A small lane runs past my apartment block, cutting between our colossal, modern building on one side and the wall of the run-down, danwei-style gated development next door. Once upon a time, this lane led nowhere in particular. You could drive in the main gate of our complex, loop around behind the south building, where I live, and make a big U turn out through that lane back onto the main street. Exciting. But after some recent construction work the roads through our apartment complex can now be used to cut from West Dawang Rd. to either Jianwai or Guanghua Lu.

Naturally, this has completely screwed the traffic through our development. Where we once had only the occasional taxi or private car we now have a constant stream of bleating, smoking Beijing traffic. Twice a day, at rush hour, the whole mess grinds to a halt thanks to a section of the connecting road to Jianwai, which handles traffic in both directions but, cunningly, is only one lane wide. Under Beijing’s “who dares wins” approach to traffic right-of-way, this narrow passage is usually monopolized by one direction or the other, causing massive pileups and enraged mass-honking fits right underneath my living room. At these moments, I turn my eyes heavenward offer thanks to god for the blessing of double-paned windows.

However, all this traffic has been useful for one group of people: the merchants who operate the tiny shops and restaurants lining that lane between our block and the danwei. When this lane was a quiet backwater, those merchants consisted of a xiaomaibu (a kind of microscopic convenience store) and two photocopying places. But with encroaching development has come encroaching commerce.

The wall by the lane was never designed to function as commercial real-estate. It’s really the back wall of a narrow building that opens into the danwei complex. But the merchants of Beijing, famed for their entrepreneurial spirit, aren’t the type to let a little thing like zoning or structural design stand in their way. One by one, merchants have leased the little rooms out of this building and knocked out their section of back-wall so that their properties open into the lane. Someday the entire roof will collapse, pancake-like, onto the lot of them, but until then they’ll do a roaring trade.

Thanks to all this industriousness, we now have a xiaomaibu, three photocopying places (you can never have enough photocopies), a water seller, a florist-cum-pet shop (patronized recently on Imagethief’s anniversary), a liquor-and-smokes joint, and two hair stylists with disturbingly similar fronting and decor. We briefly had one of Beijing’s numerous hole-in-the-wall sex shops, but she has recently moved on.

This being Beijing, we also have restaurants in droves. In Beijing you’re never far from food, especially if you have low expectations. In the space of 150 meters we have a yet-to-open dumpling place with fabulously pastel interior lighting, a Hunan place that does roaring business and has already expanded once, a Hangzhou specialty place, two Xinjiang/Muslim places with their conspicuous green signs, and --count them-- four of Beijing’s “Chengdu Snack” fast-food joints. With the exception of the Hunan place, all of these restaurants have appeared within the last two months.

I find the four Chengdu Snack places particularly interesting. Anyone who has spent time in Beijing will recognize their red and white marquees. Short of food sold from push-carts or overturned oil cans (more common than you might think), these places are Beijing’s universal, down-market cheap-eats joints of choice. They are the cockroaches of Beijing restaurants: hardy, indestructible, able to survive in environments hostile to other restaurants. Like cockroaches, they also tend to multiply in shocking numbers in the smallest of spaces.

As you would expect in Beijing, where trademark law is a barbaric foreign concept treated with same kind of wonder and disbelief that Americans reserve for ritual scarification, there is not actually one “Chengdu Snack” place. There are, instead, dozens of look-alike, sound-alike places using the red-and-white marquee design. So it is that our lane’s four restaurants consist of a Chengdu Xiaochi (成都小吃), a Chongqing Meishi (重庆美食), a Bayu Xiaochi (巴渝小吃), and a Shudu Xiaochi (蜀都小吃) all of which, from a distance or through slightly smudged sunglasses, look identical.

In the end, they all offer almost exactly the same menu of Beijing and pseudo-Sichuanese standards. The food, if they follow the pattern of these restaurants elsewhere in the city, will be uniformly drab. I can think of only one exception, a Chengdu Xiaochi place on Zhixin West Road at Chengfu Road, near the Beijing Language and Culture University, that bucked the trend. Hidden behind a deceptively small marquee and entranceway was a large, booming restaurant that offered tasty dishes at ludicrously low prices. Fresh vegetables, good sauces and competent chefs ensured that it was a battlefield every day at lunch time. This was the restaurant that deluded me into thinking that good food was the norm for these kinds of places.

But two years of further, bitter experience has taught me that it was, in fact, a cruel exception. And that’s why I haven’t been able to bring myself to try any of the four new places across the lane from my apartment. (I have gone to the Hunan place a couple of times. It's not bad, but it's so smoky that you're liable to cure your head like a side of bacon in the time it takes to eat a meal.)

So it seems rather a waste of space that there are four carbon-copy dives crammed into such a limited strip of real estate. I can think of so many things that would have been more useful there, especially considering the number of foreigners in the neighborhood, and would almost certainly have yielded substantially more revenue per square foot. Why not a Jewish deli? A gelateria? An IHOP? Why not a goddamn Starbucks, for that matter? You can’t bang two flints together without setting fire to a Starbucks in this town, but there isn’t one anywhere in our foreigner-infested neighborhood.

But it was not to be. At least we have the Xinjiang places for variety, although I haven't tried them either.

Of course, there is no sense in getting worked up about it. Within the next few weeks, the people leasing shop space out of that building will go a shop too far. Someone will break out one more section of back wall than the deteriorating, great-leap-forward era brickwork can stand, and the entire rank of restaurants, copy shops and hair salons will collapse. It will be just another of Beijing’s anonymous tragedies of urbanization.

Fortunately for diners on the cheap, there are two more Chengdu Snack places just around the corner.