Philadelphia’s Chinatown is a popular destination for tourists looking to take Chinese food and learn about Chinese culture. But for lifelong members of the Chinese community, the town – home to over over 5, 000 residents– is also defined by its perseverance and success.
Residents and allies have strongly opposed the Philadelphia 76ers ‘ plans to build a baseball market in the Market East community at the southern border of Chinatown, a display that has been present for the past two and a half years.
A city-sponsored society effect study found that the industry may have resulted in the “loss of Chinatown’s primary identity and local significance”. According to estimates, half of the town’s small businesses may have suffered as a result of worsening traffic, possible rent increases, and a new group of people less likely to patronize the area’s cultural businesses.
Although it is unclear why the Sixers made the rapid decision to abandon the Market East industry, the news in January 2025 was welcomed by Chinatown residents who felt they had prevented still another threat to the existence of their neighborhood.
I’m an Eastern American, industrial dweller, and writer with a focus on Asian Americans, places, and social activities. I’ve seen how urban people take for granted the existence of Chinese in major cities across the country, and even internationally, from London to Havana and Ho Chi Minh City. Due to the people and friends who fight for them, Chinatowns continue to exist and flourish.
The battle over the Pacers market was only the latest conflict in over 50 years of group organizing in Philadelphia’s Chinatown.
A shelter from nativism
Like other American Chinatowns, Philadelphia’s formed during an age of severe anti-Chinese racism. The area was established in the 1870s as a haven for refugees who were escaping the American West, where light rail workers and railroad workers proclaimed,” The Chinese had go”!
Among the earliest companies were a handful of laundries and a cafe on the 900 wall of Race Street, just north of Philadelphia’s key business area.
In the age of anti-Chinese immigration rules from 1875 to 1943, Chinatowns were associated with opium-smoking, playing and trafficking. Philadelphia, a core of evil and danger, was targeted and stigmatized by law enforcement. In addition, area and secret engineers were interested in Chinatown as early as the 1920s.
The Bell Telephone Company purchased more real estate along the corridor in 1923 to build its fresh high-rise tower and parking lot, causing Chinese citizens to flee. In the same century, the town used eminent domain to dismantle accommodation blocks to make way for the Broad-Ridge Spur, which connects the Eighth Street and Vine Street train stations. Chinatown was described as” a thing of the past” in a 1934 Philadelphia Evening Bulletin article.
Race Street was transformed into a major thoroughfare in the city as more car owners began to drive over the now-named Delaware Valley Bridge. The Delaware River Bridge was completed in 1926, in a move that echoed the xenophobic slogans that prompted Chinese workers to leave western states half a century earlier.
But Chinatown persisted.
More Chinese women immigrated to the US as China’s immigration restrictions eased following World War II. The area’s transition from a working-class bachelor society to a multigenerational community of families.
‘ Save Chinatown ‘ movement forms
During the social upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s, Philadelphia’s Chinatown youth took inspiration from the Black Power and anti-war movements to fight for their community.
The city proposed expanding Vine Street into an expressway in 1966, which would have destroyed large sections of Chinatown, including the adored Holy Redeemer church and school. Holy Redeemer, which was founded for Chinese American Catholics in 1941, provided community gatherings, amusements, and religious services. One instance of the national trend of urban renewal was the Vine Street Expressway project, which sought to clear and redevelop areas that had been designated as blighted.
The nonprofit organization Philadelphia Chinatown Development Corporation collaborated with Yellow Seeds, a group of radical Asian American youth who fought against racism and imperialism in the United States, and other members of the Chinatown community, to fight the construction of the expressway.
These groups comprised the 1970s Save Chinatown movement. They organized numerous protests, appeared in numerous media accounts, and used the 1970 National Environmental Policy Act as the framework for their strategy. They demanded an environmental impact statement, which, when issued in 1983, recommended a much smaller expressway than originally designed. Holy Redeemer was saved. Two off-ramps that would have traversed the neighborhood were also eliminated in the final plans. The expressway’s construction was finished in 1991.
Resisting a prison, baseball stadium and casino
The Save Chinatown movement persisted throughout the years as locals successfully opposed the construction of a federal prison in 1993, a baseball stadium in 2000, and a casino in 2008, all of which were planned for locations in or close to Chinatown.
In a 2002 documentary that was released shortly after the baseball stadium fight ended, activist Debbie Wei stated that” the future of Chinatown is going to be a huge battle.” ” We’re going to fight it, and my kids’ going to probably have to fight it as well,” he said.
Her words were prescient. 20 years later, her daughter Kaia Chau emerged as a key figure in the fight against the Sixers arena.
Together with fellow student leader Taryn Flaherty, Chau co-founded Students for the Preservation of Chinatown. The group organized teach-ins, galvanized Philadelphia-area students to join protests, and highlighted arena developers ‘ ties to local universities, including the University of Pennsylvania and Drexel University. Students made connections between the proposed arena and the gentrification of West Philadelphia, including the demolition of the University City Townhomes, an affordable housing complex whose residents were overwhelmingly Black, by focusing on the developers.
The movement against the Sixers arena became part of a multiracial, citywide fight against displacement. As the Reverend Gregory Holston of Black Philly 4 Chinatown, part of the Save Chinatown coalition, put it:” In North Philadelphia, in West Philadelphia, in South Philadelphia, the same process is happening over and over and over again where people are pushing and displacing people of color out of this city”.
Thriving intergenerational community
Activists have also created new housing, educational and arts institutions to keep Chinatown a family-friendly neighborhood.
Hing Wah Yuen, a 51-unit mixed-income affordable housing complex created by the Philadelphia Chinatown Development Corporation, the same organization that spearheaded the fight against the Vine Street Expressway in the 1970s, is now the location where the prison was planned in 1993.
The grassroots Chinatown-based organization Asian Americans United teamed up with the Philadelphia Folklore Project and the arts and culture organization in 2000 to establish the Folk Arts-Cultural Treasures School.
The K-8 school, situated in the footprint of the proposed stadium, teaches Mandarin and emphasizes art and music classes that reflect students ‘ cultural background.
Student leaders Chau and Flaherty founded the Ginger Arts Center in 2024, more recently acknowledging the need for more” third places” for youth beyond home and school. The organization offers young people in Chinatown a space for recreation and arts education.
The new community organizations that have emerged in response to failed development projects serve as examples of how Chinatown is neither a food and culture destination nor a place to go shopping.
Instead, Chinatown is a vibrant community that has long fought to survive, reinvent itself, and decide its own future, one that bears the legacy of previous generations of resistance.
At Swarthmore College, Vivian Truong serves as an assistant professor of history.
This article was republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.