Manhattan's Chinatown is home to the
largest enclave of Chinese
people in the Western
hemisphere, it is located in the borough of Manhattan and is one of
the oldest ethnic
Chinese enclaves outside of Asia.
The borders of Chinatown are: Grand
Street to the North (bordering Little
Italy), Allen
Street to the East (bordering the Lower East
Side), Worth
Street to the South and Lafayette
Street to the West. In 2010, Chinatown and Little
Italy were listed in a single historic
district on the National Register of Historic
Places.
Ah Ken and Early Chinese Immigration: Although Quimbo Appo is claimed to have arrived in the area during the
1840’s, the first Chinese person credited as having permanently immigrated to
Chinatown was Ah Ken, a Cantonese businessman, who eventually founded a
successful cigar
store on Park
Row. He first arrived around 1858 in New York City,
where he was "probably one of those Chinese mentioned in gossip of the sixties
(1860’s) as peddling 'awful' cigars at three cents apiece from little stands
along the City Hall park fence – offering a paper spill and a tiny oil lamp as a
lighter", according to author Alvin Harlow in Old Bowery Days: The Chronicles
of a Famous Street (1931). Later immigrants would similarly find work as
"cigar men" or carrying billboards and Ah Ken's particular success encouraged
cigar makers William Longford, John Occoo and John Ava to also ply their trade
in Chinatown eventually forming a monopoly on the cigar trade. It has been
speculated that it may have been Ah Ken who kept a small boarding
house on lower Mott Street and rented out bunks to the
first Chinese immigrants to arrive in Chinatown. It was with the profits he
earned as a landlord, earning an average of $100 a month, that he was able to
open his Park Row smoke shop around which modern-day Chinatown would
grow.
Pell
Street
Chinese exclusion period: Faced with increasing discrimination and new laws which prevented
participation in many occupations on the West Coast, some Chinese immigrants
moved to the East Coast cities in search of employment. Early businesses in
these cities included hand laundries and restaurants. Chinatown started on Mott
Street, Park, Pell and Doyers streets, east of
the notorious Five
Points district. By 1870, there was a Chinese
population of 200. By the time the Chinese Exclusion
Act of 1882 was passed, the population was up to 2,000
residents. By 1900, there were 7,000 Chinese residents, but fewer than 200
Chinese women. The men came over first, got settled and employed, then saved to
pay for the passage of their wives, or not in some cases.
Doyers
Street depicted on an 1898
postcard
The early days of Chinatown were dominated
by Chinese "tongs" (now sometimes neutrally called "associations"), which
were a mixture of clans, landsman's associations, political alliances (Kuomintang (Nationalists) vs Communist Party of China) and (more secretly) crime syndicates. The associations
started to give protection from harassment due to anti-Chinese sentiment. Each
of these associations was aligned with a street gang. The associations were a
source of assistance to new immigrants – giving out loans, aiding in starting
business, and so on.
The associations formed a governing body
named the Chinese
Consolidated Benevolent Association. Though this body was meant to foster relations between
the Tongs, open warfare periodically flared between the On
Leong and Hip
Singtongs. Much of the Chinese gang warfare took place on Doyers street. Gangs were
prevalent until the 1990’s and controlled certain territories of Chinatown. The
On
Leong and its affiliate Ghost
Shadows were of Cantonese and Toishan descent
controlled Mott, Bayard, Canal, and Mulberry Streets. The Flying
Dragons and its affiliation Hip
Sing also of Cantonese and Toishan descent
controlled Doyers, Pell, Bowery, Grand and Hester Streets. Other Chinese gangs
also existed like the Hung Ching and Chih Kung gangs being of Cantonese and
Toishan descent, which were affiliated with each other also had control of Mott
Street. Born-to-Kill or known as Canal Boys being of Vietnamese
and Chinese descent had control over Broadway, Canal, Baxter Center, and
Lafeyette Streets. Fujianese gangs also existed such as the Tung On gang, which
affiliated with Tsung Tsin had control over East Broadway, Catherine and
Division Streets and the Fuk Ching gang affiliated with Fukien American
controlled East Broadway, Chrystie, Forsyth, Eldridge and Allen Streets. At one
point, a gang named the Freemasons gang, which were Cantonese descent had attempted to
claim East Broadway as their territory.
The only park in Chinatown, Columbus Park, was built on what was once the centre of the infamous Five
Points neighborhood of New York. During the 19th
century, this was the most dangerous slum area of immigrant New York (as
portrayed in the book and film Gangs of New
York). My favourite quote in a gang movie has to be
from The Wanderers, “Don’t F - - k with the Wongs”.
Post-immigration reform: In the years after the U.S. enacted the Immigration and Nationality
Act of 1965, allowing many more immigrants from Asia
into the country, the population of Chinatown exploded. Geographically, much of
the growth was to neighborhoods to the north. In the 1990’s, Chinese people
began to move into some parts of the western Lower East
Side, which fifty years earlier was populated by
Eastern European Jews
and twenty years earlier was occupied by Hispanics.
Chinatown was adversely affected by 9/11.
Being so physically close to Ground
Zero, tourism and business
had been very slow to return to the area for several years but appears to have
rebounded more recently. Another reason was the New
York City Police Department closing Park
Row – one of two major
roads linking the Financial Centre with Chinatown.
By 2007 luxury condominiums began to spread from Soho into Chinatown.
Previously Chinatown was noted for its crowded tenements and primarily Chinese
residents. While some projects have targeted the Chinese community, the
development of luxury housing has increased Chinatown's economic and cultural
diversity.
Currently, the rising prices of Manhattan
real estate and high rents are also affecting Chinatown. Many new and poorer
Chinese immigrants cannot afford their rents; as a result, growth has slowed,
and a process of relocation to the Flushing Chinatown and Brooklyn Chinatown has started. Many apartments, particularly in the Lower
East Side and Little Italy, which used to be affordable to new Chinese
immigrants, are being renovated and then sold or rented at much higher prices.
By 2009 many newer Chinese immigrants
settled along East Broadway instead of the historic core west of the Bowery. In addition Mandarin began to eclipse Cantonese as the predominant Chinese dialect in New York's
Chinatown during the period. The New York
Times says that the Flushing Chinatown now rivals Manhattan's Chinatown in terms of being a
cultural centre for Chinese-speaking New Yorkers' politics and
trade.
Economy: Chinese green-grocers and fishmongers are clustered around Mott Street,
Mulberry Street, Canal
Street and all along East
Broadway. The Chinese jewelry shop district is
on Canal Street between Mott and Bowery. Due to the high savings rate among
Chinese, there are many Asian and American banks in the neighbourhood. Canal
Street, west of Broadway (especially on the North side), is filled with street
vendors selling imitation perfumes, watches and hand-bags. This section of Canal
Street was previously the home of warehouse stores selling surplus/salvage
electronics and hardware.
In addition, tourism and restaurants are
major industries. The district boasts many historical and cultural attractions
so it is a destination for tour companies like Big Onion and NYC Chinatown
Tours. The neighborhood is home to a number of large Chinese supermarkets. In
August 2011, a new branch of New York Supermarket opened on Mott Street in the
centre district of grocery and food shopping of Manhattan's Chinatown, just a
block away is a Hong
Kong Supermarket on the
corner of Elizabeth and Hester Streets. These two supermarkets are amongst the
largest Chinese supermarkets carrying all different food varieties. A Hong Kong
Supermarket at East Broadway and Pike Street burned down in 2009, and plans to
construct a 91-room Marriott Hotel in its place resulted in community protests.
The New York Supermarkets chain, which also operates markets in Elmhurst and
Flushing, reached a settlement with the New York State Attorney General in 2008
in which it paid back wages and overtime to workers. Mmmm – no, best not
comment.
Demographics: Unlike most other urban Chinatowns, Manhattan's Chinatown is both a
residential area as well as commercial area. Many population estimates are in
the range of 90,000 to 100,000 residents. Most Fuzhou immigrants
were/are illegal immigrants while most of the Cantonese immigrants are legal
immigrants in Manhattan's Chinatown. With the coming of illegal Fuzhou
immigrants during the 1990’s, there is now a Fuzhou Community within the eastern
portion of Manhattan's Chinatown which started on the East Broadway portion
during the early 1990’s and later emerged north onto the Eldridge Street portion
of Manhattan's Chinatown by the late 1990’s and early 2000’s. The eastern
portion of Chinatown became more fully developed when the Fuzhou immigrants
began to arrive whereas before it was moderately Chinese populated and it is
referred to as the New Chinatown of Manhattan.
Now the increasing Fuzhou influx has
shifted into the Brooklyn Chinatown in the Sunset
Park section of Brooklyn
and is replacing the Cantonese population there more significantly than in
Manhattan's Chinatown. Brooklyn's Chinatown is quickly becoming the new
Little Fuzhou in NYC or Brooklyn's East Broadway. During the late
1980’s and 1990’s, most of the new Fuzhou immigrants arriving into New York City
were settling in Manhattan's Chinatown and later formed the first Fuzhou
community in the city amongst the waves of Cantonese who had settled in
Chinatown over decades; but by the 2000’s, the Fuzhou population growth had
slowed within Manhattan's Chinatown and began to accelerate in Brooklyn's
Chinatown instead.
Although Mandarin is spoken as a native
language among only ten percent of Chinese speakers in Manhattan's Chinatown, it
is used as a secondary dialect among the greatest number of them and is on its
way to replacing Cantonese as their lingua
franca. Although Min
Chinese, especially the
Fuzhou
dialect,
is spoken natively by a third of the Chinese population in the city, it is not
used as a lingua franca because speakers of other dialect groups do not learn
Min.
Housing: The housing stock of Chinatown is still mostly composed of cramped tenement buildings, some
of which are over 100 years old. It is still common in such buildings to have
bathrooms in the hallways, to be shared among multiple apartments. A federally
subsidized
housing project, named Confucius
Plaza, was completed on the corner of Bowery and Division
streets in 1976. This 44-story residential tower
block gave much needed new housing stock to thousands
of residents. The building also housed a new public grade school, P.S.
124 (or Yung Wing Elementary). Besides being the first
and largest affordable housing complex specifically available to the Chinatown
population Confucius Plaza is also a cultural and institutional landmark,
springing forth community organization, Asian Americans for Equality (AAFE), one
of Chinatown's oldest political/community organizations, founded in
1974.
Landmarks: For much of Chinatown's history, there were few unique architectural
features to announce to visitors that they had arrived in the neighbourhood
(other than the language of the shop signs). In 1962, at Chatham
Square the Lieutenant Benjamin Ralph
Kimlau Memorial archway was erected in memorial of the
Chinese-Americans who died in World War
II. This memorial, which bears calligraphy by the great
Yu
Youren (1879 - 1964), is mostly ignored by the
residents due to its poor location on a busy car thoroughfare with little
pedestrian traffic. A statue of Lin
Zexu, also known as Commissioner Lin, a Foochowese Chinese
official who opposed the opium trade, is also located at the square; it faces
uptown along East Broadway, now home to the bustling Fuzhou neighborhood and
known locally as Fuzhou Street. In the 1970’s, New York
Telephone, then the local phone company started capping
the street phone booths with pagoda-like decorations.
In 1976, the statue of Confucius in front of
Confucius Plaza became a common meeting place. In the 1980’s, banks which opened new
branches and others which were renovating started to use Chinese traditional
styles for their building facades. The Church of the
Transfiguration (below), a national historic site built
in 1815, stands off Mott Street.
Arts and culture: The first Chinese-language theatre in the city was located at 5 – 7
Doyers Street from 1893 to 1911. The theater was later converted into a rescue
mission for homeless from the Bowery. In 1903, the theatre was the site of a
fundraiser by the Chinese community for Jewish victims of a massacre in
Kishinev. During the 1970’s, the Chinese theatres became less attractive due to
increasing gang-violence. These theaters now have all gone out of business and
closed due to DVD’s being so affordable and the availability of Chinese cable
channels, karaoke bars, gambling in casinos providing other options for the once
theatre patrons.
Education: Residents are zoned to schools in the New York City Department of
Education. PS 124, The Yung Wing School is located in
Chinatown. It was named after Yung
Wing, the first Chinese person to study at Yale
University. Public School 130 Hernando De Soto is
located in Chinatown. PS 184M Shuang Wen
School, a bilingual Chinese-English School which opened
in 1998, is a non-zoned school in proximity to Chinatown.
ALL IN ALL A MASS OF VIBRANT
COLOUR
