Chinatown, Manhattan

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Chinatown, Manhattan holds a distinction no other neighborhood in the Western Hemisphere can claim: it is home to the highest concentration of Chinese people anywhere outside Asia. Packed into roughly 1.7 square miles of Lower Manhattan, an estimated 90,000 to 100,000 residents live in its vicinity. The streets run dense with Chinese greengrocers, fishmongers, garment workers, dim sum restaurants, and jewelry shops. The sound of Cantonese drifts from one block; Fuzhounese from the next. How did a single square mile of Lower Manhattan become such an extraordinary focal point for the Chinese diaspora? The answer runs from a cigar stand near City Hall Park in the 1850s, through anti-Chinese legislation, through gang warfare on narrow streets, and into an ongoing struggle between displacement and survival that is reshaping the neighborhood right now.

• 2. Ah Ken and the Cigar Trade

  ›

  Ah Ken is credited as the first Chinese person to have permanently settled in what would become Chinatown, arriving around 1858. He was a Cantonese businessman, and author Alvin Harlow described him in Old Bowery Days: The Chronicles of a Famous Street (1931) as probably one of the Chinese men noted in 1860s gossip as peddling "awful" cigars at three cents apiece from small stands along the City Hall park fence, offering a paper spill and a tiny oil lamp as a lighter. The California Gold Rush of the 1850s had brought approximately 25,000 Chinese immigrants to the United States in search of what they called gam saan, or "gold mountain," and those who ended up in New York found work as cigar sellers or billboard carriers. Ah Ken's success was contagious: cigar makers William Longford, John Occoo, and John Ava followed him into the neighborhood, and together they built something close to a monopoly on the cigar trade. It has been speculated that Ah Ken also ran a boarding house on lower Mott Street, renting bunks to new arrivals. Earning an average of $100 per month as a landlord gave him the capital to open his Park Row smoke shop, the commercial seed around which modern-day Chinatown would grow.

• 3. Exclusion and the Bachelor Society

  ›

  By 1870, the Chinese population in what was becoming Chinatown had reached 200 people, clustered on Mott, Park (now Mosco), Pell, and Doyers Streets, just east of the notorious Five Points district. By 1882, when the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed, the number had grown to 2,000 residents. The 1873 Long Depression had intensified competition for jobs and stoked anti-Chinese riots, particularly in California, pushing many Chinese immigrants eastward toward New York. The legal walls that followed were severe. The 1900 US Census recorded 7,028 Chinese males in Chinatown but only 142 Chinese women. That imbalance persisted for decades. Wenfei Wang, Shangyi Zhou, and C. Cindy Fan, writing in "Growth and Decline of Muslim Hui Enclaves in Beijing," described Chinatown as remaining "virtually a bachelor society" until 1965, when immigration reform finally lifted the restrictions. The Chinese Exclusion Act was not repealed until 1943. Into that largely male world, the tongs filled the gap that formal institutions left open. These associations were a mixture of clan groups, political factions, and, in some cases, crime syndicates, providing loans, job assistance, and protection from anti-Chinese harassment. The governing body they formed, the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, was meant to ease tensions between the tongs, but open warfare periodically erupted anyway, much of it concentrated on Doyers Street.

• 4. Gang Territories and Street Control

  ›

  Doyers Street became so closely associated with gang violence that it earned a grim reputation across the city. The On Leong tong and its affiliate gang the Ghost Shadows, both of Cantonese and Toishan descent, controlled Mott, Bayard, Canal, and Mulberry Streets. The Flying Dragons, affiliated with the Hip Sing tong and also of Cantonese and Toishan descent, held Doyers, Pell, Bowery, Grand, and Hester Streets. Other groups carved out their own zones: the Hung Ching and Chih Kung gangs, also Cantonese and Toishan, fought for control of Mott Street. A gang called Born to Kill, also known as the Canal Boys and composed almost entirely of Vietnamese immigrants under the leadership of David Thai, controlled Broadway, Canal, Baxter, Centre, and Lafayette Streets. Fujianese gangs also staked out territory: the Tung On gang held East Broadway, Catherine, and Division Streets, while the Fuk Ching gang, affiliated with Fukien American, controlled East Broadway, Chrystie, Forsyth, Eldridge, and Allen Streets. Gang activity from groups like the Ghost Shadows and Flying Dragons remained prevalent until the 1990s. Columbus Park, the only park in Chinatown, was built in 1897 on the very ground that had once been the center of the Five Points neighborhood, the most dangerous immigrant ghetto of 19th-century New York. The 5th Precinct of the NYPD reported that crimes across all categories decreased by 77.1% between 1990 and 2019.

• 5. Little Fuzhou Emerges

  ›

  From the late 1980s through the 1990s, a large wave of immigrants from Fuzhou arrived in New York City. They were largely non-Cantonese speakers who also knew Mandarin, and they found themselves linguistically and culturally at odds with the established Cantonese-speaking community to the west. Affordable apartments were concentrated in the eastern borderline of Chinatown, east of the Bowery, in a zone that was then a mixed population of Chinese, Puerto Ricans, and Jewish residents. Many Fuzhou immigrants had no legal status, were forced into the lowest-paying jobs, and faced resentment from Cantonese residents and landlords. They settled along East Broadway and Eldridge Street, which gradually became known as Fuzhou Street No. 1 and Fuzhou Street No. 2, respectively. By the 1990s, this eastern stretch had developed into its own enclave, Little Fuzhou, distinct from the older Cantonese-dominated neighborhood from the Bowery going west. The Fuzhou influx mattered economically as well: property values, which had been dropping in the 1980s, began rising quickly in the 1990s, and landlords in Manhattan's, Flushing's, and Brooklyn's Chinatowns were able to generate roughly twice as much rental income as before. Since the 2010s, however, gentrification has been pressing into Little Fuzhou, and large numbers of Fuzhou speakers have been moving out, many relocating to the Sunset Park section of Brooklyn, which has taken over as the largest Fuzhou community in New York City.

• 6. Architecture, Institutions, and Memory

  ›

  For most of Chinatown's history, the built environment gave few outward signals that visitors had crossed into a distinct neighborhood, beyond the language on shop signs. That changed in 1962, when the Lieutenant Benjamin Ralph Kimlau Memorial archway was erected at Chatham Square in memory of Chinese-Americans who died in World War II. It was designed by local architect Poy Gum Lee (1900-1968) and bears calligraphy by Yu Youren (1879-1964). A statue of Lin Zexu, the Foochowese Chinese official who opposed the opium trade, also stands at Chatham Square, facing uptown along East Broadway toward the Fuzhou neighborhood. In 1976, the federally subsidized Confucius Plaza, a 44-story residential tower at the corner of Bowery and Division Street, added much-needed housing and also housed PS 124, known as Yung Wing Elementary, named after Yung Wing, the first Chinese person to study at Yale University. The Chinese American experience has been documented at the Museum of Chinese in America since 1980. Wing on Wo and Co, established in 1890, became the oldest continuously run business in Manhattan's Chinatown; in 2016, when it was listed for sale at around $10 million, a grandchild of the original owner named Mei Lum stepped in and took it over. Lum launched the W.O.W. Project to preserve the neighborhood's cultural life through art and activism, including oral history exhibitions and a response effort to the COVID-19 pandemic called Love Letters to Chinatown.

• 7. Gentrification and the Fight to Stay

  ›

  In 2008, the New York City Council proposed the East Village/Lower East Side rezoning plan, which prompted community opposition and the formation of the Coalition to Protect Chinatown and the Lower East Side. The rezoning passed later that year, but the city subsequently created the Chinatown Working Group to consider revisions. The Coalition joined that working group in 2010, and the two bodies incorporated demands for what was called "people first zoning." Competing plans have since continued to challenge those efforts. A 2021 N.Y.U. Furman poll found that the share of Asian-identifying individuals in the community dropped from 34.8% in 2000 to 28.1% in 2021. In 2024, protests targeted the Museum of Chinese in America, where demonstrators criticized the museum's acceptance of funding linked to the construction of a new jail in Chinatown and called it a "community-buy-back." East Broadway Mall, at 88 East Broadway, went from around 80 stores to roughly 17 during the COVID-19 pandemic. In November 2021, the New York state government announced $20 million to revitalize several city-owned properties in the area, but by October 2022, Curbed reported that the grant was being rescinded from East Broadway Mall. Civic groups that have owned real estate in Chinatown since the neighborhood's earliest days continue to push back against corporate pressure to sell their properties for luxury condominium development, and the Chatham Square branch of the New York Public Library, founded in 1899 and rebuilt as a Carnegie library in 1903, has housed a large Chinese collection since 1911.