Chinatown Connections
In 2024, the New York City Economic Development Corporation (EDC) launched Chinatown Connections, the City’s current effort to redesign Kimlau Square and surrounding streets, which includes a plan to add a “Chinatown Welcome Gateway”– a cultural marker intended to represent the Chinatown community. According to EDC, “Chinatown Connections will redesign the gateway to Manhattan’s Chinatown into a safe and vibrant space that celebrates the neighborhood’s Chinese heritage, improves multimodal circulation into and around Chinatown, and supports local businesses.” The plan includes a Street Improvement Project (SIP) along Park Row and at key intersections, led by the Department of Transportation (DOT).
From EDC’s Chinatown Connections website: “In 2022, in response to the acute challenges the neighborhood is facing, the Chinatown neighborhood received $20 million in grant funding from the New York State (NYS) Downtown Revitalization Initiative (DRI) for 11 projects to support the neighborhood’s economic recovery. Local stakeholders identified these 11 projects through the Chinatown Downtown Revitalization Strategic Investment Plan as catalytic investments intended to improve multimodal circulation into and around Chinatown, support local businesses, and celebrate the neighborhood’s rich cultural history.”
Artist Info Session: Chinatown Connection’s “Gateway” Project
Think!Chinatown is hosting an info session for NYCEDC’s Chinatown Connections: Chinatown Welcome Gateway project. In this session, Think!Chinatown will provide important contextual information about cultural representation and the history of gateways in Chinatown. Marvel Architects and NYCEDC will also share about the project, selection process, timeline, budget, and answer any questions.
Think!Chinatown is working as a sub-consultant to advise on the community engagement process to Marvel Architects, the architectural design consultant for the NYCEDC's Chinatown Connections project. Specifically, T!C is solely advising Marvel's community engagement process, and not executing it. While T!C is supporting outreach to get the word out about the artist and panelist call, we do not have any input in the selection of the artist. Once the panel has identified its finalist, however, T!C will be available tosupport the selected artist by providing cultural context of the neighborhood.
Think!Chinatown is here to create space for conversation with artists who wish to engage deeply with the complex context of our neighborhood and the many layers of our communities. We are not for or against any particular design, but we do hope this call process will identify an artist who has expansive thinking about what cultural placekeeping can mean for an iconic neighborhood like Manhattan’s Chinatown —someone who can go beyond the stereotypes and tropes, and think about this opportunity to reflect on Chinatown's place in America's narrative.
From July to November 2024, Think!Chinatown presented Making or Faking Chinatown? Representing People, Place and Culture, an urban planning focused exhibition that explored the unresolved debate of cultural representation in Chinatown’s built environment through extensive research, photographs from Chinatowns across North America, and artwork by artist John Lee.
As our community prepares to take on this important public conversation, we invited our community to study the context and exercise our urban planning vocabulary to make informed decisions about our neighborhood’s public space and our future.