Description:
Formal Institutions are established organizations with well-defined structures. These institutions have clear objectives and goals and are widely accepted as “official” or “legitimate”.
We focus on general information (location, date of establishment, etc.), services provided, significance in the community, and demographics/general information regarding participants in the institutions if available.
Each group examining one of the four Asia towns has studied 1 – 2 institutions in each of the following categories:
Schools: any institutions or buildings of education or instruction
Libraries: places set aside for books, periodicals, and other materials for reading, viewing, listening, studying, or reference as a room, a set of rooms, or building where books and other sorts of media can be accessed or borrowed
Hospitals/Health Centers: health facilities that provide patient treatment and medical and surgical care to sick or injured people
Community-Outreach Centers: institutions and organizations that seek to provide physical, emotional, social, educational, and/or financial services or other services that will better the members of the community
Cultural Centers: organizations, buildings, or establishments that promote and cultivate culture and the arts
Introduction:
Represented in the table below are trends discovered across a single neighborhood’s formal institutions:
Formal Institution Trends Within a Single Neighborhood
| Chinatown/Asiatown | Trends Across Neighborhood’s Formal Institutions
|
| Manhattan | Though slight growth of diversity can be seen there, Manhattan’s Chinatown does not seem particularly racially/ethnically diverse, and the formal institutions reflect that: The institutions we studied mostly cater to Asians, particularly the Chinese. P.S. 42’s student body was overwhelmingly Asian, and the LES Even Start chapter’s program (when it was running) dealt strictly with Chinese families, so many services are conducted in both English and Chinese in the realm of education there. The Chatham Square NY Public Library sees mostly Chinese patrons and boasts a large Chinese materials collection. The health care provided by the Charles B. Wang Community Health Center seems to center on the Chinese in terms of statistics collected and languages services are conducted in (Some of their operators don’t even speak English!). The Chen Dance Center, while certainly appearing to welcome people of other races, actively tries to promote the Asian American presence it boasts in its community. And the Greater Chinatown Community Association deals mostly with Chinese people and has bilingual publications/brochures in English and Chinese. Also, many institutions’ signs contained Chinese. Granted, we aren’t getting the whole picture because we only studied some institutions, but we still feel assured that most of the institutions in the area would largely cater to the Chinese. Of note as well is that Chinatown is a hub of Chinese culture and business for other areas where the Chinese communities are more dispersed, so not only town inhabitants frequent the area’s institutions but also Chinese people from other places are presumed to do so as well. |
| Flushing | Many people come from outside Flushing to use the neighborhood’s resources aside from the people actually living in Flushing itself. Overall, the larger institutions are more diverse than the smaller ones since they provide more resources and thus attract more people from outside the Flushing downtown area and its predominantly Asian networks. Also, some of these larger institutions are some of the most prominent establishments in all of Queens. However, the larger institutions still reflect which ethnicities are the largest in the entire Flushing neighborhood, which are Asians and Hispanics. The smaller institutions are more ethnic-based and Flushing-based. However, because of their strong ties to that particular ethnicity, many people of that ethnicity from outside Flushing come to Flushing to participate in those institutions in order to be able to connect to their culture. Some of these places are as far out as Long Island and New Jersey. These smaller institutions are predominantly Asian, primarily Chinese and Korean. Some of these smaller institutions have stayed mostly Asian throughout their histories and some have diversified. Whether they have diversified or not depends on the institution’s ability to provide services outside their own ethnicity that will relate to other ethnicities (e.g. providing announcements in English). |
| Sunset Park | Sunset Park is predominantly Asian and Hispanic, with Asians on the east side of the neighborhood and Hispanics on the west. We did all large institutions so they all provide services for Chinese constituents (mostly in terms of having Chinese translations and Chinese media on hand), as well as members of other races. The demographics of most of the institutions reflect the demographics of Sunset Park – even the Brooklyn Chinese-American Association provides services for non-Asians now since it’s gotten so large. |
| Bay Ridge | Most of our locations are in the northern half of Bay Ridge, along the 4th Avenue R train line where it is very commercialized with businesses and shopping centers. The ethnic demographics of the library, high school, and the martial arts center mirror that of the Bay Ridge community; it’s very multi-ethnic. The majority of the Asian population in Bay Ridge is found in the northern part, so we believe that they are Asian residents from Sunset Park who migrated southward. The library serves as a community center that welcomes all ethnicities and has services that cater to the large Asian population. The fitness center spreads Asian culture and morals of the martial arts. The medical center reflects more of its location along 4th Avenue where there is a significant Middle Eastern and Arabic population, especially because it is a privately owned medical center run by a Middle Eastern doctor. The only institution located further from our general area of study is Fort Hamilton High School, which is more towards the center west part of bay ridge, away from the commercial area and in a wealthy residential part of the neighborhood. |
Cross-town Conclusions About Formal Institutions:
One of the biggest trends we have seen across all the neighborhoods is that a neighborhood’s racial/ethnic makeup tends to govern what its formal institutions provide. For example, in Manhattan’s Chinatown, because the Chinese ethnic group single-handedly dominates the area, the institutions provide services that cater to the Chinese (e.g., they provide significant amounts of library materials in Chinese, some workers only speak Chinese, etc.), but in the other three towns, we see major diversity in the demographics, so the institutions (even the apparently Chinese- or Asian- oriented ones, which now show signs of branching out) tend to be more open and receptive to other races/ethnicities in the area (or at least less Asian-centric). In fact, when an institution studied was not located in an area heavily touched by Asian demographics, especially if the institution was private or upscale, nothing might have seemed Asian about it at all. Taking that a step further, if an Asiatown contained areas dominated by other cultures, the languages of signs and services would not only simply not be in Asian languages but would also shift in the lingual direction of those cultures.
Another thing to consider is how Manhattan’s Chinatown has a long history as a Chinese ethnic enclave and holds a big reputation among many as the “Chinatown of Chinatowns” around New York City (some people don’t even know the others in the area exist). How does this influence this town’s institutions and how does this compare with the other towns’ institutions? We look to the institutions themselves for answers: The Chen Dance Center provides a great example of what’s going on in Manhattan’s Chinatown as opposed to the other three in that it is trying to welcome diversity while preserving Asian culture by actively trying to take in more Asian dancers. In the other towns, diversity is already present, with two or more groups making a significant presence in each of those towns. For those towns, it’s less about trying to maintain a culture in an area that is facing diversification and more about trying to maintain the culture in the an already diversified area.
Lastly, across all of the towns, we found institutions that corresponded to each of our enumerated categories of institutions (even if some had to overlap). This is important because it tells us that across the towns, the needs of the people are being met – which is essentially the very purpose of a formal institution. After all, formal institutions don’t just spring up from out of nowhere; they are created in response to needs. The five categories generally correspond to different areas of need (the boundaries of each of these perhaps oversimplified areas may overlap of course, but these are the main areas linked to the categories): education, literacy, health care, cultural preservation, and general outreach. Because we found useful, influential institutions that fell into each category in some way, we feel assured that at least in the areas listed above, the needs of the people are not going completely unnoticed; something is being done about these needs, and on that warm note, we would like to invite you to check out each of our individual websites for a more in-depth look at each town’s formal institutions:
Formal Institutions in Manhattan
Formal Institutions in Flushing
