What’s this about?
.
You’d know if you were part of the South Asian community, familiar with the Newton area of Surrey. In fact, you might have celebrated your marriage here.
It’s the “Payal Business Centre” at 8128 128th Street (map here).
Among the offices for jewellers, lawyers, realtors and All Seasons Radiators, there are four banquet halls – all typically full on Thursday to Sunday nights, especially during wedding season. They’re also used for political events, birthday parties, anniversaries and other events important to this community. And given that the average hall fits anywhere from 600 to 800 people (with some up to and over a thousand), this complex may have the busiest concentration of cultural events in the Lower Mainland.
Says Sukh Johal, who gave me a drive-by tour: “These halls are used all year round and make for a great focal point. On weekends, there’s always something going on, especially with the community being so tightly knit. Of course the property has sufficient parking, which is usually one of the major issues when the city gives a green light for a banquet hall.”
Ah yes, the parking. Other than that planted strip along 128th and a few divider beds, the centre is wall-to-wall asphalt – a not surprising landscape for an industrial zone, originally created by the railway line which angles across the centre’s southwest side.
There’s the irony: a place to celebrate a society’s most personal moments could only find a home where industrial zoning accommodates the kind of places a suburban community needs: big boxes and parking lots. Jane Jacobs’s dictum – “new uses need old buildings” – means that these strip malls and business parks will be the places where innovation and change find a home. Especially, in this case, if that rail line becomes a rapid-transit route, and at least some of that asphalt gets transformed into another kind of celebratory public space appropriate for the uses that are actually there..