot of inspiration.Last year, in a piece commissioned by The Shed, Hudson Yards’ arts centre, Ms Wu created a massive, whimsical stainless steel installation.”Usually, when you’re walking around a city, people’s relationship to the material is a look, something they’re looking at from the outside. But I wanted this piece to take up enough space for the viewer to feel like they could walk through It,” said Ms Wu, 30.
The material has long been the object of Ms Wu’s fascination.Over the past 10 years, watching her mother’s neighborhood in Flushing slowly flood with stainless steel fixtures, she began collecting scraps of material she found in Flushing’s industrial estate.A few years ago, while visiting relatives in rural Fujian, China, she was fascinated by the sight of a huge stainless steel gate between two stone pillars.
“Flushing itself is a very interesting but complex landscape, with all the different people coming together in one place,” Ms Wu said.”These stainless steel fences dramatically change the look of the original structure they’re added to, and ultimately the entire landscape. On a material level, the steel reflects everything around it, so it kind of blends into the environment while remaining very bold and evoking. focus on.”
Post time: Jul-08-2022