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| On the residential streets of Flushing, Queens, and Sunset Park, Brooklyn, steel fences line almost every other house. They’re silver, sometimes embellished with gold, and they’re in striking contrast to the modest brick and vinyl-clad houses that they encircle, like a diamond necklace worn atop an old white T-shirt. |
| “If you have money to spare, you should always get the better option,” said Dilip Banerjee, gesturing toward his neighbors’ wrought iron fences and basking in the shine of his own steel fence, handrails, door and awning that cost him about $2,800 to add to his unassuming two-story house in Flushing. |
| Like the white picket fence, long a symbol of the so-called American dream, the stainless steel fence embodies a similar sense of making it. But the steel fence is not muted or uniform; it twists and turns to the taste of the maker, personalized with various ornaments, including lotus flowers, “om” symbols and geometric patterns. At night, street lamps and car headlights exaggerate the glimmer of stainless steel that does not, cannot disappear into the darkness like wrought iron. Whereas some people might be turned off by the flashiness, standing out is exactly its point — the stainless steel fence is an undeniable signal that the homeowner has arrived. |
| “It’s certainly a mark of middle class arrivals, especially for folks for whom this is their first home,” said Thomas Campanella, a historian of city planning and the urban built environment at Cornell University. “There is a status element to the stainless steel.” |
| The rise of these fences — commonly found on single-family houses but also surrounding restaurants, churches, doctors’ offices and more — parallels the growth of Asian Americans in New York. Last year, the city’s Office of Immigrant Affairs reported that Asians and Pacific Islanders are the city’s fastest growing racial group, increasing primarily by 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 grew to nearly 845,000. The city also found that more than half of those immigrants lived in Queens. Correspondingly, Mr. Campanella estimates that stainless steel fences started to take off in New York during the same time frame. |
| When his Hispanic neighbors moved and sold their houses to Chinese buyers, the fences started to spread, said Garibaldi Lind, a Puerto Rican resident who has lived in Sunset Park for decades. “There’s two down there,” he said, gesturing down 51st Street. “Up here, there’s three more.” |
| But other homeowners have also embraced the style of fence. “Throughout Queens Village and Richmond Hill, if you see a fence like this, it’s typically a West Indian household,” said Farida Gulmohamad, a Guyanese real estate agent. |
| “It is our status symbol,” she added. |
| They’re not to everyone’s liking. “I’m not a fan myself. They’re unavoidable, but they’re a strange thing where they’re too shiny or they call too much attention to themselves,” said Rafael Herrin-Ferri, the photographer behind the book “All the Queens Houses.” “They have a very tawdry quality about them. There’s a lot of tawdry, cheap stuff in Queens, but they don’t blend or complement any of the other stuff.” |
| Still, for all their fanciness and gaudiness, the fences are also practical, requiring low maintenance compared to iron fences with peeling paint. Newly renovated houses for sale are dressed up from head to toe (or more aptly, awning to gate) in glittering steel. |
| Priya Kandhai, a real estate agent in Queens who frequently has listings in the Ozone Park and Jamaica neighborhoods, said, “South Asians and East Asians seem to gravitate more toward stainless steel because it looks nicer.” |
| She said when she shows her clients houses with steel fencing and awnings, they feel that the house is more valuable and modern, similar to a kitchen having a stainless steel fridge instead of a white plastic one. |
| A Love for Stainless Steel Across Continents |
| The story of stainless steel goes back several decades. |
| It was first invented in 1913 in the United Kingdom. It started to be adopted en masse in China in the 1980s and 1990s, according to Tim Collins, secretary-general of the World Stainless Association, a nonprofit research organization based in Brussels. |
| In recent years, “stainless steel has become more widely understood as a material with longevity associated with it,” Mr. Collins said. “The ability to produce it and form it into interesting shapes and have symbolic features from people’s home countries has been a more recent revolution.” In comparison, wrought iron is much harder to customize, he added. |
| The popularity of stainless steel fences could be attributed to “people wanting to remember their heritage but also embrace a modern-looking material,” Mr. Collins said. |
| Wu Wei, an associate professor at Nanjing University’s school of architecture and urban planning, said that many private stainless steel companies formed in the late 1990s and early 2000s in the Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces of China. “They made a lot of household products,” said Ms. Wu, who remembered the first stainless-steel product in her home was a vegetable washing basin. In the ’90s, stainless steel products were considered valuable, but today, they’re “everywhere and everyone can have it, and sometimes you have to use it now,” she said. |
| According to Ms. Wu, the ornate design of the fences could stem from the Chinese tradition of including lucky patterns on everyday objects. She said that Chinese characters (such as “fu” which means lucky), the white crane which stands for longevity, flowers which stand for blossoming and other auspicious symbols can be commonly found “in traditional vernacular dwelling in China.” For the wealthy, Ms. Wu said, these symbolic designs became the aesthetic of choice. |
| Chinese people immigrating to the United States in recent years brought with them this affinity for stainless steel. And as steel-fence fabrication shops started to crop up in Queens and Brooklyn, New Yorkers of all backgrounds started to install these fences as well. |
| Mr. Banerjee, 77, who emigrated from Kolkata, India, in the 1970s, said he always aspired 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 his doorsteps adorned with stainless steel railings. |
| One of his first jobs was working in a jute mill in India. When he first came to New York, he crashed at various friends’ apartments. He started applying for jobs he saw advertised in the newspaper, and he eventually got hired as an engineer at a firm. |
| After getting settled in 1998, Mr. Banerjee bought the house he now lives in, and over the years, he painstakingly renovated every bit of it, making it fit the vision he had — the carpets, the windows, the garage and, of course, the fence were all swapped out. “The fence protects it all. It’s growing in value,” he said proudly. |
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