![]() ![]() This eastern portion of the neighborhood is often called Little Fuzhou, a reference to the capital city of Fujian province. Today, Manhattan’s Chinatown has two fairly distinct sections: The western portion is home to the older Cantonese residents who arrived in the mid-20th century and the east is where the newer immigrants, mostly from Fujian province, have settled. As Chan says, many of the city’s newer immigrants chose to settle instead in one of the newly created outer borough Chinatowns-in Sunset Park and Bay Ridge in Brooklyn and Elmhurst and Flushing in Queens. Members of the CWG have launched lawsuits that successfully delayed construction of four proposed luxury mega towers on the waterfront and with NYC Council member Christopher Marte, are about to launch another suit in the coming weeks.Īt one time, Manhattan’s Chinatown was home to almost all of NYC’s Chinese people, but by the 1980s, only 30 percent of all Chinese in the city were living there. “Our community was told that we would be next, instead, our turn never came and without protections, our neighborhood was targeted for luxury over-development, which has swiftly led to many residents, workers, and small businesses being priced out,” she says. The plan is a response to the two neighborhoods being left out of the protective rezoning of “the whiter, wealthier East Village in 2008,” Winters says. One group fiercely dedicated to keeping Chinatown affordable for immigrants and low-income New Yorkers is the Chinatown Working Group, which has put together a community-led rezoning plan “to stop displacement in Chinatown and the Lower East Side,” according to Briar Winters, who, along with Zishun Ning, are co-chairs of the CWG. ![]() “Over the past 10 years, gentrification and high rents have made New York’s original Chinatown no longer an affordable settlement point for new immigrants, who choose Brooklyn or other options instead,” he says. Chinatown saw tremendous growth in the early ’70s as more Hong Kong Chinese immigrants settled in the area and then again during the ’80s and ’90s when mainland Chinese came in droves. ![]() There was more of a sense of community among the locals, everyone knew each other. Karlin Chan, a community activist who has lived in Chinatown for over 60 years, describes the large-scale changes he has seen: “The Chinatown of the 1960s was all of five blocks sandwiched between Italian and Jewish communities. We are presenting it again with updated information for July 2022.] Throughout the 1900s, the Chinese population of Manhattan’s Chinatown grew slowly and steadily until it surged dramatically in the 1960s, when immigration quotas based on national origin were abolished. By the 1870s, the neighborhood had grown to 2,000, an increase that Peter Kwong, author of "The New Chinatown," attributes to “a violent anti-Chinese movement in the West and the completion of the transcontinental railroad.” Why only Chinese men? Because immigration laws at the time wouldn’t allow the wives and families of these men to join them. Now the neighborhood pretty much envelopes what was once Little Italy to the north and has expanded into a big chunk of the Lower East Side, once a predominantly Jewish neighborhood, to the southeast.Īn 1859 New York Times article estimated that at that time, there were only about 150 Chinese men living in lower Manhattan. What began as a small enclave around Pell, Doyers, and Mott streets has grown exponentially over the past few decades. New York City neighborhood boundaries are constantly changing, but few have transformed as dramatically as those of Manhattan’s Chinatown.
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