Nobody calls the near West Side of Chicago “Jew Town” anymore. The great-grandchildren of the merchants who sold ... well, just about everything ... at the sprawling open-air market on Maxwell Street have scattered — to Rogers Park, then Skokie, then everywhere.
Many of the city’s old ethnic enclaves were shattered by supposed “progress,” whether the Italian community on Taylor Street, bulldozed by the expanding University of Illinois at Chicago, or the heart of Bronzeville, cut out by CHA high-rises.
Chinatown is an exception. Not only has it preserved its ethnic character — 90% of the neighborhood’s residents are Asian, most speaking Chinese at home — but it’s growing, despite, and in some cases because of, setbacks it suffered.
“Chicago’s Chinatown is really interesting,” said David Wu, executive director of the Pui Tak Center, a community center in Chinatown. “Philadelphia and New York, Washington, D.C., and Boston — every Chinatown is within blocks of the financial district and City Hall, and every one of these cities would say their Chinatowns are dying.”
Chicago’s Chinatown was originally jammed into two blocks of Clark Street in the Loop. But in 1912, rising rents and white hostility prodded the Chinese community to move, wholesale, to Wentworth and Cermak.
Bad then, good now.
“If we were at Clark and Van Buren and wanted to expand at all, we couldn’t,” said Wu. “A hundred years ago, it wasn’t nice to be pushed out of your community. But now Chicago’s Chinatown is the only one flourishing. It’s more like a normal community, without huge pressures of gentrification.”
Many of the city’s old ethnic enclaves were shattered by supposed “progress,” whether the Italian community on Taylor Street, bulldozed by the expanding University of Illinois at Chicago, or the heart of Bronzeville, cut out by CHA high-rises.
Chinatown is an exception. Not only has it preserved its ethnic character — 90% of the neighborhood’s residents are Asian, most speaking Chinese at home — but it’s growing, despite, and in some cases because of, setbacks it suffered.
“Chicago’s Chinatown is really interesting,” said David Wu, executive director of the Pui Tak Center, a community center in Chinatown. “Philadelphia and New York, Washington, D.C., and Boston — every Chinatown is within blocks of the financial district and City Hall, and every one of these cities would say their Chinatowns are dying.”
Chicago’s Chinatown was originally jammed into two blocks of Clark Street in the Loop. But in 1912, rising rents and white hostility prodded the Chinese community to move, wholesale, to Wentworth and Cermak.
Bad then, good now.
“If we were at Clark and Van Buren and wanted to expand at all, we couldn’t,” said Wu. “A hundred years ago, it wasn’t nice to be pushed out of your community. But now Chicago’s Chinatown is the only one flourishing. It’s more like a normal community, without huge pressures of gentrification.”
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