Oak Tree Road and the Second Life Cycle Blues
I recently visited my parents in central New Jersey, and during that visit I drove out east to the Edison/Iselin area to see the Oak Tree Road corridor, sometimes called Little India. I knew I was going to write something about it, but I wasn’t sure what my angle would be. Then, I came across an old Strong Towns piece, at just the right time.
In the piece, headlined “Second Life Cycle Blues,” Charles Marohn talks about the “second life cycle”: the point when the inherent fragility of the suburban land use pattern begins to appear, following the initial period when everything is functional, shiny, and new, and when developers are paying for infrastructure and national chains are knocking.
“The Suburban Experiment creates an illusion of wealth early on, which makes it very seductive,” he writes. “As the city enters the second life cycle and all of the dispersed systems that came with the growth now need costly maintenance, the seductive illusion is slowly destroyed.”
The Strong Towns critique of the suburban development pattern is twofold: one, it’s very expensive to maintain (its relatively low densities are part of this, but we like to talk about “productivity” rather than density alone); and two, it’s built “to a finished state,” making it more like a product than a place. As it ages, and its financial fragility begins to show, people move away and build the same thing, brand new, somewhere else. This is what’s meant by “sprawl,” but that term implies disorder. This process is highly ordered, just badly ordered.
What does any of this have to do with Edison’s Little India? Well, the Oak Tree Road corridor, where the linear South Asian neighborhood sits for a couple of miles, is at least at its second life cycle. Many of the strip plazas and commercial buildings, and the houses on adjacent streets, are from the 1960s and 1970s. Some are even a little older. The typical house I saw was a cape (many with a full or partial second-floor expansion).
A typical suburban residential street just off Oak Tree Road.
An older strip plaza, anchored by an Indian grocery store.
No large box stores have been built in the corridor recently; there’s only one full-sized supermarket (a former Pathmark, now India Grocers), in possibly the newest strip plaza, built in 1986. One of the other supermarkets, a branch of the Indian chain Patel Brothers, inhabits an old mid-sized A&P. There’s a bowling alley from the 1960s being heavily remodeled (there was no indication of what it’s becoming), and a Dairy Queen barn-style building next door, currently vacant but recently housing an Indian restaurant. Dairy Queen first built their iconic barn-style buildings in 1961.
A former A&P now housing an Indian supermarket.
Former Dairy Queen; old bowling alley to the right, and a Hindu temple in the background.
The area was fairly undeveloped until the mid-20th century, when development came to this strip and its side streets (radiating out from the area’s older downtowns), whereupon it was built “to a finished state,” and then development pretty much stopped. “In the early 1990s,” writes Monte Burke in Forbes, “Oak Tree Road was a cesspool of biker bars, prostitutes, and abandoned buildings.” Another article recounts: “More than two decades ago, Oak Tree Road was lined with bars and all but abandoned after 7 p.m. There was no foot traffic and motorcycle gangs roamed the streets. Chandrakant Patel, owner of restaurant and snack shop Chowpatty Foods, recalls how rough the neighborhood was when he first opened in the neighborhood in the 1980s.”
Second life cycle blues.
Normally, that’s the end of the story. If the place is sufficiently affluent, like the early suburban counties on Long Island, all of this stuff carries on, slowly getting replaced and upgraded, or at least being maintained. But in many more places, the locus of growth moves elsewhere. There are any number of aging, worn-out commercial strips and residential streets from this period that struggle to maintain their infrastructure and attract business, sometimes in regionally depressed areas and sometimes next door to the next generation of suburban development. When revitalization does come, as it sometimes does, it is often in the form of large-scale retail and mixed-use development.
But here on Oak Tree Road, the smaller and more granular scale remains, as do a large percentage of the original houses and commercial structures. And more importantly, business itself survives at a local and small scale. Hundreds of Indian-owned small businesses populate the Oak Tree Road corridor, and even some Indian chains. But there aren’t many large national retailers here. The property listing for that 1986 shopping center, anchored by an Indian supermarket and a cinema showing Indian films with English subtitles, barely observes the neighborhood’s makeup today; its list of ten “nearby major retailers” includes five banks and three American chain restaurants.
Indian businesses along the downtown Iselin portion of Oak Tree Road.
The small scale of the businesses, the larger number of people out walking, the large, often extended families out shopping, are all typical of immigrant neighborhoods. You can see much the same atmosphere and approach to commerce in Eden Center, a strip plaza in Virginia’s Washington, DC, suburbs that serves the area’s large Vietnamese community.
An example of one of the area’s Indian fusion restaurants.
A write-up at NJBIZ attributes the Oak Tree Road corridor’s success to its concentration of businesses serving the South Asian community, creating a kind of critical mass. And the success is very real: “Average asking rates [i.e., commercial rents]...are often four times what one would find in townships similar to that of Woodbridge.” This is a highly productive place, especially given its predominant land use.
However, while its status as Little India is obviously a major factor in its success, it isn’t the whole story. Monte Burke’s Forbes piece explains the rest. The South Asian community “builds wealth the old-fashioned way,” he writes. Recounting a meeting of local neighborhood lenders and businesspeople, he explains: “Together these four men have helped fund (sometimes with interest-free loans) more than 200 small businesses owned by fellow Indo-Americans. Doing so, they believe, makes for a stronger neighborhood and a thriving downtown area.” Part of this is because recent immigrants are generally unable to qualify for conventional bank loans. Lending by locals within the community fosters business at a local scale, and creates opportunity outside of the modern, impersonal financial system.
A fine-grained commercial atmosphere coexists with a car-oriented landscape.
Monte dubs this “alternative investing,” but also, as noted above, describes it as “the old-fashioned way.” It is the old-fashioned way, and it largely accounts for the highly local, idiosyncratic, fine-grained feel of ethnic enclave neighborhoods. It isn’t some “magic of immigrants,” something impossible for native-born Americans to achieve; it’s the same time-tested way America built its own settlements up until the age of the suburban experiment. And it’s a way of building we’ve regulated almost out of existence. The kind of energy and entrepreneurship that saved the Oak Tree Road corridor can be unlocked anywhere.
Of course, not everything is perfect here: high commercial rents are a double-edged sword; the titular road is a stroad, and its design holds back street life. But nonetheless, the neighborhood’s approach to development makes small-scale, locally owned businesses easier to start, and incremental development easier to finance.
We might associate it with immigrant communities, or with classically urban settings. But it works for everyone, and it works in aging suburban settings, too. It might even spare them their second life cycle blues.
Addison Del Mastro writes on urbanism and cultural history. He tweets at @ad_mastro and writes daily at Substack.
In honor of the season, here’s a short adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” which illustrates the damage that zombie projects — large, ambitious projects that drag out for years or never get off the ground — can do to a place.