The city’s earliest Chinese residents had started settling in the area around Mott and Pell Streets a few decades before, around the time Mr. Wong wrote that his aim was “to make this paper supply the long-felt want of our countrymen, of whom not one in a thousand can read a word of English.” For the paper’s headquarters, he chose an office space on Chatham Street (now Park Row) a few blocks south of what was shaping up to be the city’s first Chinatown. In 1883, Wong Chin Foo ( 王淸福) - an early writer and advocate on Chinese American issues - arrived in Manhattan and started New York City’s first Chinese-language newspaper, The Chinese American. Charles Von Urban/Museum of the City of New York Prior to policy changes beginning in the 1940s, anti-Chinese immigration legislation meant that the Chinese community in Chinatown was mostly male. But as the prominence of Manhattan’s Chinatown as the singular Chinese cultural center of the city has waned in the 21st century, this unique piece of infrastructure has begun to slowly disappear.ĭoyers Street in 1932. These signs represented a formal recognition of the growing influence of a neighborhood that for more than a century had largely been relegated to the margins of the city’s attention.

They are the product of a program from the 1960s aimed at making navigating the neighborhood easier for those Chinese New Yorkers who might not read English. “For Rent / 出租” signs are everywhere, alluding to the shrinking number of Chinese businesses and residents.Īnd above a dwindling number of intersections hang signs declaring the names of the street in English and in Chinese.īilingual street signs have hung over the bustling streets of the city's oldest Chinatown for more than 50 years. Instagrammable dessert shops serve young locals and tourists alike. Job posting boards covered in slips of paper cater to recent immigrants. Here in Lower Manhattan, Republic of China flags still flutter above the offices of family associations that were founded before the Communist Revolution. As with many neighborhoods in New York City, Chinatown has a history that is legible in layers.

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