Starting Points: Margaret Chin

Apr 4, 2010

Advertising on a Wall, Not a Web Site - NYTimes.com

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By SARAH MASLIN NIR

MANY people hustle right past the wall pasted with paper fliers on Forsyth Street, in the shadow of the Manhattan Bridge. But others make pilgrimages to this easternmost reach of Chinatown, where scores of advertisements, most handwritten in Chinese, are posted, their phone-number strips curling like beckoning fingers.

The wall functions as an offline Craigslist — a Craigswall, if you will — where Mandarin and Cantonese speakers do brisk business renting rooms to longtime residents and newly arrived immigrants for whom English and the Internet are as yet unnavigable. There is a similar wall inside a grocery store in Flushing, Queens.

Though the wall on Forsyth Street advertises mostly apartments, Margaret Chin, who represents Chinatown on the City Council, said she had seen all kinds of fliers around the neighborhood, including complaints about particular lawyers.

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“If you have something to say,” she said, “you write it up and you just post it up.” The custom of hawking goods and ideas by poster and placard took hold in China after the 1949 revolution, said Lincoln Cushing, co-author of “Chinese Revolutionary Posters: Art From the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.”

In rural towns, “You would have this wall that would be taken over” by placards, he said. “People stand in front of this wall and read this, and they respond by putting up their own character poster.” Flier-covered Chinatown, he said, is quite likely “an echo of that.”

The wall in Flushing, inside the A & N Food Market at 4179 Main Street, has been up for about 20 years. It’s “a landmark, like the Empire State Building,” said Tem Shieh, 60, the market’s manager. Unlike the wall on Forsyth Street, it is highly organized: advertisers must use a certain form and pay $1.50 for three days. Occasionally, landlords have spats over covering up one another’s ads, Mr. Shieh said; some even stand guard for hours by the roughly 12-by-14-foot wall, making sure their ad remains visible.

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A & N Food Market sells 100 forms a day and, as on Forsyth Street, many of the ads are for a room or rooms within people’s homes. As with the Chinatown wall, rents are rarely listed — they are negotiated — but people say they are generally low.

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In Chinatown, Nancy Lin, who works at the Internet cafe on the second floor of the building with the ads, said the caretakers there tear them down once or twice a week. But “they’re back up” within minutes, she said. “Not in an hour, in a half-hour, maybe 20 minutes.”

Juanjuan Li, 46, who recently moved to New York from China, was apartment hunting at the wall one cold weekday afternoon, on the recommendation of someone in her English class. The scene was far from her American dream. “This is not New York like in the ‘Gossip Girls,’ ” she said.

Jeffrey E. Singer contributed reporting.