Welcome to Chinatown
Pell Street and Bowery
Baxter Street and White Street
Canal Street and Eldridge Street
Canal Street and Eldridge Street
Canal Street and Eldridge Street
East Broadway and Pike Street
East Broadway between Pike Street and Forsyth Street
East Broadway between Pike Street and Forsyth Street
Division Street and Pike Street
Monroe Street between Pike Street and Market Street
Looking South on Eldridge Street
The intersection of Division, Forsyth and Eldridge Streets
A different view of the same intersection
The East Broadway Mall is a hidden gem of the Old New York. Squashed under the Manhattan Bridge and the rumbling trains above, dozens of small businesses, and hundreds of people, buy and sell food, clothes, jewelry, electronics and more. The following few pictures are just a taste of this incredible, mostly un-gentrified community.
Above is an open-air market under the stone arches of the Manhattan Bridge.
Street vendors on Forsyth Street
Looking East on East Broadway
The intersection of Canal Street, Ludlow Street and Division Street
The bustle of people here on East Broadway is constant as small businesses and street vendors compete for customers to buy their wares.
Nowhere, not even this hidden section of Chinatown down under the Manhattan Bridge, is safe from the plague of gentrification. As luxury condos, office towers and hotels sweep Lower Manhattan, replacing generations of working class communities, small businesses and cultural centers, they leave in their wake a gulf of blandness, of bleak glass monoliths devoid of anything human. Rising in the background of the above picture is a new sleek, blue glass office building that towers over the rest of the century-old neighborhood.
Canal Street between Forsyth Street and Eldridge Street
But let’s not end on a low note. Chinatown as a community is still going strong. The neighborhood on East Broadway, along with the neighboring Two Bridges community, both of which are working class communities that have made their home in the tenements and projects of Lower Manhattan for decades, have recently defeated a proposal to build four, one thousand foot luxury condominium towers along their coastline. As I write this, the developers are appealing the court’s decision to side with the communities, so the future is far from certain. But the simple fact that working class immigrant New Yorkers, the heart and soul of this city, are fighting and starting to win gives me hope.
Canal Street between Forsyth Street and Eldridge Street
Grand Street and Chrystie Street