The Urban Home Away From Home [뉴욕타임즈/ 01.28]

[sofla77]

The Urban Home Away From Home

Lessons From McDonald’s Clash With Older Koreans

Picture windows, lively traffic and easy access for the elderly: the McDonald’s at Northern and Parsons Boulevards in Queens. Damon Winter/The New York Times

But why that McDonald’s?

 The kerfuffle started when word spread that the police were repeatedly evicting elderly Korean patrons from a McDonald’s in Queens. The Koreans have been milking their stays over $1.09 coffees, violating the restaurant’s 20-minute dining limit. The news made headlines as far away as Seoul. Last week, Ron Kim, a New York State assemblyman, brokered a détente: The restaurant promised not to call the police if the Koreans made room during crowded peak hours.

 Still, the question remains. The McDonald’s at issue occupies the corner of Parsons and Northern Boulevards, in Flushing. A Burger King is two blocks away. There are scores of fast-food outlets, bakeries and cafes near Main Street, a half-mile away.

 So, in the vein of the urban sociologist William H. Whyte, who helped design better cities by watching how people use spaces, I spent some time in Flushing. What I found reinforced basic lessons about architecture, street life and aging neighborhoods at a time when New York’s population of residents 60 and older is rising.

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A basement space at this community center in Flushing, Queens, is not attractive to many older Koreans. Damon Winter/The New York Times

 For starters, there were common sense lessons about money and cars. Older city dwellers on tight budgets who don’t own automobiles or no longer drive want inexpensive meeting places within walking distance of their homes. The elderly Koreans at McDonald’s, with one exception, all told me that they live within two blocks of the restaurant.

 They don’t use the local senior center, they said, because it’s in a church a mile and a half away. (Never mind that it’s in a church basement.) “There’s a van that will take us there,” Kun Pae Yim, 86, one of the McDonald’s regulars, told me. “We’re grateful for the offer. But we are not schoolchildren or government workers. We want to see our friends when we choose.”

So independence is a factor. It’s a big part of why anyone lives in the city.

 At the same time, people don’t want to be alone. So they find a sense of belonging in what they think of as their neighborhood, which tends to shrink as they age. The Flushing branch library, free and welcoming, the busiest in New York, is always packed with young and old people, but it’s almost a mile away. A park closer by has benches where some of the regulars meet when the weather is good, but outdoors is not an option in winter or high summer, when McDonald’s has air-conditioning.

 Step into the McDonald’s on Main Street, whose layout is one of those glum shoe boxes with the counter in the back, and on a recent Saturday, you could find a clutch of elderly Chinese women nursing a single coffee, cheerfully occupying a nook near the entrance. It’s an area that accommodates eight or so, set apart by a low divider: the equivalent of courtside seating in terms of watching the comings and goings, but slightly separate from the main dining room, with a view onto the street through the front window. Bathrooms are on the second floor, a major deterrent for older people. I watched an elderly man descend the stairs like Mallory from Everest, clinging to the handrail for dear life.

 Across downtown Flushing, managers at eateries with restrooms have had the most problems with lingering elderly patrons. Not long ago, on Union Street, a branch of Tous les Jours, a South Korean chain of French-style bakeries, opened, replacing another bakery, but with fewer seats and without a toilet for customers.

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A McDonald’s on Main Street is patronized mainly by customers of Chinese origin. Damon Winter/The New York Times

 In any case, most of those places are too far and foreign for the McDonald’s gang. Even the Burger King, only two blocks away, is remote if you walk with a cane. A few of the regulars at McDonald’s told me that they had frequented a different Korean bakery, a block away, but that it was replaced a couple of years ago by a Chinese-American-owned clothing store, the harbinger of changing times.

 Therein lies a further lesson. The neighborhood’s center of gravity has shifted. As the Chinese population in downtown Flushing has grown, younger, more affluent Koreans have moved eastward toward Bayside, leaving behind an older generation of Koreans. Absent a senior center within walking distance, McDonald’s has become, by default, their home away from home. Its architecture offers big picture windows with views onto a major intersection. A seating area near the front door is set apart, half-obscured from the restaurant’s counter staff, with an extra-long banquette, ideal for large groups, people watching and privacy: the urban trifecta. McDonald’s is a ready-made NORC.

 The official name is Naturally Occurring Retirement Communities. These include various midcentury housing projects (like Co-op City in the Bronx or Penn South in Manhattan) that have evolved serendipitously over the decades into homes well suited for the elderly people who have aged in them. Despite itself, and the many disgruntled patrons who find nothing charming about people they consider space hogs, McDonald’s is the NORC that has bound together the elderly Koreans. Most of them didn’t know one another until they visited the restaurant. They were drawn there by proximity and price, and they have stayed for the companionship.

 “It’s how we keep track of each other now,” Mr. Yim told me. “Everybody checks in at McDonald’s at least once a day, so we know they’re O.K.”

 People check in from far away, too. Byung Uk Cho, 84, who moved to the neighborhood from New Jersey three years ago and stops into the restaurant two or three times a day, said that a friend called from Seoul after hearing about the evictions last week. “We became famous around the world,” he said, “but, ultimately, it wasn’t a conflict between a big corporation and weak seniors. It was a community issue.”

 And that’s the answer to the original question.

 McDonald’s the corporation serves billions and billions. But the hamburger joint at Parsons and Northern Boulevards is theirs.

[Forget_me_not]

전 솔직히 이 기사 접할 때 부끄러웠다는 ㅠㅠ 하지만 이분들을 위한 공간이 절대적으로 부족하기 때문이라는 생각도 드네요.

[신중생각신속행동]

They are so pity.ㅜㅜ