From murals to fashion and music, the vibrancy of the Chinese diaspora seeps from every pore of Manhattan’s Mott Street, showcasing the community’s culture. Now the city also seems to want to participate in the culture.
In February, Mayor Eric Adams and the New York City Department of Transportation (DOT) made the $55.8 million The Chinatown Connections project aims to “beautify” and “draw visitors to the neighborhood” by building a Welcome Gateway and street art installations in Kimlau Square and along the gated Park Row thoroughfare, where the New York Police Department (NYPD) headquarters are established. According to Manhattan Community Board 3, part of the project will “coordinated” with NYPD to “reorganize the French barricades and parking lots.”
Some locals doubt this effort will improve Chinatown’s history, heritage and community. In an interview with HyperallergicAmy Chin, a board member of the nonprofit Think!Chinatown, expressed concern that the project could distract from what many local residents say is excessive policing, which would contribute to the gentrification of the neighborhood and the wiping out of its longtime residents .
“Did anyone ask for nice art on the police barricades?” Chin said. “Why do we spend our money this way?”
At an open street fair on Saturday, August 24, DOT announced the four artists selected for Chinatown Connections who will each receive up to $20,000 for their project: Deanna Lee, Isolina Minjeong, Chenlin Cai and Singha Hon. Participants were invited to take part in surveys conducted by two of the artists to share feedback on the project. However, a Chinatown Connections working group was not given the correct date for the event and was given only 24 hours’ notice to provide feedback, according to correspondence reviewed by Hyperallergic. This miscommunication reflected what community leaders see as a general disconnect between Chinatown residents and the project itself.
The NYC Department of Transportation did not respond Hyperallergic‘s request for comment.
The project comes in the middle community-led calls to reopen Park Row’s crucial thoroughfare that once connected Chinatown to other parts of Lower Manhattan. According to Chin, the Park Row garage was originally given to the neighborhood in exchange for the NYPD building the One Police Plaza headquarters, which many activists now recognize as a hub for processing arrested protesters. But after September 11, the NYPD took over the garage and closed down the entire Park Row street, stating: precautions against terrorist threats. The ‘frozen zone’, which remains in place, local businesses cut off from parking and a critical transportation route. In a July 24 press release, Jan Lee, founder of the Chinatown Core Block Association, argued that this acquisition may have cost the city $1 billion because the NYPD now uses the once affordable garage for free. He explained that “Chinatown customers and residents have lost for 23 years. of parking equal to 3,358,000 parking days.”
“The police took back their refund,” Chin said.
Lee said the frozen zone has led to at least five lawsuits against the NYPD over the years. In 2004, the Supreme Court of the State of New York double sided with Chinatown locals about the closure. Another one was settled in 2008, after which the city and the NYPD agreed to “reduce the impact of the closure on pedestrians and ambulances traveling to Downtown Hospital” and to “meet with residents to discuss larger changes.” At a town hall held at the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association on July 25, Chin and several others alleged that police had parked on the street without proper permission. placardsanother blow to the local population who need the spaces to do business.
Tensions continue to rise with claims of underreported police harassment and the construction of the city’s mega-prison, which did just that physically damaged houses and blinded companies. Artist-led organizations including Chinatown Art Brigade and Art Against Displacement have long protested the project, and as of 2020, the Museum of Chinese in America and then-president Nancy Yao faced backlash after the institution received funding related to the construction of the prison.
But some see Chinatown Connections and the street art installations as a productive opportunity, including participating artist Deanna Lee, who hopes the project can help combat gentrification in the neighborhood.
“The NYPD is considered by many to be an oppressive, occupying presence in Chinatown, evidenced by what appears to be the permanent transformation of Park Row from Kimlau Square to Frankfort Street into an extension of the police department campus,” she said. adding that the project “may motivate some actions on the nature of public spaces and how they are used and controlled.” Hyperallergic has contacted the three other artists selected for the project to give their opinions.
Alison Kuo, a local sculptor, did not sign up for the Chinatown Connections project in protest of its possible role in the neighborhood’s eradication.
“Many socially conscious artists reject the idea that police make us safer,” Kuo said Hyperallergic in an interview. “Why then should we be tasked with decorating a traffic barricade on what is essentially land stolen from Chinatown by the NYPD?”
Chinatown’s historic tensions with the NYPD date back well before Park Row’s closure in 2001. In 1975, police beat a Chinese-American man named Peter Yew after he intervened in their attack on a 15-year-old driver during a minor traffic incident. The attack sparked a massive protest weeks later, with thousands of people flooding the streets and local businesses closing their doors. The iconic photographer Corky Lee documented the historic demonstration, in which protesters demanded that the NYPD not only drop charges against Yew, but also end its practice of targeting undocumented immigrants and forcing “all people who look Asian” to show their papers. The Marshall Project reported on this during Donald Trump’s presidency The frequent involvement of the NYPD in deportation proceedings, thousands of which have been filed against Chinese.
Jeanie Chin, an original member of the historical artist-activist collective Basement Workshop in Chinatown, attended many of these protests during the 1970s and led to efforts to reopen Park Row. She called the Connections project a “harbinger of gentrification” in an interview with Hyperallergic.
“It’s basically painting over something that shouldn’t be there,” she said. “We would like to see the barricades gone, so installing artwork really doesn’t help us. It’s just an attempt to embellish the problem.”
Kuo also commented on the city’s lack of investment in existing arts and culture organizations in Chinatown. “Public art must come from our community and come out,” Amy Chin echoed.
The Center for Poverty and Social Policy reported this in 2022 24% of Asian New Yorkers experience povertymore than twice as many as their white counterparts. For many who live nearby, art installations like the Chinatown Connections project cannot compensate for the high poverty rates, the skyrocketing cost of living due to gentrification, or the often unspoken negative interactions with police.
In fact, some see the Welcome Gateway plan as a direct sign of the city’s disdain for the Chinatown community’s own vision of arts and culture, Kuo explains.
“Chinatown does not need the city to manage how it creates art, culture and social services,” she added. “We already do all these things for ourselves.”
