The Hawaiian-born New York journalist William Yukon Chang died on September 4, 2019, and his obituary appeared in the New York Times yesterday morning. (The online version is here. The World Journal also published its own obituary here.) I was … Continue reading
Completed in 1960, the rippling, modernist Chatham Green cooperative apartment building (165-215 Park Row) dominates the intersection of Park Row and Worth and St. James Streets to the southeast of the old core of Chinatown. Between 1928 and the mid-1950s, … Continue reading
In 1882, Congress passed and the president signed an order barring all Chinese laborers from entering the United States for ten years and enshrining previous court decisions denying Chinese aliens the right to naturalize. In 1892, Congress extended the ban … Continue reading
This simple 1915 building, located at 49 Mott Street in the heart of Chinatown, was constructed on the site of a notorious 19th century tenement house. Since the mid-1920s, it has been the headquarters of the Lin Sing Association (聯成公所). Founded … Continue reading
This very plain 20th century building occupies the site of an earlier structure at 4 Mott Street where Chinglun Frank William Lee (李錦綸) was born in 1884. The younger son of a Chinese immigrant father and a German American mother, … Continue reading
In 1917, New York State voters finally approved women’s suffrage, despite having rejected it in a referendum just two years earlier. The majority of the pro-suffrage votes came from New York City, where women’s suffragists ran a tremendously organized campaign … Continue reading
The two buildings sit directly across from each other on Canal Street. The first, 191 Canal, is located at the same address as the prewar tenement that once housed the Chinese Hand … Continue reading
This fairly nondescript 19th-century building at the corner of Mott and Pell Streets in New York’s Chinatown once housed the brokerage business of James Waye “Shavey” Lee and James Yip Typond. … Continue reading
This building at 62 Mott Street is the Zhonghua Dalou/中華大樓 (the best translation is probably the “China Tower”) and houses the Chinese Community Center and the headquarters of the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association of New York (CCBA-NY). The structure itself … Continue reading
This fairly ordinary building once served as the office of Sing Kee, also known as Sing Kee Low (劉成基). Sing Kee was a native of San Jose, California, and moved to New York at some point in the 1910s. During … Continue reading