Chinatown - Progress or Gentrification?

AdamBC said:
The primary owner of the land, the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority, is in debt for its huge Big Dig project and would like to turn a profit.

I don't see why they feel they have to destroy a neighborhood to turn a profit. Besides, the Big Dig was colossally mismanaged. There is no way to turn a profit on that boondoggle.

Yea I'm not even going into the last few posts, but i wanted to comment on this off topic as it may be.

I was talking to another union guy who worked on the tunnel and he claims he knew right from the beginning the tunnel was going to leak with the materials they were using. He claims he brought it up to his boss, his boss's boss, and the next boss up and went to meetings every week to tell them it was going to leak, along with a bunch of his co workers. they did nothing about it, and just told them to do their job and that the engineers knew what they were doing.

sometimes you gotta take input from these tradesman that have been working with these materials all their lives and trust them a little bit. as uneducated and ignorant as they may appear, they know their own job.
 
That really speaks to the elitism in Boston. 'You can't possibly know what you are talking about, you didn't go to college!' blah blah blah.

It wouldn't have been so bad had someone not lost her life.
 
Excellent point Van. Is anything planned in her honor? If we are going to have memorials on the greenway...it would seem fitting that something be done for her.
 
It would be fitting but I doubt that the powers the be would like to see something honoring their incompetence.
 
Re: off topic

DarkFenX said:
sidewalks said:
From what I have perceived, there are certain behaviors that contribute to and reinforce cycles of poverty and certain behaviors that contribute to and reinforce the success of upper middle class families. These are learned cultural behaviors but it seems to me that they do exist and it is somewhat naive to pretend that they don't.
What you percieve is the amount of money, not behavior. Poorer families can't always afford good education like private schools and such that wealthier family can. As you can tell, public school in Boston is horrendous but its the only choice poorer families have. Having money gives wealthy families' children the ability to join better colleges, jump start on their own businesses, and etc. What you percieve is only part of the those who are in poverty who join gangs and commits crimes, etc. These stem from the lack of proper help from school to give kids the proper education they need. Others try the best to make it into the world and trust me, it's not that damn easy. Many of you believe that it is easy to be successful. The answer is no, its not. Determination and good education may not get you the life you desire. Especially in Boston where jobs are scarce and housing prices are ridiculously high. And addition to that, many of the wealthier kids become successful through connection that they recieve from their parents' jobs or their friends. Immigrant parents don't have the luxury of having connections to high-paying companies and jobs. It's not just behavior that causes this cycle.

Yeah, I owe all my success to my private school education...

First of all, schools in Boston are not bad, children in Boston are bad and it creates a culture and inertia of not working hard in school. I have seen this overcome time and time again by extremely involved families and parents in the city (I know kids from Boston Latin and other schools), but unfortunately lower income people ARE much less involved on the whole.

A child in Boston has a much higher ceiling to reach than I did in school. They can go to Boston Latin, take all AP's, and look even better since they did it in public inner city schools and because they are contrasted against the lower-performing students in their system.

I, on the other hand, went to a school where most of the classes I wanted to take in senior year were canceled due to budget cuts. We don't have an unwieldy, huge, lumbering teachers union to strike if a class is cut. Hell, my town couldn't even pass an override for years. And we don't have piles of state and federal aid to do with what we want, we make do with what we can get and still have better outcomes than most school districts.

There are horribly mismanaged and wasteful school districts that still have great outcomes because the parents and families are involved and the kids have a strong work ethic. Hell, look at Newton, their schools suck, they have huge layers of bureaucracy entrenched, but they still have good outcomes.

I'm way off topic, admittedly, but the point is that inner city kids have just as much opportunity, if not more, than most suburban kids. They just don't take advantage of it.

Trying to stretch the truth because you want to say that poor people are no worse than rich people is not helpful here. Let's admit that lower-income people are statistically more likely to be associated with gangs, commit crime, and less likely to be heavily involved with their kids' education. You can come up with all the anecdotal evidence that you want, but does anyone really think that if you compared those numbers as percentages, rich to poor, that the poor would win or be equal?
 
Re: off topic

DudeUrSistersHot said:
Let's admit that lower-income people are statistically more likely to be associated with gangs, commit crime, and less likely to be heavily involved with their kids' education. You can come up with all the anecdotal evidence that you want, but does anyone really think that if you compared those numbers as percentages, rich to poor, that the poor would win or be equal?

you're on. i'll bet you three supportive comments on your posts if you can come up with the hard statistics backing all three items (and including reasonable income brackets and white-collar crimes, drug consumption, tax and insurance fraud, "bully" gangs, etc. -- i.e. you have to convince a reasonably impartial audience).
 
Re: off topic

DudeUrSistersHot said:
Trying to stretch the truth because you want to say that poor people are no worse than rich people is not helpful here. Let's admit that lower-income people are statistically more likely to be associated with gangs, commit crime, and less likely to be heavily involved with their kids' education. You can come up with all the anecdotal evidence that you want, but does anyone really think that if you compared those numbers as percentages, rich to poor, that the poor would win or be equal?
Many lower-income kids associante with gangs, commit crimes, etc. because of the lack of money. I know people who commit crimes because they were desperate for money. And look, only a small percentage of students go to Boston Latin School (including me) but thats the point. ONLY a few chosen are given the chance to go to such a prestigious school. Others are left out and those that aren't in exam schools suffer. Why? Because all the exam schools take the brightest students from every other schools. What happens to the other schools? All they have are students that are average or below average. Under the No Child Left Behind, money grants are only given to those school who's that passed a national test (i.e. MCAS). The rest do not recieve any funds. Thus many of the cities school do not recieve such funds and continue to suffer without improvement and the gap between educational level among schools increase.

I'm not saying poor people are no worse than rich people. I'm saying rich people has more options, more opportunities than poorer people and my point was that its the difference of wealth among the residents of Boston, not mainly the certain behavior of poorer families, that keeps the cycle of failure going.
 
Re: off topic

[
i have quite a bit of experience with relatively to very poor Chinese, Vietnamese, Bulgarian, Ugandan, and UK immigrant families, and some involvement with Indian immigrants. my experience says you are off-base. you haven't seen "hovering" parents until you've met a Chinese family with young children (its so good Hollywood has a whole sub-genre around the subject). and I've never encountered anything quite like the reach of a Ugandan family sending its children to live in the US even though the parents couldn't come with just to get them into a better school.[/quote]

I couldn't agree more, and frankly I don't think that the learned behaviors which perpetuate cycles of poverty are evident in most immigrant groups. I also don't think that those groups make up anywhere close to a majority of the students in our inner city public schools. Nor are they anywhere close to a majority of the residents in public housing. I am suggesting that there is an entrenched underclass in the United States that is disproportionately likely to commit crime, drop out of school and get involved in other anti-social behavior. I would also suggest that the people that are part of this entrenched underclass have adopted several behavioral characteristics that hamper the social and economic progress of their children and themselves. A thumbnail sketch of these characteristics would include: dissolution of the nuclear family, lack of emphasis on education within the home, disproportionate levels of drug use and high levels of incarceration. This is not a new debate. It was laid out by Daniel Patrick Moynahan decades ago and has been echoed several times in the last several years. And of course, as Bill Cosby and even Deval Patrick have recently pointed out, lower class African Americans are a well represented segment of this group.

The point is that it is disingenuous to suggest that crime, drug use, and poor educational habits cannot be associated with poverty. These problems are simply more prevalent among the poor than they are among the wealthy. I am simply saying that these things are manifestly true. I am not saying that we should diminish our commitment to the underprivileged or eliminate affordable housing from wealthy communities. [/quote]
 
I just received the following e-mail from the Asian Community Development Corporation about two public "community planning forums" that people might be interested in:

The Chinatown Gateway Coalition invites you to tell us
what you would like to see built on Chinatown's Big Dig parcels.

We can't stress enough that the Chinatown Gateway Charrette is the most important step of the entire two-year-long community process of gaining community influence on how redevelopment of Big Dig parcels in and around Chinatown either benefit or batter the Chinatown community. Please join us and help determine a sustainable future for Chinatown and Greater Boston as a whole.

Join the upcoming community planning forum to help create a community vision for the Chinatown Gateway District, a twenty-acre area linking Chinatown, Leather District and South Station.

Upcoming sessions:

Saturday, July 14 9:30am - 5:00pm
land use analysis and economics discussion

Saturday, July 21 1:00pm - 5:00pm
Transportation discussion

Both events will take place at the Metropolitan Community room on 38 Oak Street in Chinatown, just one block from the New England Medical Center T stop.

We still need volunteers for the event. Please call Alex at 617-482-2380 x 208 for more info or just show up early! Thank you!
 
9:30 - 5:00pm talk about all day. Alas, i still won't be able to go because of work and class :oops: .
 
A different sort of change in Chinatown:

A fare change in Chinatown
Restaurants add Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese items
By Sarah Schweitzer, Globe Staff | August 6, 2007

Winnie Yung grew up in a remote Cantonese village in the Chinese countryside, where white rice and vegetables were daily fare and Vietnamese noodle rolls were about as foreign as a calzone.

But one morning last week found Yung in Chinatown, feverishly scrubbing counters in a Chinese eatery that she recently purchased and plans to transform into a Vietnamese restaurant.

"Vietnamese food is low-fat and fast," said Yung, of Malden, whose husband owned a Chinese restaurant in Hanover until recently. "I wanted to try a change."

Yung is part of a growing number of Chinatown restaurateurs who are serving up non-Chinese dishes in a departure from the neighborhood's namesake and tradition.

Where chop suey and chow mein long reigned supreme, Vietnamese sandwich shops, Korean barbecue joints, and sushi bars now dot the narrow, bustling streets. And while Chinese banquet halls and seafood emporiums still form the majority of eateries in Chinatown, some say non-Chinese restaurants could one day soon catch up.

The shift, restaurant owners say, owes to an overabundance of Chinese restaurants and an American palate that is increasingly keen to a broader array of Asians foods now available in Boston.

So fractured is the Chinatown market that many restaurants now offer multiple Asian cuisines.

"We wanted to appeal to both markets," said Sue Duong, 23, a recent Northeastern University graduate of Vietnamese heritage who works summers at Xinh Xinh, her family's 18-month-old Chinatown restaurant, which serves both Vietnamese and Chinese dishes.

The influx of non-Chinese fare to Chinatown has been evolving in recent decades, and does not mean that Chinese influence has diminished. The vast majority of owners of the restaurants have Chinese roots. Though Duong's parents came to the United States from Vietnam, her grandparents were born in China. The same is true for many other owners of Chinatown Vietnamese restaurants, including the Rainbow Cafe and Original Buddha Delight restaurant.

The owner of Kaze Shabu Shabu, a Japanese restaurant, is Chinese. Ginza, a Japanese restaurant, is owned by two men of Chinese origin and one of Japanese.

Pearl Villa, which serves both Chinese and Malaysian fare, has Chinese owners.

"The various Asian ethnicities are poaching each other's cuisines to attract more customers," said Michael Liu of the Institute for Asian American Studies at the University of Massachusetts at Boston.

But restaurant owners say the grab for a wider Chinatown restaurant clientele has had mixed results. Some say lunchtime business is booming as downtown workers flock for ph? and futo-maki, but dinner traffic is slow because parking challenges thwart non-Chinatown residents from visiting. Restaurant owners are banking on new business from the high-end lofts and condominiums under construction in and around Chinatown, whose residents, they hope, will seek out Asian offerings considered more eclectic than traditional Chinese.

For years, Boston's Chinatown was a single-cuisine neighborhood. Located on reclaimed tidal flats that had been previously home to Irish, Jews, Italians, and Syrians, Chinatown was settled in the 1880s by Chinese laborers fleeing anti-Chinese sentiment on the West Coast. By the 1920s, small Chinese restaurants catered to Chinese laundrymen and merchants, according to a 1998 Princeton University dissertation made available to the Globe by the Chinese Historical Society.

In 1929, Ruby Foo's Den opened on Hudson Street and became the first Chinatown restaurant to attract a steady stream of non-Chinese customers, mostly garment factory owners and managers who were largely Jewish, according to the dissertation. A slew of restaurants opened following the 1941 razing of Chinatown's elevated rail. By the end of World War II, a restaurant district had come into being, with 26 Chinatown restaurants in 1952 that catered to non-Chinese customers. The restaurants offered Americanized Chinese food, like chop suey, adopted English names like Good Earth and Lotus Inn, and fronted signs adorned with neon dragons and promises of exotic dining experiences.

Specialists date the beginning of Chinatown's Pan-Asian smorgasbord to the 1980s, when newly arrived Vietnamese immigrants rented storefronts that had been part of the Combat Zone, a six-block zoned stretch of adult entertainment that was on the decline because of competition from X-rated home videos and suburban strip malls. Some Vietnamese restaurants departed Chinatown later that decade to open restaurants in Fields Corner in Dorchester. Those who stayed tended to be of Vietnamese or Chinese extraction, said Hiep Chu, executive director of Vietnamese American Initiative for Development Inc.

In the 1990s, Malaysian, Japanese, and Korean restaurants moved in, propelled by growing interest in Asian cuisines that were lighter than some Chinese fare. At the same time, some Chinese restaurants departed Chinatown for Boston suburbs, such as Quincy and Malden, where growing numbers of Chinese had taken up residence.

Chinatown's Chinese restaurants evolved as well.

Chop suey was excised from menus and replaced with more authentic fare.

"They now use chopsticks, no forks," said David Wong, owner of a block fronting Washington Street that includes a several Vietnamese eateries as well as his Empire Garden Restaurant.

There, he said, he now serves dim sum all day in a nod to American diners' eagerness for something different and lighter than the traditional fare of Chinese restaurants in the United States.

Still, some are bypassing Chinese altogether.

At Xinh Xinh on Friday afternoon, Dana Roszkiewicz, an employee of the state Department of Mental Retardation, flipped past the restaurants Chinese offerings to the Vietnamese ones.

"The flavors are lighter and clean. The bright colors. The taste is fresh," Roszkiewicz said as he closed the menu and prepared to order Vietnamese spring rolls and chicken with lemongrass in Chinatown.
 
I have to be honest, I'd go with Vietnamese or Thai over Chinese any day of the week, for the reasons mentioned.
 
I found a great stream of videos called "A Chinatown Banquet" on YouTube. Some of the historical vignettes are quite educational and informative.

http://www.youtube.com/user/asiancdcorg

Here are several images I stole from the videos.

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That big empty grassy lot, isn't there a plan to build housing on it? When is the groundbreaking supposed to occur?
 
IMG_7174.jpg


This is the Dainty Dot, no?

You can tell because if you look at the black glass you can see a reflection of my heart as I think about this building's fate.
 
Some of those names are off. For instance, I know the fourth photo is Kingston St. just south of Essex.

Thanks for the photos. Chinatown is a place I never spent enough time in and now I want some b?n.
 
That big empty grassy lot, isn't there a plan to build housing on it? When is the groundbreaking supposed to occur?

That's the Parcel 24 project, which has its own thread on here somewhere. It was approved a few years ago but I haven't heard any news since. Grrrrrrrrrrr.....
 
That's the Parcel 24 project, which has its own thread on here somewhere. It was approved a few years ago but I haven't heard any news since. Grrrrrrrrrrr.....

There is no historic building we would get to tear down in order to build there which limits the incentives.
 

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