NEW YORK, NY.- As with many neighborhoods in New York City, Chinatown has a history that is legible in layers. Here in lower Manhattan, Republic of China flags still flutter above the offices of family associations that were founded before the Communist Revolution. Job posting boards covered in slips of paper cater to recent immigrants. Instagrammable dessert shops serve young locals and tourists alike. “For Rent” signs are everywhere, alluding to the shrinking number of Chinese businesses and residents.
And above a dwindling number of intersections hang signs declaring the names of the street in English and in Chinese.
Bilingual street signs have hung over the bustling streets of the city’s oldest Chinatown for more than 50 years. 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.
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. 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.
Most records of the program seem to have either been destroyed in a flood at a Department of Transportation facility, lost in the subsequent move or (as suggested by a few stumped officials interviewed for this article) never recorded in the first place.
We set out to survey what was left to piece together the program’s history.
Bilingual services are a fact of life in a city where more than 3 million residents from almost 200 countries speak more than 700 languages and dialects.
New York provides language help for city functions like voting, subway wayfinding and court proceedings, and single, non-English street name signs have been installed in some of the city’s ethnic communities, including West 32nd Street in Koreatown, co-named “Korea Way," and a portion of Avenue C co-named “Loisaida” (Lower East Side), in homage to the Puerto Rican community.
But the signs on Chinatown’s streets are different: They are a vast, neighborhood-wide exercise in translation carried out hand-in-hand with the city government — a completely bilingual street grid.
The history of these signs tells the story of the growth, decline and evolution of one of Manhattan’s largest immigrant communities.
1840-1969: No signs, informal street names
In 1883, Wong Chin Foo — 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. 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.
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.”
The city’s earliest Chinese residents had started settling in the area around Mott and Pell streets a few decades before, around the time Wong arrived in the United States to attend college. As Wong pursued his American education, Chinese immigration to the country was increasing as thousands of Chinese were recruited to work on the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad. Chinese immigrants often faced horrendous treatment, legal discrimination and unfair labor practices, which Wong wrote about and lectured on around the country.
After the final spike was driven on the Transcontinental Railroad in 1869, Chinese laborers found themselves without reliable work and facing rising racial animus and violence in the Western states. An increasing number started migrating to Eastern cities. By the time Wong arrived in 1883, Manhattan’s Chinatown had become a destination for Chinese immigrants.
It was also around this time that informal Chinese street names began to appear in Chinatown — written on shop windows and in personal correspondence.
1969: Official Chinese street signs come to the Chinatown core
On June 11, 1966, two police officers, Joseph LaVeglia and Chris Columbo, were on Chatham Square in matching plaid shirts and buzzcuts. They had been sent by the city to install new signs above the Chinatown’s police call boxes (a quick way to reach a local police precinct in an era before cellphones). The signs explained what the boxes were for and how to use them — in Chinese.
The new Chinese-language instructions were an attempt by the city to accommodate the growing number of people who did not speak English fluently, driven by a massive influx of immigrants from all over China and the Chinese diaspora following the passage of the Immigration Act of 1965, which completely overhauled Chinese immigration to the United States.
Around the same time, another effort to assist new arrivals with navigating the neighborhood was taking shape: The Chinese Chamber of Commerce, one of the few local organizations that acted as a conduit between Chinatown and city bureaucracy, was petitioning the New York City Transit Authority to create and install bilingual street signs in Chinatown “to make life simpler for the thousands of new Chinese immigrants,” wrote The New York Times in 1969, “who arrive with little knowledge of the English language or Latin alphabet.”
The idea of “official” Chinese street names, however, opened up a novel issue: What Chinese names to use? While Chinese dialects share the same written language (either in simplified or traditional forms), the pronunciation of each character can vary widely, dialect to dialect.
In the late 1960s, a majority of immigrants in Chinatown came from China’s southern regions of Toisan and Canton (now known as Guangzhou). While the final names were reportedly based on community submissions and chosen to be phonetically understandable to immigrants speaking different dialects, Toisanese and Cantonese are most clearly reflected in the names chosen.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Chinatown was becoming more diverse. With immigrants from other regions, dialects like Mandarin and Fujianese spread through the neighborhood.
While the signs failed to represent the diversity of dialects, their arrival represented a new era of prominence for Manhattan’s Chinatown, as the community had grown into a thriving home and commercial center for Chinese New Yorkers.
1985: Chinatown doubles in size, at least in the eyes of the Department of Transportation
One hundred years after Wong set up his newspaper’s headquarters on Chatham Street, a young urban planner named Jerry S.Y. Cheng found himself down the street, trying to figure out how to make sense of the snarled traffic around Chatham Square.
From when Wong arrived in Chinatown up to the passage of the 1965 Immigration Act, Chinatown’s population grew steadily to around 15,000 residents. When Cheng immigrated from Taiwan in 1969, the population had already started to balloon, and by 1985, it had grown to 70,000 residents. The area’s economy, powered by the garment and restaurant industries, was booming. There were more business, more shops, more people and more traffic.
As a result, Cheng found himself in demand. “They would come to me with problems because I am Chinese,” Cheng said. “I know the leaders, I can translate — I became like a bridge.”
It was in this context that Cheng met Li Boli, the president of the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, a supervisory body for about 60 organizations that has long been an unofficial (though oft-disputed) governmental body in Chinatown.
In 1984, Li called Cheng to talk about street signs. By then, the geographic footprint of Chinatown had grown — by some estimates, doubling in size — and had started to encompass areas previously considered Little Italy, the Bowery and the Lower East Side. After former President Richard Nixon’s famous 1972 visit to China and the thawing of U.S.-Chinese relations, more and more Mandarin- and Fujianese-speaking immigrants were arriving every year.
With Cheng’s help, the Benevolent Association petitioned the Transportation Department to expand the bilingual street name program to reflect the area’s growth.
“There wasn’t a lot of pushback from DOT,” said David Gurin, who was deputy commissioner at the time. “The community asked for the signs, and so they were kind of a courtesy.”
The only controversy was over where exactly the boundaries of the Chinese street signs (a proxy for the boundaries of Chinatown) should be drawn. The Transportation Department apparently commissioned a two month study of the extent of Chinatown, but the results of that study are most likely lost.
When asked if he remembered what kinds of records might be kept, Cheng laughed. “No, no, I don’t think so,” he said. “I don’t think there will be much. Almost everyone involved in this has passed away.”
What we do know is that once the streets were agreed upon, the next hurdle was, again, choosing the Chinese names. This time, the group making the decisions was a committee within the Benevolent Association — business owners, property owners and longtime residents who predominantly spoke Toisanese and Cantonese.
They were choosing names for a very different Chinatown, yet the chosen names again relied on Toisanese and Cantonese dialects, ignoring large segments of Chinatown’s newest immigrants.
They also ignored the colloquial street names that were common in parts of the neighborhood. Different waves of Chinese immigrants had given names to streets that spoke more to the culture on the street than the English name. For example, to many in Chinatown, Mulberry was known as Corpse Street because it was lined with funeral homes, florists and effigy shops. Many of these names are still used in Chinatown today.
1985-the Present: The signs today
Chinatown is still a vibrant cultural center for Chinese and Chinese Americans and a landing pad for new Chinese immigrants, but the neighborhood is shrinking. Asians are the fastest growing population in New York City, according to the 2020 census. However, Chinatown has experienced the largest exodus of Asian residents of any neighborhood in the city, even as increasing numbers settle in Brooklyn and Queens.
The changes are a result of cumulative effects that go back to at least Sept. 11, 2001; the aftermath of the attacks dealt an immense blow to the Chinatown economy, especially the restaurant and garment industries. Meanwhile, real estate speculation and foreign investment have fueled rising rents, and most recently, the pandemic has led to a rise in racist rhetoric and violence, and a decrease in business at the area’s shops.
In recent years, local efforts have been channeled toward community organizing and demonstrations, like those against the closure of Jing Fong (the historic dim sum restaurant, and the last union restaurant in Chinatown), the construction of a new jail in the heart of the neighborhood, the latest city rezoning efforts and gentrification and displacement. Protests against anti-Asian violence have filled parks and public plazas. In the face of these visceral struggles, issues like bilingual street signs seem to command little attention.
Which is maybe why many have not realized that the bilingual street signs are also disappearing.
Only 101 bilingual signs remain in Chinatown. At the program’s peak, at least 155 had been ordered to be printed. Of the 40 streets that Tan was asked to do calligraphy for, nearly half no longer have a single remaining bilingual sign. According to Alana Morales, deputy press secretary at the Transportation Department, “The Chinese-bilingual signs are not part of the U.S. DOT’s Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices for Streets and Highways.” This means that if bilingual street signs are knocked down or damaged, she said, “they are replaced with signs in English.”
Many of the people involved in the 1980s push are dead, and there is little pressure to maintain the program. The signs are viewed by the city as a one-time program that will slowly fade away, rather than as some permanent part of the city’s infrastructure.
In present-day Chinatown, organizations like the Chinese Chamber of Commerce and the Benevolent Association still have influence — they are common stops, for example, for local politicians looking for an endorsement in Chinatown. But as the neighborhood has become more diverse, their time as the main liaisons between the city and the neighborhood has passed.
Meanwhile, a host of new advocacy organizations have risen up with new priorities and serving different segments of Chinatown’s population, focusing on issues like affordable housing, displacement, community services and COVID-19 relief.
None of the local residents, community organizers, business owners or scholars interviewed for this article were previously aware that the signs were disappearing.
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
