ABSTRACT
Devon Avenue in Chicago is an ethnic and immigrant retail strip home to South Asians, Jews, Russians, Latin Americans, Koreans, and native-born white Americans of various ethnic backgrounds. 1 This cultural diversity belies any attempts to categorize this street as a site of a single community; rather, landscapes of different ethnic groups are interwoven into a complex tapestry. The architectural character of Devon Avenue is similar to many multiethnic retail streets in US cities. Typically, such streets include dense rows of multi-storied mixed-use buildings occupied by sequential waves of new immigrants, for whom the street becomes the initial launching pad into America. Narrow storefronts with eye-catching signage distinguish the buildings along such streets. Examples of such streets include New York's Lower East Side and Chicago's Lower West Side. However, the highly visual architectural quality of these spaces makes it difficult for us to see them as lived environments of a diverse group of people. The ephemeral and experiential interpretations of these places by different stakeholders may escape the gaze of a material culture scholar who studies building types. Architectural historians focus on who built a building, the construction technologies, and material details. But what happens when the users of the buildings change and new tenants occupy old buildings? In Devon Avenue we see instances where users temporarily transform parts of a building into very specific kinds of places which, after those users leave, then revert to what they were before. We encounter situations where one group of individuals uses a space in a certain way while another group simultaneously uses the same space differently.
