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Chinatowns

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    New York’s Chinatown is one of the many old ethnic neighborhoods that have formed part of the city’s social mosaic. It is visually exotic, a popular tourist attraction. It is the largest community of Chinese in the Western Hemisphere, home to 350,000 Chinese immigrants.  

      The first immigrants were primarily Guangdon railroad workers from the west who during the 1870’s settled in a family prescribed area of Manhattan which consists of the 13 blocks bounded by Canal, Worth, and Baxter streets and the Bowery near the artery that links the Holland Tunnel (to New Jersey) and the Manhattan Bridge (to Brooklyn). For nearly a century, anti-immigration laws prohibited most men from having their wives and families join them, therefore the neighborhood became known as a “bachelor society” and for years its population remained static. Its surprising growth is of rather recent history. The new arrivals overwhelming Chinatown are part of the biggest wave of Asian immigrants in American history. In 1965, Congress increased Asian immigration quota by replacing the law that had, for more than eighty years, barred many Chinese while admitting large numbers of Europeans with a quota for the Eastern Hemisphere that is significantly larger than that for the Western Hemisphere. Since then, Asians have become the leading immigrants. Chinese, the second largest Asian group, under its new law head straight to New York, their first choice among cities in the United States. With 1400 people arriving every month, Chinatown has burst out of its former confines below Canal Street and sprawled into Soho and revitalized the Lower East Side. Another 350,000 Chinese inhabit New York’s other two Chinatowns - Flushing in Queens and 8th Ave. in Brooklyn - but Manhattan’s Chinatown is the central community.

     In the past, the main businesses were restaurants and garment factories. But with the influx of immigrants from the People’s Republic of China, Taiwan, and especially Hong Kong (with the 1997 "Return of Hong Kong to China" and not knowing what the future of Hong Kong would be after 1997), they have poured capital into Chinatown real estate. Chinatown now spills over its traditional borders into Little Italy to the north and formerly Jewish Lower East Side to the east.

     The Chinese have turned Chinatown into the city’s clothing manufacturing center. Its nearly six hundred factories have an annual payroll well over $200 million. Chinatown is also an important jewelry district now turning over $100 million in gold and diamonds a year. Its 350 restaurants draw tourist and conventioneers. It has 27 banks, by far the highest bank-per-capita ratio in the city.

     Even though the local residents of Chinatown cling to old values and traditional ways to keep alive bits and pieces of a culture that are not meant for display, Chinatown is now livelier than ever - a thriving marketplace crammed with souvenir shops and restaurants in funky pagoda-style buildings crowded with pedestrians day and night. Shops of all kinds are marked with signs written in Chinese characters, narrow sidewalks are crowded with stacks of fresh seafood and strange-looking vegetables in extraterrestrial shades of green. The air is filled with smells of Chinese food from fast-food noodles to dumplings to dim sum to sumptuous Hunan, Szechuan, Cantonese, Mandarin, and Shanghai feasts, every imaginable type of Chinese cuisine. Restaurant windows display rows of barbecued ribs and roast chicken and ducks. Everyday camera-toting tourists jam the busy streets wandering about restaurants, shops, and vendor stands to try to get the sensation of an exotic culture.

                                                                 Peter Miller     

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