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Getting the Story

Chinatown has always been a neighborhood of immigrants and a stepping-stone to a better life in America, but it has not always been Chinese. It was a slum for Irish immigrants in the early and mid-1800s, who were widely despised by American nativists and Protestants.

The Five Points district, near where present-day Worth, Baxter, and Park streets meet, was New York City's most notorious slum for a good part of the 19th century. Mulberry Bend was another slum of overcrowded tenements and filthy conditions, primarily made up of Italian immigrants seeking work in America. In the 1890s, journalist Jacob Riis called Mulberry Bend "the foul core of New York's slums … where nothing short of total demolitions will ever prove of radical benefit."

A financial panic and depression in 1893 convinced many Italians to leave the Bend and return to Italy. Shortly thereafter, reform campaigns spearheaded by Teddy Roosevelt, then on the Police Commissioner's board, and a young politician named Al Smith helped tear down the slums and create Columbus Park, the first park in the neighborhood. A pavilion at the north end of the park was used for summer concerts and dances, and a statue of Columbus stood among the trees.

Today, the park is concrete gray and the pavilion is weatherbeaten and painted in gaudy red with Chinese dragons, fenced off from public use with "Do Not Enter" signs hanging from the eaves. The only dancing done there now is the jig-jig of cooing pigeons on the roof as they vie for turf and what passes for love in the fowl world. Columbus, like countless immigrants before him, has moved uptown. In his case it's atop a pillar overlooking Central Park at Columbus Circle on 59th Street.

Chinese started trickling to Mott Street in the late 1800s, but the area was at that time made up predominantly of Italian immigrants. Because of immigration laws that forbade immigration by Chinese, the numbers remained low throughout the early 1900s and were mostly male Chinese who had families back in China. After World War II, the immigration laws were revoked and thousands of refugees came, escaping the Communist regime. Another large wave came in the 1960s, and this group--combined with the historical migration of more established immigrants to middle-class suburban homes--gave the neighborhood its predominantly Chinese population.