East Downtown Houston

• 1. Introduction

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  East Downtown Houston sits in a stretch of the city that a journalist once called, in a the 28th of November 2002 Houston Press article, "a silent, godforsaken stretch of no-man's-land that's not really the Warehouse District, nor the Third Ward, nor the East End." That writer, John Nova Lomax, was putting words to something the neighborhood itself struggled to name for years. Just east of Downtown and north of Interstate 45, it occupies a geographic middle ground that for decades resisted easy definition. What drew people here, pushed them out, and what gave the place its identity? Those are the questions this documentary follows. From Cantonese immigrants arriving in the 1930s to an EB-5 visa scheme floated in 2008, from a temple built by Vietnamese refugees to a stadium that became the first of its kind in Major League Soccer, East Downtown Houston turns out to be a place where the edges of history keep brushing up against each other.

• 2. The Old Chinatown

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  Cantonese immigrants moved into what became the old Chinatown during the 1930s, settling east of Downtown after leaving the city center in search of cheaper land. The area was then part of the Third Ward. They opened grocery stores and restaurants, and held Chinese New Year celebrations that drew crowds from across the city. Immigrants from Vietnam and other East Asian countries followed them into the neighborhood in the years after.

  By the early 1950s the Chinese Merchants' Association had shifted to the southeastern edge of Downtown Houston, taking many Chinese-owned businesses with it. What had been a Chinatown in the heart of the city was replaced by commercial development by the 1970s, and the East Downtown Chinatown grew to fill that vacuum. Viet Hoa and other Asian immigrants arrived through the 1970s, and by the 1980s the neighborhood held a theater, supermarkets, warehouses, a bank, and restaurants.

  Lang Yee "Bo Bo" Woo, originally from Guangdong province, was a central force in developing the old Chinatown through the 1970s. Area newspapers covered Chinatown regularly, and the opening of Houston Center in Downtown sent more traffic its way. When plans for the George R. Brown Convention Center were being debated, the Houston Center Improvement Committee predicted that the new facility would stimulate Chinatown. After the center opened, that predicted benefit did not arrive. When Woo died, a developer named Dan Nip stepped in as the main driving force.

  Authors Anthony Knapp and Igor Vojnovic, writing in "Ethnicity in an Immigrant Gateway City: The Asian Condition in Houston," observed that into the early and mid-1990s, Old Chinatown had considerable promise, evident in its role in promoting tourism. But the sewer system could not handle the scale of the proposed development. One major street linking Old Chinatown to Downtown was closed when the Brown Convention Center was expanded. By the 1990s, most East Asian businesses had relocated to the new Chinatown in southwest Houston, and the old neighborhood was left behind.

• 3. The Name Problem

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  John Nova Lomax, writing in 2002, explained that he reached for his clumsy description because by 2000, the name "Chinatown" was no longer accurate for the area, even though it had still been in use through the 1980s and 1990s. The district was effectively unnamed and unclaimed. It took another several years before the neighborhood got a label that stuck.

  In 2008 the management district launched a website, namethedistrict.com, and asked residents and stakeholders to submit suggestions. Proposals included "the Warehouse District," a nod to the old industrial buildings still scattered across the area, and "Saint E," a reference to St. Emanuel Street, which had become a corridor of bars and clubs. The district ultimately chose "EaDo," a condensed form of "East Downtown," one of the three most popular submissions. By late 2009 the East Downtown authority had begun a formal re-branding effort around the new name, and by 2010 an artist community had started forming in the district.

• 4. Faith and Refuge

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  The Texas Guandi Temple in East Downtown was established in 1999 by a Vietnamese couple, Charles Loi Ngo and Carolyn. The decision to build it came out of a robbery at their store in the Fifth Ward. They survived the attack and believed that Guandi, the deity to whom the temple is dedicated, had protected them. A Vietnamese refugee named Charles Lee coordinated the donations and funding needed to make the temple possible. Lee described his motivation as gratitude: he wanted to thank the United States for welcoming him when he arrived in 1978. The temple is open to people of all religions and has perfumed halls.

  St. Nicholas Church in East Downtown, maintained by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston, is Houston's oldest Black Catholic church. The congregation's history stretches back to 1887, when a school attached to the church opened its doors. By 2012 the church had added Swahili-language masses to serve African immigrant parishioners, and it developed a specific ministry for Cameroonian Catholics through the Assumption Cameroonian Catholic Community. The Chinese Cultural Center was also once located in the old Chinatown, and its opening was attended by Dolph Briscoe, then the Governor of Texas.

• 5. Redevelopment Pressures

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  Shell Energy Stadium, home to the Houston Dynamo and the Texas Southern University football team, sits on a tract bordered by Texas, Walker, Emancipation, and Hutchins streets. The stadium seats 22,039 and holds concerts and boxing matches alongside soccer and football. The predecessor to that name, BBVA Compass Park, was the first soccer-specific stadium in Major League Soccer located in a downtown area. Its opening, along with the arrival of Daikin Park nearby, accelerated changes in EaDo; by 2015 many of the older small houses historically occupied by Hispanic residents were being replaced by townhouses with wealthier occupants.

  The former U.S. headquarters of Schlumberger stands in EaDo as well, built in an Art Deco style. The building sat vacant for a period before Gaurav Khandelwal and Apurva Sanghavi, then the owners, considered adding retail and offices around 2013 without following through. David Denenburg acquired the building in 2016 and announced plans to restore it and bring in retail tenants.

  In 2008, Dan Nip, now a developer and board member of the East Downtown Management District, encouraged investment in the old Chinatown section by pointing to the EB-5 visa program: an investor who placed $500,000 in the area and created two jobs over ten years would become eligible for permanent residency. By 2022, few Chinese businesses remained, and a proposal to expand Interstate 45 threatened to remove several of the former Chinese-owned buildings still standing.

• 6. Homelessness and Tension

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  East Downtown has long been associated with one of Houston's larger concentrations of homeless residents. The pattern reflects geography as much as anything else: nearly all of Houston's nonprofit and faith-based agencies providing food and shelter are located within Downtown and Midtown, and those that predate the current wave of redevelopment draw people eastward. Independent groups also bring food, clothing, and toiletries to nearby vacant lots on their own. The Star of Hope, a faith-based agency, operates a major shelter for women and children on Emancipation Avenue between Texas and Franklin streets, with a men's facility nearby on the west side of US 59, north of Daikin Park.

  As developers have moved into EaDo and pushed for revitalization through commercial and residential projects, the tension with the existing homeless population and the organizations serving them has grown. Some voices in the conversation have called for the city to restrict public sleeping on sidewalks and to regulate charitable food distribution. Whether the services that homeless residents depend on can continue to operate in the district as redevelopment advances remains an open question.

  Rusk School, outside of East Downtown but serving parts of the district, reported a student mobility rate of nearly 100% in 1995, driven by a very large homeless population among its families. That number offers a precise window into how deep and longstanding the instability in this part of Houston has been.

• 7. Schools and Civic Life

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  East Downtown sits within the Houston Independent School District, under Trustee District VIII, which Diana Davila represented as of 2009. The school history of the area is layered and, in places, contentious. Dodson Elementary, which had around 445 students in 2014, became the center of a prolonged school board dispute that year. HISD superintendent Terry Grier argued for closing Dodson so a different school could use its building during construction. On the 13th of March 2014, the board voted 5-4 to close it. Trustee Juliet Stipeche then declared in April 2014 that there would be another vote, but board member Harvin Moore moved to table the matter indefinitely, and the board voted 5-3 to end further debate, turning away speakers who had come to address the closure.

  Charles W. Luckie Elementary School, located at 1104 Palmer in what is now East Downtown, served African-American students until it closed around 1943. St. Nicholas Elementary School opened in 1887 and moved with its church to a new location around 1920; the current school building opened on the 8th of September 1931, and the older building, which the church had been using, was demolished on the 12th of May that same year. METRORail has served EaDo since 2015 through the EaDo/Stadium station on the Green and Purple lines, and the Leeland/Third Ward station on the Purple Line. Fire Station 10, which opened in East Downtown in 1894, relocated in 1985 to what is now the site of the new Chinatown and Greater Sharpstown.