Rediscovering Manhattan's Chinatown

Welcome, Old Friend: Rediscovering Manhattan's Chinatown
By ERIC ASIMOV
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/01/dining/01CHIN.html

NOBODY says much about Chinatown these days. Not Manhattan Chinatown, anyway. Flushing is where the excitement is, or Brooklyn. "You know," one Chinese-food maven whispered to me recently, "there are really two Chinatowns in Brooklyn now, Sunset Park and the Avenue U area near Bensonhurst, but nobody knows about that one."

Lovers of Chinese food crave secrecy and are suspicious by nature. They are desperate to learn where the hot chefs are cooking, but fear they have chosen a restaurant where the great chef has already left. They are certain a restaurant's real treasures are denied to them because they can't read the proverbial Chinese-language menu. Long ago the writer Calvin Trillin said that he carried a card with the Chinese sentence for "Bring me what they're having at the next table."

But the big secret in Chinese food these days is right out in the open, if only anybody were looking. It's Chinatown — Manhattan Chinatown — where the food, to my mouth at least, is as good as or better than it's ever been.

It's not just the restaurants, although that's a pretty good place to start, but fish shops, meat markets, greengrocers and purveyors of things you never knew you wanted, like dried licorice plums, which doubtless have some health benefit but to me just smell good.

Even while much of Chinatown may seem familiar, like the jurors flocking to Big Wong on Mott Street for roasted pork at lunchtime, it is constantly changing. Street vendors are now all over, selling fried turnip cakes on Canal Street, for example, and little fried-dumpling shops are springing up, offering the unbeatable deal of five for a dollar. New-wave Chinese restaurants like Shanghai Cafe and Big Eat cater largely to a younger crowd and offer glimpses of the latest crosscultural dining trends in Hong Kong.

"It's still a really exciting place," said Mr. Trillin, who regularly rides to Chinatown on his bicycle from his home in Greenwich Village. "There's constantly something new there."

Even with something old, you can learn something new and exciting. On a recent sunny afternoon, when I stopped at the Mei Lai Wah Coffee House, a worn and battered cafe practically hidden on Bayard Street, I found the dregs of the day's baking, a steamed pork bun that had sat around long enough to turn as tough as one of the listing vinyl booths. The place was empty and lifeless.

But when I returned in the morning, Mei Lai Wah was hopping, filled with men drinking coffee from paper cups as trays and trays of fresh buns were stacked in racks. The baked pork buns were superb, with a glossy, pliable pastry and a savory, slightly sweet filling, and just 60 cents apiece. A sweet braided sesame bun, still warm from the oven, was just the right chaser.

Mei Lai Wah was there years ago when Chinatown was just a small clutch of narrow bends between Canal Street and Chatham Square. Chinatown's star shone brightest in the 1970's and 80's, when New York City's love affair with Chinese food was at its height. Woody Allen and Mariel Hemingway nurtured their doomed love affair in "Manhattan" over Chinese takeout containers while Edward I. Koch, the noshing mayor, was an irrepressible Chinatown habitué. College students from Connecticut — I was one — used to consider it an adventure to drive down after midnight to Wo Hop or Hong Fat, places where even the greasiest moo shu pork tasted great at 3 a.m.

Chinatown has grown tremendously since then, expanding to the north and east, reducing Little Italy to a quaint diorama as it has engulfed much of the Lower East Side. But it's no longer a big deal to many New Yorkers.

It came to be taken for granted, diminished in the city's imagination by an expanding world of Thai, Vietnamese, Malaysian and Korean restaurants — many of them in Chinatown itself. Like network television in the age of cable, Chinatown is now noted for what it lacks rather than appreciated for what it offers.

Of course, 9/11 hit Chinatown especially hard, and so did the SARS link to Asia. But those events only accelerated the slide downward.

"Life was tough there even before 9/11," said Leonard Lopate, the talk show host on WNYC radio, who lived in Chinatown for 30 years before moving to Brooklyn in 2001. "People now have all these other options. Food tastes have changed as well."

And why not? The world has grown: people have seen, tasted and traveled more, and nobody, least of all the Chinese, expects to settle for the same old dishes. Cantonese, particularly by way of Hong Kong, is still the dominant style in Chinatown, though you can also find Shanghai, Fujian and even a little Sichuan, often all on the same menu.

Bubble tea shops are proliferating, as are fancy bakery chains with as many French and Italian pastries as traditional Chinese delicacies. The Flushing and Sunset Park Chinatowns may have more Taiwanese or Sichuan restaurants, but they don't have Manhattan's variety. What they do have is parking.

"Parking is such an issue, but I would not say the culinary attraction has shifted," said Wangsheng Li, who works for MetLife and is a frequent visitor to Chinatown. "The Chinese restaurants there have become more sophisticated in terms of trying new things."

Consider, for example, the bizarre curry bun at Big Eat, one of Chinatown's shiny new restaurant-lounges. It's a hollowed-out roll as big as a jack-o'-lantern, filled with spicy, peppery curry tinged with coconut milk. A chicken leg pokes out the top like an umbrella in a stand. It's good, too, though it's not exactly clear what makes it Chinese. With other dishes like Malaysian curry, Thai pork chop, edamame, and a mysterious "baked pol bello mushroom and cheese rice casserole," Big Eat caters to the worldly tastes of its clientele.

"It's an infusion of nouvelle cooking from China, and newly arrived chefs reflect these kinds of tastes," Mr. Li, a onetime restaurant manager, said. "The distinction between regional cuisines has become very blurred."

The more traditional flavors of Chinatown are still easy enough to find and can be astonishingly good. At Chanoodle, a bright new restaurant on Mulberry Street, the fried rice with two kinds of Chinese sausage is a beautiful, colorful dish, putting to shame the grease bombs that pass for fried rice at the takeout joints. The green of the peas, the red of the cubed peppers and the bright yellow of the egg contrast with the white of the fluffy rice, and the sausages — one dried, the other fresher — add complementary pungencies.

OK 218 Grand is a plain little restaurant alongside a takeout shop with excellent roasted meats served over rice, and surprisingly good Peking duck, served with graceful ceremony as a waiter swiftly anoints pancakes with hoisin and rolls them up with duck.

"I still go to Chinatown all the time," Mr. Koch said. "But I feel so sorry for the people because the business is way off." One of his favorite Chinatown restaurants, Sun Lok Kee, relocated to Flushing last year after a fire at its longtime Mott Street site.

"The rent was too high, and the restaurant was too small," said Sunny Lee, manager of New Lok Kee, as the restaurant in Flushing is now called. "In Flushing, more people are on the streets."

That may seem difficult to comprehend for people who have dodged and parried their way up Mott Street, particularly on the block between Hester and Grand Streets, home to a fabulous selection of food shops. Here, one after the other, are greengrocers with neatly stacked piles of mustard greens, cabbages and melons, with baskets of shiitake mushrooms and Chinese pumpkins.

Fish shops display fat striped bass, live blue crabs tied with cloth so as not to expend energy and lose body fat, buckets of squatting frogs and glistening little silver fish still breathing. Butcher shops offer every possible portion of the pig and cow.

"To my mind it's the single best food market in the city," said Ed Schoenfeld, a restaurant consultant and longtime expert on Chinese food. "To me, it makes Arthur Avenue's covered market look like small potatoes."

A block away, Peter Lam and his brother Joe Si, who own four Joe's Shanghai restaurants in Manhattan and Queens, have gone against the grain. They opened Joe's Ginger on Mott Street just a couple of months ago, reinvesting in Chinatown at a time when everybody else is counting it out.

"9/11 and SARS and the parking, those three big problems, have killed a lot of business in Chinatown," Mr. Lam said. "We found a good location because we felt that next year the Manhattan economy will be better."

Chinatown itself has taken steps to rebuild its business. In September, it cordoned off Bayard Street for a Moon Lantern festival, an unusual occurrence for a community that usually limits its celebrations to the Chinese New Year. There has been talk about improving sanitation and parking, although not everybody expects much to change.

"There is lip service to community effort but I don't see it happening," said Michael Batterberry, a restaurant historian who is editor and publisher of Food Arts magazine.

As with almost anything having to do with Chinatown, the more you try to understand, the less you realize you know. Things change for reasons that are difficult to discern, and don't change for equally unfathomable causes.

Why is it, for example, that at least three well-known restaurants have changed their names slightly? Harmony Palace, a longtime dim sum specialist on Mott Street, recently promoted itself to Grand Harmony, while NY Noodletown on the Bowery performed a similar upgrade, becoming Great NY Noodletown. By contrast, the Triple Eight Palace on East Broadway knocked itself down a digit, and is now called 88 Palace.

"Quite a lot of businesses have changed hands," said Ray Chen, an antiques dealer. "There's always this sort of thing."

Sex, lies and videotape

Sex, lies and videotape
Saturday, July 26, 2003
by ALLEN T. CHENG, SCMP
http://china.scmp.com/chifeatures/ZZZPZRL5DID.html

At the height of the Sars crisis, Wei Wujun's phone was almost silent. "No husband dared to risk going out to cheat on their wives," says the Shanghai-based private eye and China's most famous mistress hunter. "But today, with Sars off the radar screen, my phone is ringing non-stop again."
The outbreak didn't just have a dramatic impact on the mainland economy. It also had a devastating impact on mainland nightlife as most hostess clubs had to shut down during the 10 weeks that marked the height of the crisis, from April to early June.

But with the World Health Organisation travel advisory on Beijing lifted, mainland and expat men are at it again: cheating on their wives. Mr Wei's business is seeing a revival.

Frequently interviewed on television and known nationally as an er nai sha shou, or mistress assassin, the 48-year-old has helped more than 1,200 women track down their philandering husbands all over China.

At 1.81 metres tall and 90kg, Mr Wei cuts a formidable figure. He usually wears sunglasses, even at night, and often wears a baseball cap that covers much of his face. A chain smoker, he is a quiet man who seldom boasts of his success as China's best-known private eye. "You can't stop a married man from playing around, but when he takes a mistress and actually sets up a household, then he breaks the law," says Mr Wei, who spent more than 10 years as a police officer in the People's Liberation Army in Shandong province and 10 years as a news reporter and TV producer before setting up his agency in 1993. "Er nais [second wives] hurt the institution of marriage, and too many married men these days are taking them on."

Mainland mistresses aren't hurting only mainland wives. Just ask Laura, a 39-year-old who lives in the American Midwest. Laura, who asked that her last name not be used, knows about mainland concubines only too well - Mr Wei helped her track down her philandering husband and his mistress in Shanghai. For years husband Kevin had been a loving man. On Valentine's Day, he always gave her a dozen roses. On her birthday, there would be a romantic dinner out, away from the kids. At night, the couple always had quality time talking about what happened during the day. But all that changed two years ago, when Kevin began travelling to Shanghai for regular business trips. He became distant and cold. Then he didn't return phone calls until the next morning and began lying about money.

"Being in this situation as a wife is like having your head and your heart constantly arguing," says Laura, who is 11 years younger than Kevin. "I knew if this was anyone's else's husband, I'd believe another woman was involved, but because this was the man I married, had children with and thought I knew better than anyone in the world, I simply could not believe it. Any time I'd question his behaviour he said I was crazy and would vehemently deny any wrongdoing."

In July last year, Laura hired Mr Wei to snoop on Kevin during one of his trips to Shanghai. Laura's intuition was right: there was another woman, a 28-year-old from Shanghai. The detective caught Kevin and the woman on camera cuddling in a park, walking hand-in-hand in a shopping mall, and walking to an apartment he had rented for her. The evidence was presented in a divorce case Laura filed after Mr Wei tailed the pair for two days last July. She won more than half of Kevin's assets in the settlement a few months ago.

Laura was a rare foreign client for Mr Wei, who says that more than 90 per cent of his customers are middle-age mainland women, usually angry wives of rich businessmen or senior provincial officials. He also serves a flourishing customer base of Taiwanese wives.

On occasion, his clients are angry husbands who want him to track down their philandering wives.

"It's not because Chinese wives aren't satisfying their husband's needs," says Mr Wei. "China's spiritual vacuum is the problem. Before economic reform began, everyone was poor and relied on the richness of Maoist ideology. Deng Xiaoping overturned Maoism with economic reforms, but he lacked an ideology. What has come to fill the vacuum has been the worship of materialism - people in power and those with money are never satisfied. They need more power, more money and with it more sex."

Mr Wei may sound like a priest or a prude, but he is operating on the side of the law. Two years ago, the National People's Congress promulgated the New Marriage Law, which criminalises keeping an er nai. Although it does not carry a prison sentence, men caught keeping a mistress must compensate their spouses financially in a divorce settlement.

Mr Wei's rates aren't cheap. He charges most clients 2,000 yuan to 3,000 yuan (HK$1,890-$2,830) a day, depending on the equipment needed to track down and spy on cheating husbands. For foreign clients like Laura, he charges US$1,000 a day. Despite the high fees, he runs a brisk business. "The need for my services is tremendous," he says. He employs more than a dozen full-time staff in Chengdu and Shanghai and operates an agency with a network of more than 200 independent detectives throughout the mainland. "Many people have money and get rich. Once they're rich, they're no longer satisfied with one wife. Some have seven or eight `wives'," Mr Wei says.

Li Yinhe, a professor at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, thinks Mr Wei is providing a much-needed service. "Chinese society is regressing to before 1949, when it was acceptable for Chinese men to have concubines," says Ms Li. "Now, a wife whose husband has a mistress can sue for divorce and get a large chunk of his assets. That is why this new marriage law is so important." The law came about as a result of heavy lobbying by Professor Li, who saw concubines becoming a national trend among businessmen over the past decade.

Mr Wei says helping wives track down their cheating husbands isn't easy. Occasionally, he takes on mobsters. On a recent trip to Lanzhou, Gansu province, he had to flee from his hotel room to avoid six thugs that the mistress had hired to hunt him down. He was later able to follow the thugs to the woman, who he filmed with his client's husband. On another trip, he claims that he fought with 14 thugs hired by an angry husband who had grown tired of being tailed.

"I was a major in the PLA police corps and an expert in the martial art of qin na [a Chinese martial arts form similar to Japanese aikido]," Mr Wei recounts while taking drags on his cigarette. "They followed me into an alley and tried to corner me. By the time I was finished with them, there were 14 of them lying down, and I walked away."

He admits he doesn't take on all clients. "I never accept clients who are the wives of senior central government officials. You don't want to anger a senior official in Beijing. It's just too much trouble."

Mr Wei sticks to flourishing business in southern China, the mainland's prosperity belt.

"I plan to do this a few more years," he says with a laugh, tossing a long mane of grey-streaked black hair that is usually hidden under his cap. "And then I plan to open a detective school training other private eyes - other mistress assassins."

Laura says she hopes China can conquer its addiction to concubines. "My advice to men is simple: don't hurt your families. When you have an itch or a mid-life crisis, don't hurt your wives and your children. Don't get an er nai. Get a convertible."

China Angered by Reported Orgy Involving Japanese Tourists

China Angered by Reported Orgy Involving Japanese Tourists
By JOSEPH KAHN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/30/international/asia/30ORGY.html

BEIJING, Sept. 29 — The police said today that they had detained half a dozen people in connection with assertions that hundreds of Japanese tourists had hired similar numbers of local prostitutes and staged a public display of promiscuity on a sensitive anniversary in Sino-Japanese relations.

Details of the reported three-day sex romp at a luxury hotel in the southern city of Zhuhai remained sketchy, but that did not diminish an outpouring of invective against Japan on China's Internet chat sites or unusually racy articles in the state-controlled press.

The incident has further embittered relations between China and Japan, which were already strained this month when Chinese construction workers stumbled upon a cache of mustard gas that Japan had left behind after its World War II-era occupation. One man died and several others were badly burned in the accident. Japan apologized.

Beijing and Tokyo have also been throwing sharp elbows in an effort to secure access to Russian oil, pushing competing proposals for the construction of a pipeline they both see as crucial to meeting their demands.

The city of Zhuhai, like some others along China's borders with Hong Kong and Macau, is well known for attracting Chinese and Western sex tourists. But the incident involving a group of 400 Japanese visitors and as many as 500 local prostitutes prompted national outrage because of the scale and the timing.

Chinese newspapers reported over the weekend that the male tourists, some as young as 16, hired prostitutes at local nightclubs and brought them back in groups to the Zhuhai International Conference Center Hotel. Chinese guests staying at the hotel were quoted as saying that the Japanese men groped the prostitutes in the lobby and on elevators, and that guest floors overflowed with scenes of carnality and drunkenness.

The incident took place Sept. 16 to 18, according to the local press. The latter date is the day that China records as the start of the Japanese occupation of Manchuria in 1931.

It is unclear why reports about the sex scandal did not emerge until this past weekend, more than a week after it was said to have occurred.

Even allowing what is likely to be exaggeration in the news media, which rarely miss an opportunity to express China's anger about Japan's historical atrocities, officials say they are taking the incident seriously. The police in Zhuhai and the province of Guangdong said they had begun an investigation, and the hotel was temporarily closed.

A police spokeswoman said tonight that five or six people had been detained in connection with the matter, but declined to specify nationalities.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, Kong Quan, today called the incident odious. "Foreigners coming to China must comply with Chinese law," he said. "We hope the Japanese government will enhance the education of its people in that respect."

Japanese officials said they had not confirmed the details as reported in the Chinese press. But the deputy chief cabinet secretary, Masaaki Yamasaki, said at a news conference that Japanese should be careful to obey foreign laws when abroad.

Chinese Web sites, which are closely monitored by the authorities and censored if their content is deemed unacceptable, were full of indignation. Sohu.net conducted an online survey that attracted 85,000 responses. Nearly 90 percent said the Japanese had conducted the sex tour to humiliate China on what Chinese already call their national day of humiliation, Sept. 18.

The Piano Triumphant

The Piano Triumphant (With No Bourgeois Taint)
By DAVID W. CHEN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/26/international/asia/26CHIN.html

GULANGYU, China — For decades, music — or more accurately, Western classical music — has defined this former colonial outpost, nicknamed Piano Island for its high concentration of pianos in private homes.

But in recent years, the island, with its fading European style architecture and quaint charms, has resembled a vintage metronome, unable to keep pace with a dynamic region that is more karaoke than classical.

Now, as part of an effort to recast the island's history in a kinder, more tourist-friendly light, the local government is upgrading dozens of historic buildings, almost all of them built before the Communist victory of 1949.

It is an ambitious yet delicate project, freighted with the political baggage of the turbulent Cultural Revolution (1966-76), and of the island's first family of music, the Yins, who are helping in the renovation.

Led by the family patriarch, a wealthy banker, the Yins arrived here in the 1920's, blending into a privileged world nurtured by foreign powers that had pried open China's ports after the Opium War. By the turn of the 20th century, a dozen foreign consulates called this one-square-mile island home, offering legions of diplomats and wealthy overseas Chinese a tranquil and intimate retreat.

Because so many residents, the Yins included, were Christians, Gulangyu had at least half a dozen churches, each with its own piano. Music coursed through the leafy, winding lanes of Gulangyu, with families like the Yins holding informal recitals in luxurious villas sheathed in Mediterranean and Art Deco styles. Even today, cars and bicycles are not allowed here.

One of the women among the Yins was a soprano who released Christian recordings in the 1930's. A male Yin became a baritone singer who settled in Los Angeles in the 1980's. Yin Chengdian, a music teacher who showed a visitor around on a recent day, founded the Xiamen Music School in the early 1990's.

But the most famous Yin was Chengzong, one of China's most accomplished pianists, born here in 1941.

In May 1967, during the Cultural Revolution, as the Red Guards prepared to denounce him for essentially being politically incorrect, Mr. Yin rolled out a piano in the middle of Tiananmen Square. For three days, he played revolutionary odes to Mao.

"I think he played a heroic role in helping to save the piano from destruction," said Richard Kraus, a political scientist at the University of Oregon and the author of "Pianos and Politics in China," published in 1989.

"If you played the piano, it was prima facie evidence that you were contaminated by Western bourgeois culture. So by agreeing to harness the piano for the Cultural Revolution, Yin Chengzong was responsible more than any other artist to give everyone the signal to stop beating up on the pianists and the violinists."

Later, Mr. Yin helped to write the music for the "Yellow River Concerto," which became a staple of the Cultural Revolution, and remains popular today.

But he was criticized by some for seemingly cozying up to Communist leaders, and becoming a favorite of Mao's wife, Jiang Qing. So when the political winds shifted with the end of the Cultural Revolution, he was persecuted and banned from playing for several years.

Eventually, he left China for the United States in 1983, settling in Manhattan, where he still lives today. Even now, he does not like to talk much about the past, saying that people should focus on music, not politics. But he has said that he was only trying to save the piano from destruction, and survive himself.

It was not until a few years ago that he made a bittersweet visit home. By then, the island had already changed from a place that had been ambivalent about its history to one that was trying desperately to restore it. The population had dwindled to about 17,000, with most young people moving to Xiamen, across the water in Fujian Province.

In part to bolster the restoration effort, Yin Chengzong has embarked on a concert tour of China that will run until November. "Gulangyu is now just an island for tourists, so they asked me to come back to help."

Some criticize the renovation as an attempt to restore his reputation and that of the family by fitting them into an economy that is turning Gulangyu into a theme park.

In the commercial heart of the island, near a ferry landing that some residents say is shaped like a piano, the sidewalks have been repaved with embossed music notes, Gulangyu's answer to the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

A few years ago, Gulangyu opened a piano museum, the largest in the country. Within the last year or so, the government installed outdoor speakers around the island that now play everything from Ravel's "Bolero" to a classical version of the Beatles' "Yesterday."

Yin Chengdian, Chengzong's older brother, estimates that the restoration will affect up to 200 historic buildings, including the family residence. The goals, he said, include having regular piano master classes and small recitals.

He is convinced that classical music will never be scorned again in China.

"If you want to take it back, you can't, because it's what the people want," he said. And besides, he added, "we prefer to talk about the future. We don't like to talk about the past very much."

China to Launch First Manned Spacecraft

China to Launch First Manned Spacecraft
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/26/international/asia/26BEIJ.html

BEIJING, Sept. 25 — China's first manned spacecraft could be launched "as early as next month" from a site in the remote northwest and will probably contain one crew member, the state-owned People's Daily reported today on its Web site.

It gave no further details about a timetable for the craft, Shenzhou-5, which the government had said earlier would fly with a Chinese crew aboard by next year. The flight will probably last 24 hours, the newspaper said.

The mention of the timing in an article about China's dreams of manned spaceflight was the most specific signal yet that a launch was imminent.

"China's first piloted space journey could occur as early as next month," the article said. "The Shenzhou-5 is set to soar."

China's leaders have invested significant resources in their secretive military-affiliated space program and have tried to stir nationalist sentiment about the project, as the United States and the Soviet Union did in the 1960's.

People's Daily said Shenzhou-5 would be carried into space by a Long March 2F rocket from the Jiuquan Space Launch Center in Gansu Province. It would probably land, as its predecessor did, on the grasslands of Inner Mongolia.

"While the crew compartment can hold as many as three passengers, Shenzhou-5 is seemingly to be operated by a lone pilot," People's Daily said.

It said Shenzhou-5 would have three modules: an orbital module with science equipment, the crew module and a service module holding equipment, solar panels and rocket engines.

Space-Age Garages That Save Space

Space-Age Garages That Save Space
By ANTOINETTE MARTIN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/21/realestate/21COV.html

IT lumbered and thudded into existence -- three years late, some still-debated but hefty amount over budget -- but the Hoboken municipal parking garage that opened its robotically controlled doors last year displays a stunning agility. It lifts and carries cars about on computer-controlled steel pallets as if they were delicate ballerinas, moving with precision and speed inside a structure that is remarkably compact.

While performance tests are still going on, the garage is limited to operating at two-thirds of its full capacity. When all systems are go, however, it will park 324 cars on just a 100-by-100-foot lot. The seven-level garage is 56 feet high, not much higher than the four-story row houses that are its neighbors.

''This is amazingly proficient use of space,'' commented Darius Sollohub, a New Jersey Institute of Technology professor who studies parking and urban land use. ''It may provide one of the solutions to the most important conflict in urban design: where do you put all the cars in environments where car volume is high and space is at a premium?''

Although an automated garage is more expensive to build it typically takes only about half as much precious real estate as a conventional ramped garage to handle the same number of cars, or even more. That is why in European and Asian cities, the automatic garage was long ago anointed as the best solution, Mr. Sollohub said.

The Hoboken structure, designed by Gerhard Haag, an engineer and architect born in Germany, where ramped garages are rare and automatic garages common, is a first-of-its-kind in the United States. There are other automated garages in the country, some dating from the 1950's. But the Hoboken garage -- and another smaller one designed by a different company in a Washington apartment building -- belong to a new generation of fully automated garages that parking industry specialists say is generating new interest. Indeed, Mr. Haag said, there are 67 American cities, including Manhattan, where his company is currently discussing proposals.

Hoboken's Garden Street Garage is completely computerized, with two identical elevator systems that are able to move simultaneously in both vertical and horizontal directions and communicate with each other by wireless transmitters. The garage's computer figures out which of the hundreds of spaces in the building a vehicle should occupy, and then delivers it there untouched by human hands.

A monthly parker pulls into one of four driveways at the red-brick building on Garden Street, which on the outside looks pretty much like a group of Hoboken row houses. The driver powers the car forward a few yards onto a steel pallet, maneuvering the wheels between guardrails as instructions appear on an L.E.D. signboard about correct alignment, then turns off the engine and gets out.

After locking the car, the parker swipes a card in front of a magnetic reader, and while the sign on the wall is flashing a reminder to step back, automatic elevator doors close around the car and it is whisked to a computer-assigned slot.

The computer factors in the vehicle's size when making an assignment, putting larger S.U.V.'s on lower levels. It also takes into account the driver's schedule on previous visits, putting vehicles whose owners enter and exit frequently in the slots that the system can most easily access.

When the owner returns for the car and swipes the card again, the process begins in reverse. Within seconds, another electronic sign announces at which bay the car will appear, still on the pallet where the parker placed it. In its first year of operation, according to the computer records, the average wait to retrieve a car was 2.5 minutes.

THE key breakthrough with his type of design, according to Mr. Haag, is that the mechanized system is ''truly redundant.'' With older automated designs, said Mr. Haag, all three movements a car elevator can make -- in and out, up and down, side to side -- are powered by one central unit. If any single part fails, the garage becomes inoperable.

Mr. Haag's patented design has dual systems, so that its two elevators can move separately and independently, and the three types of movements they make are each powered by separate motors. Furthermore, each individual motor has a backup. There are twin motors powering the rollers under the pallets, for example, each working at less than half capacity and programmed to take over if the other should fail.

Besides increasing reliability, notes Dale F. Denda of PMRC, a national parking market research company, the fully automatic garage means ''throughput'' is enhanced -- parking lingo for shortening the time it takes to store cars and retrieve them.

The one other fully automatic garage in the United States is set beneath the Summit Grand Parc, an apartment building two blocks from the White House in Washington that incorporates both a new apartment tower and historic structure that was once home to the United Mineworkers. Designed by the Spacesaver Parking Company, a division of the Mid-American Elevator Company, and using equipment manufactured by a German concern, Wohr, the garage parks just 74 cars, and has only one automated elevator system.

''But without the automated system,'' said Michael A. Underwood, a senior vice president of the project's developer, Summit Properties, ''we wouldn't have had parking at all. For the kind of luxury apartments we provide, we had to have parking -- but this was a narrow lot between existing buildings, and with a conventional garage, we found ourselves hamstrung by site constraints. Automation provided an option.''

Urban land use specialists say that this sort of situation will continue to occur in congested American cities, and that automated parking could become a widely used option. Tomorrow, in fact, a seminar on automated parking is scheduled at the Urban Land Institute, a Washington research institute, using the Summit Grand Parc as a case study.

The Spacesaver company has another 99-car automatic garage that has been approved in Aspen. The company reports additional interest in various Northeastern metropolitan areas, and a spokeswoman said it also had a project under discussion in New York City, although she would not provide details about the site.

The Manhattan site that Mr. Haag is eyeing would involve tearing down an old building and constructing a privately operated 300-car fully automatic garage.

Monthly rates for parkers would be competitive with those at a conventional garage, said Mr. Haag, ''or else the market wouldn't exist.'' In Hoboken, a standard municipal fee of $200 per month applies, at the automated garage and all others. In Washington, Summit Grand Parc residents pay $225 monthly, and for S.U.V. size spots, $250.

Until very recently, the American way has been to indulge a cultural passion for driving, even in a parking structure, observed Shannon Sanders McDonald, an architect and scholar who is writing two books on the history of parking garages and land use -- one of them with Mr. Haag.

''People love their cars in this country,'' Ms. McDonald said. ''and the car-loving culture is the main reason for the garage typology.''

In Europe and Asia, the development history, traffic patterns, and parking ''culture'' are different, she said, and cities simply are not built to accommodate the hulking presence of a typical ramped structure. There are roughly 5,000 automated garages on those two continents -- including dozens that are fully computerized and robotically operated like the ones in Hoboken and Washington.

Ramped garages are actually very unpopular with many Americans -- ''ignored at best,'' Ms. McDonald said, ''hated by many.'' Why would people loathe a parking garage? Let her count the ways: ''They are perceived to be ugly, grimy, scary places where muggers are waiting to snatch purses and wallets, you will probably get your car paint scratched or your fender bent, and you are more than likely to get trapped in a long line of cars spewing exhaust when you're trying to get to the exit.''

Ms. McDonald, an architect who currently serves as an adjunct professor of architecture at North Dakota State University in Fargo, says garages have been made a ''scapegoat for urban ills.'' Yet she and others in the emergent field of scholarly research on parking -- along with entrepreneurs like Mr. Haag -- make a case that automatic garages actually help alleviate some of what ails modern cities, by eliminating the dirty-and-scary factor, and by maximizing land use.

''The main advantage of automated garages,'' said Mr. Denda, who is the research director for PMRC, which is based in McLean, Va., ''is that they can be built on sites that are too small or irregular for the construction of conventional garages.''

Of course, the cost of construction and operation also figure in heavily to a developer's decision to build an automated garage.

IN Baltimore, Ashbourne Properties is considering Mr. Haag's Robotic Parking system for a proposed three-building apartment complex that has street access only 60 feet wide. ''It is the only way we could provide on-site parking -- and we are happy to have the option,'' said Ashbourne's president, Crispin Etherington.

''The price we have been quoted is $22,000 per space, when conventional parking costs about $15,000 per space. We are studying the economics of our project, and the Baltimore market before deciding which way to go.''

Another developer, David Barry of the Applied Companies in Jersey City, said his company recently decided against automated parking for a 12-story apartment structure going up in that city based on cost, and also the general reluctance of lenders to underwrite ''something so new, and untested.''

Mr. Haag also noted that being on the cutting edge can cause problems for conservative lenders. In his view, the ongoing tests of the structural strength and reliability of the Hoboken garage being done to satisfy the construction bonding company are ''really overdoing it.''

But as developers in many metropolitan areas find themselves scrapping over sites they would have considered unbuildable even a year or two ago, Mr. Denda said, automatic parking garage proposals are increasingly coming into play -- and familiarity with the issues they raise will rise.

The four-level automatic garage in Washington, beneath the Summit Grand Parc, occupies a space measuring 60 by 106 feet -- smaller than many suburban yards. It is 32 feet floor-to-ceiling -- shorter than many power poles.

The Hoboken garage is situated in the middle of a block on a narrow street with metered spaces on both sides and is built on land that required considerable environmental cleanup.

Mr. Haag said that if a ramped garage could even have been built on the Hoboken site -- which is questionable in his view -- it would have provided only 95 spaces, compared with 324, and construction costs would have run close to $30,000 per space, compared with $20,000.

Precisely what the Hoboken garage cost, and how long it took to build, remain touchy issues in the city -- with the mayor having recently abolished the parking authority after an investigation into how it handled the project, and Mr. Haag's Florida-based company, Robotic Parking Inc., and Belcor -- the company that acted as general contractor -- still locked in legal battle over which one was responsible for construction issues that caused delays.

But Mr. Denda from the parking research company said none of that was particularly surprising. ''That's the construction industry,'' he shrugged, ''and in Hoboken, the municipality was involved, which only adds to the complications.''

Seymour Gage, a veteran parking garage engineer from Manhattan, said he finds it difficult to believe one of the new fully automated garages will ever be built in New York.

Mr. Gage, 83, designed two automated garages in the 1950's that are still working today -- as is he. The Showbiz Parking structure in the Manhattan theater district, off Eighth Avenue, between 45th and 46th Streets, was built in 1957, Mr. Gage said, using an elevator-on-wheels system devised by an Iowa inventor, Virgil Bowser, and Mr. Gage's engineering know-how. Like other mechanized garages of the era, it requires a staff -- 8 to 10 people during peak hours -- with valets stationed on each floor.

The new robotic computerized garages are ''a totally different animal'' from that one, Mr. Gage said. He is currently working as a consultant on construction of a fully automatic garage in Moscow, ''which is becoming a hotbed of parking,'' he said, with hundreds of buildings going up, all with automatic parking structures beneath.

''Other companies are building in Beijing,'' Mr. Gage said, ''and in Europe, right now a company called Klaus is putting up about 30 -- very similar to the one in Hoboken.''

''We Americans,'' he added, ''are way behind on this, absolutely.''

The additional cost of constructing an automated garage is one of the reasons for that, Mr. Gage said. ''There is no question that the fully automatic garage is more expensive to build -- maybe 50 to 75 percent more for a small one, 60 spaces or less,'' he said.

On the other hand, Mr. Gage said he was recently asked to consult on a proposal for building a large underground automated garage being contemplated in Brooklyn. In that case, he said, a robotic garage would be cheaper -- by 20 percent.

''The main reason is it would be underground,'' he said. ''That is more costly in general. But below ground, automated parking beats self-parking, because of savings on construction. You don't have to go as deep, or as horizontally.''

AN industry group formed two years ago in Los Angeles -- the Automated and Mechanical Parking Association -- said the $20,000-per-space cost of an automated garage is a ''disadvantage'' planners have to consider. On the other hand, Mr. Haag insists that if the cost of land is figured in, an automated garage for 60 cars or more is always less expensive to build than one with the same capacity with ramps.

''Also, when comparing costs, many times it is forgotten,'' he said, ''that our price includes a closed facade, a sprinkler system and a valet parking service.'' Automatic garages do not require a ventilation system, he pointed out, since the car engine is never running while the car is inside, and no exhaust fumes are generated. No pedestrian elevators, fire doors or emergency staircases are needed either.

An automated system uses more electrical power, he pointed out -- but is much less labor-intensive. In Hoboken, there are just two young men running the show -- Mr. Haag's son, Constantin, and Filipe Sousa, who oversees the computer system, watching blinking lights on his screen track the movement of cars through the garage, and receiving messages when any motor reaches one million revolutions and needs a maintenance check.

''It's really the garage doing all the work,'' Mr. Sousa said with a laugh. ''We're just along for the ride.''