Why was the trail needed?
First of all, the very rich history of the Chinatown neighborhood is invisible in a lot of ways. But so much has happened there, and it’s such an interesting history. So that needs to be visible and known. Chinatown has been overlooked as compared to other [historic] neighborhoods, but it’s just as significant, and [Chinese people have] been there since the 1870s.
Also, Chinatown has been going through a lot of displacement [of longtime residents] in the last 20 years, particularly since [around] 2010. That displacement crisis made us feel we need a community stabilization strategy. The Chinatown Stabilization Committee, which is affiliated with us and the Chinese Progressive Association, was launched to support those stabilization efforts. A lot of that strategy is about developing new affordable housing and preserving existing housing as affordable, but it’s also about helping tenants organize against eviction. There are a lot of different components to it.
How has historic preservation been a part of that?
Even though our knee-jerk reaction to historic preservation is often like, “We don’t want to … tell everybody what color to paint your door,” we do want it to be difficult to demolish these buildings. Because once you demolish a building, tenants are never coming back. So we started exploring that relationship between historic preservation, celebrating our history, and anti-displacement and community preservation. And we decided, let’s take the historic and cultural preservation idea and interpret it in the way that we need.
That’s been a lot of the focus of our work in recent years. And we think that part of that is celebrating the history of the neighborhood as always being an anchor community for immigrant, working-class families. Whether it was the Irish, the Europeans, the Syrian and Lebanese communities, or the Chinese. And that’s why we called it the Immigrant History Trail [instead of] exclusively celebrating Chinese American history. Because it’s all part of that history of being that anchor neighborhood, and that’s what we’re trying to preserve. That’s all part of the history that we share.
