Short answers, pulled from the story.
Chinatown, Manhattan has an estimated population of 90,000 to 100,000 residents. The neighborhood covers roughly 1.7 square miles of Lower Manhattan and holds the highest concentration of Chinese people in the Western Hemisphere.
Ah Ken is credited as the first Chinese person to have permanently settled in what became Manhattan's Chinatown, arriving around 1858. He was a Cantonese businessman who founded a successful cigar store on Park Row.
The Chinese Exclusion Act was passed in 1882 and severely restricted Chinese immigration to the United States. It created a stark gender imbalance in Chinatown: the 1900 US Census recorded 7,028 Chinese males but only 142 Chinese women. The act was not repealed until 1943.
Little Fuzhou is a sub-neighborhood within Manhattan's Chinatown that developed along East Broadway and Eldridge Street from the late 1980s through the 1990s, as large numbers of immigrants from Fuzhou settled in the eastern portion of Chinatown east of the Bowery. East Broadway became known locally as Fuzhou Street No. 1 and Eldridge Street as Fuzhou Street No. 2.
The Museum of Chinese in America has been documenting the Chinese American experience in Manhattan's Chinatown since 1980. In 2024, demonstrators protested the museum's acceptance of funding linked to the construction of a new jail in Chinatown.
A 2021 N.Y.U. Furman poll found the share of Asian-identifying residents dropped from 34.8% in 2000 to 28.1% in 2021. Many Fuzhou-speaking residents and businesses have relocated to Brooklyn's Sunset Park, and East Broadway Mall went from around 80 stores to roughly 17 during the COVID-19 pandemic.