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Chinatown, Manhattan
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The Chinatown neighborhood of Manhattan — a borough of New York City — is an ethnic enclave with a large population of Chinese immigrants, similar to Chinatown districts in other American cities.
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The Chinatown neighborhood of Manhattan — a borough of New York City — is an ethnic enclave with a large population of Chinese immigrants, similar to Chinatown districts in other American cities. It is the second most populous Chinatown in the Western Hemisphere (after San Francisco's Chinatown), and third in area size (San Francisco, Vancouver).
Location
Until the 1970s, the traditional borders of Chinatown were:
Within this area, most tourists only see the older center of Chinatown, the intersections of Canal Street with Mott and Mulberry streets; the intersection of Pell and Doyers Streets. During the 1980s, Chinatown went through a period of expansion that made it the largest Chinese community in the Western Hemisphere. Its current borders are as follows:
- Hester Street in the North, West of The Bowery (bordering the East Village and SoHo sections of NYC)
- Broadway in the West (encroaching the TriBeCa sections of NYC)
- Worth Street in the South, East of Broadway (encroaching the City Hall area)
- The Bowery in the East
- The Stretch of Broadway from Worth to Chambers.
- The Stretch of The Bowery from Hester to Delancey.
- The Stretch of East Broadway from The Bowery to near Rutgers.
It is an area of approximately 0.28 statute miles in the North-South direction of its longest contiguous area(Hester to Worth) by 0.29 statute miles in the East-West direction of its widest contiguous area(Broadway to The Bowery) of Manhattan island. Total land area: about 0.36 (a little over one-third) statute square miles, or roughly half the size of the European nation of Monaco.
History
Ah Ken and early Chinese immigration
Although Quimbo Appo is claimed to have arrived in the area during the 1840s, the first man credited to permanently immigrate to Chinatown was Ah Ken, a Cantonese businessman, who eventually founded a successful cigar store on Park Row. He first arrived in New York around 1858 where he was "probably one of those Chinese mentioned in gossip of the sixties 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 he may have been Ah Kam 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 from which modern-day Chinatown would grow around.
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 early days of Chinatown were dominated by Chinese "tongs" (now sometimes rendered neutrally as "associations"), which were a mixture of clan associations, 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 racism. 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 forth.
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 Sing tongs. Much of the Chinese gang warfare took place on Doyers street. Gangs like the Ghost Shadows and Flying Dragons were prevalent until the 1980s.
The only park in Chinatown, Columbus Park, was built on what was once the center 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 movie Gangs of New York).
Post-immigration reform
In the years after the United States 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 1970s, Little Italy was absorbed. The only true remaining remnant of that ethnic enclave is Mulberry Street north of Canal, and the extent of the "neighborhood" is a number of Italian restaurants which cater mostly to tourists. The section known as NoLIta is starting to be filled with Chinese residents as well, at least the Southern portion of it.
In the 1990s, Chinese people began to move into some parts of the western Lower East Side, which 50 years earlier was populated by Eastern European Jews and 20 years earlier was occupied by Hispanics. There are today only a few remnants of Jewish heritage left on the Lower East Side, such as the famous Katz's Deli and a number of synagogues and other old religious establishments.
Chinatown was greatly affected by the September 11, 2001 attacks. Being so physically close to Ground Zero, tourism and business has been very slow to return to the area. Part of the reason was the New York City Police Department closure of Park Row - one of two major roads linking the Financial Center with Chinatown. A lawsuit is pending before the State Superior Court regarding this action.
Currently, the raising prices of Manhattan real estate and rents are also affecting Chinatown and it seems that the neighborhood is shrinking to its original borders. New and poorer immigrants cannot afford their rents and a process of relocation to Queens has started, and apartments particularly in the Lower East Side and Little Italy that used to be home for new Chinese immigrants are being bought and renovated by well-to-do Americans, including Chinese-Americans. Many of the displaced have also left for the greener pastures of larger Chinatowns like San Francisco's, which is currently experiencing revitalized growth and prosperity after nearly two decades of decline.
Economy
Much of Chinatown works in an underground economy, where wages are below the mandated minimum wage and transactions are done in cash to avoid paying taxes. This underground economy is responsible for employment of large numbers of new immigrants who lacked the language skills to seek better jobs. This system attracted the garment industry to use large-scale sweatshops in the Chinatown area. Tourism and restaurants are also major industries.
Chinese green groceries and fish mongers are clustered around Mott Street, Mulberry Street, Canal Street (by Baxter Street) and all along East Broadway (especially by Catherine Street). 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 neighborhood. Canal Street, west of Broadway (especially on the North side), is filled with Chinese street vendors selling imitation perfumes, watches, and hand-bags, which are largely purchased by tourists and non-Chinese. This section of Canal Street was previously the home of warehouse stores selling surplus/salvage electronics and hardware.
Besides the more than 200 Chinese restaurants in the area for employment, there are still some factories. The proximity of the fashion industry has kept some garment work in the local area though most of the garment industry has moved to China. The local garment industry now concentrates on quick production in small volumes and piece-work (paid by the piece) which is generally done at the worker's home. Much of the population growth is due to immigration. As previous generations of immigrants gain language and education skills, they tend to move to better housing and job prospects that are available in the suburbs and outer boroughs of New York.
Demographics
Unlike most other urban Chinatowns, Manhattan's Chinatown is both a residential area as well as commercial area. Most population estimates are in the range of 90,000 to 100,000 residents. It is difficult to get an exact count, as neighborhood participation in the U.S. Census is thought to be low due to language barriers, as well as large-scale illegal immigration.
Until the 1960s, the majority of the Chinese population in Chinatown emigrated from Guangdong province and Hong Kong, thus they were native speakers of Cantonese, especially the Guangzhou and Taishan dialects. A minority of Hakka was also represented. Mandarin was rarely spoken by residents even well into the 1980s. Most recent immigrants are from Mainland China, and hence speak Mandarin, the official spoken language of China. A significant portion are from Fuzhou, Fujian province, so they are native speakers of the Fuzhou dialect of Min. Most Fuzhou immigrants 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 1990s, there is now a Fuzhou Community in the eastern portion of
Manhattan's Chinatown which started on East Broadway and later on emerging onto other streets in the eastern portion of Manhattan's Chinatown, however their influx has slowed down a lot since then and now the Fuzhou population is almost as dominant as the Cantonese population in Manhattan's Chinatown. After the Fuzhou influx slowed down, their influx then later on shifted over to Brooklyn's Chinatown on 8th avenue which was traditionally an almost completely Cantonese community like all Chinatowns and now the Fuzhou influx is increasing a lot more quickly in Brooklyn's Chinatown than in Manhattan's Chinatown. With Brooklyn's Chinatown much more smaller size than in Manhattan's Chinatown, the Fuzhou influx has had a lot more better success than in Manhattan's Chinatown in overpopulating the Cantonese population in Brooklyn's Chinatown and it is now on it's way of surpassing the already Fuzhou population in Manhattan's Chinatown and it is more than likely expected
that Brooklyn's Chinatown will become a much more established and bigger Fuzhou Community than the one in the eastern portion of Manhattan's Chinatown.
Although Mandarin is spoken as a native language among only ten percent of Chinese speakers in NYC's Chinatown, it is used as a secondary dialect among the greatest number of them and is on its way to replace Cantonese as their lingua franca. Although Min Chinese 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.
Buildings
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 gigantic 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, (or Yung Wing Elementary). Since new housing is normally non-existent in Chinatown, many apartments in the building were acquired by wealthy individuals through under-the-table dealings, even though the building was built as affordable housing.
Landmarks
For much of Chinatown's history, there were few unique architectural features to announce to visitors that they had arrived in the neighborhood (other than the language of the shop signs). In 1962, at Chatham Square the Lt. 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 Fuzhou-based 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 (Fúzhóu jie ???). In the 1970s, 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 1980s, banks which opened new branches and others which were renovating started to use Chinese traditional styles for their building facades.
Street names in Chinese
Satellite Chinatowns
Other New York City area Chinese communities have been settled over the years, including that of Flushing in Queens, which in recent years has actually surpassed the community in Lower Manhattan. Another community is located in Sunset Park in Brooklyn, particularly along 8th Avenue from 40th to 65th Streets. New York's newest Chinatown has recently sprung up on Avenue U in the Homecrest section of Brooklyn. Outside of New York City proper, a growing suburban Chinatown is developing in Edison, New Jersey, which lies to the southwest.
While the composition of these satellite Chinatowns is as varied as the original, the political turmoils in the Manhattan Chinatown (Tongs vs. Republic of China loyalists vs. People's Republic of China loyalists vs. Americanized) has led to some factionalization in the other satellites. The Flushing Chinatown, for example, was spearheaded by many Chinese fleeing the Communist retaking of Hong Kong in 1997 as well as Taiwanese who used their considerable capital to buy out land from the former residents. The Brooklyn Chinatown located in Sunset Park however, is mostly immigrant and populated by both Cantonese and Fukienese newcomers to America, however the Fukienese is on it's way of turning the Chinese Community into the new, more established, and bigger Fuzhou community than the one in the eastern portion of Manhattan's Chinatown. More culturally
assimilated Chinese have moved outside these neighborhoods into more white or Hispanic neighborhoods in the city while others move to the suburbs outright.
See also
Further reading
- "New York's First Chinaman". Atlanta Constitution. 22 Sep 1896
- Crouse, Russel. Murder Won't Out. New York: Doubleday, Doran & Company, 1932.
- Dunshee, Kenneth Holcomb. As You Pass By. New York: Hastings House, 1952.
- Ramati, Raquel. How to Save Your Own Street. Garden City, Doubleday and Co., 1981. ISBN 0-385-14814-3
External links
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