Our group visited Chinatown on March 24, 2014. The main focus of our research is on gentrification so we wanted to make note of any luxury developments in the neighborhood. We noticed that many modern developments were located side-by-side with dilapidated tenements houses and family-owned shops.

We visited Pell Street first and saw many old tenement buildings but there were also a number of modern businesses, such as T-Mobile and Boba Life NYC. There were also a number of fine-dining restaurants, one of which was located right across from an old loan organization.

We then walked further down south towards Madison Street and encountered many large apartment complexes that seemed to have been built recently. A few blocks down, we noticed an entire row of apartments that we later found out were government-funded housing (NYCHA). As we left Pearl Street and walked towards Oliver Street, we noticed that the streets were getting dirtier and there were more people milling around. At Pearl Street, the sidewalks and roads were devoid of people and cars. It was also around Oliver Street that we began to see a lot of tenement buildings.

Other streets that we visited included East Broadway, Market, and Henry Street. Gentrification definitely hit these areas but it wasn’t uniform. There were modern, glass apartments right across from run-down tenement buildings and Parisian wedding dress stores next to a supermarket that sold fish and dried herbs.

Here is a brief interview that we conducted:

By: Emily Yeung, Christine Zhou, Shixu Zheng, Nick Djamalidinov, and Stella Kong