Sept. 30 marks the mid-autumn festival, an appropriate time to look at Boston’s Chinatown, long one of the city’s most vibrant neighborhoods. Since the first Chinese immigrants began arriving in the 1880’s, the familiar surroundings of the neighborhood served as a transition to American life for new arrivals. Asian immigration patterns evolved with regional politics, and the area saw influxes of people from Vietnam, Cambodia, and other nations as well as other regions of China. Today Chinatown is a thriving, but crowded place, with roughly twice the population density - and about half the per-capita annual income - as Boston overall. -Lane Turner and Lisa Tuite
-
Boston Globe Archive
Jan. 27, 1946: Boston schoolchildren from the Quincy school on Tyler Street, under the supervison of headmaster John P. Maloney, rehearsed for a celebration of the Chinese New Year. Pauline Yee tied a hair bow and put the finishing touches on the holiday costume for Caroline Jane Wong.
-
Boston Globe Archive
May 1, 1931: This man read standing in front of the Chinese "newspaper." It was actually a community bulletin board on the outside of a brick wall on Oxford Street where local announcements, job notices, news items, and cultural events were posted. This custom came from China where community announcements were posted in a similar fashion.
-
Boston Globe Archives
July 3, 1948 : When the automobiles left the parking lot at Kingston and Beach streets in the twilight hours on weekdays and all day Sunday, the parking lot was transformed into a softball diamond for Boston's Chinatown youth. A long fly ball hit by "Mr. Team" Yong drove in two runs in this picture.
-
John J. Landers/Globe Staff
Feb. 3, 1957: The din of thousands of firecrackers filled the air on Tyler Street as members of the Gung-Ho Club paraded through the area with the traditional dragon, touching off the Chinese New Year celebration.
-
Hugh O'Donnell/Boston Globe Archives
Jan. 6, 1951: Posters in Chinese informed residents of the so-called “alien registration” regulations. Jan. 10, 1951, was the last day for undocumented immigrants to register with the government according to the law. Thirty thousand immigrant “address report cards" for the 25 cities and towns of the Boston Postal District had been turned in so far. The posters informed people that the Chinese Benevolent Association, then at 14 Oxford St., would assist anyone who needed help completing the government forms.
-
Paul Connell/Globe Staff
May 16, 1974: Susanna Lee appeared happy to wait on customers seeking to buy popular Chinese magazines.
-
Donald Preston/Globe Staff
Nov. 8, 1976: Officially zoned as an adult entertainment district by the city of Boston, Chinatown residents had to share their neighborhood with the strip clubs, X-rated movie theaters, and crime of the Combat Zone for decades. That indignity gradually passed with progressive community action that forced the city to reconsider adult zoning, with the makeover of the Big Dig and rising real estate prices also helping to force out the red light businesses.
-
Paul Connell/Globe Staff
July 13, 1981: Jose Rivera, the owner of a small apparel factory that employed 35 people at 15 Kneeland St., helped a seamstress with her work. Harrison and Kneeland streets were once the center of the apparel making industry in New England.
