It’s hardly news that Chinatown is transforming right now. The highest profile incursions into the neighborhood has been the development along Washington St. south from Downtown Crossing - the renovation of the Paramount, the erection of the Ritz-Carlton high rise, and now the new construction on the parking lot at Beach Street. On the other end, the Central Artery parcel will be freed up for park space. Add to that the curtailing of the red light establishments in the area, and the question remains how much Chinatown will remain Chinatown, or whether its current Chinese and Asian inhabitants and users will be priced out.
One indicator suggests the latter: the decline of Asian grocers in the neighborhood. Over the last year, Thai Binh Supermarket closed, moving out to Dorchester to service the Vietnamese community there. Now I see that C-mart Supermaket, across the Surface road, is closed. And flyers posted around Chinatown mention the likelihood that the Super88 in Herald Square will be forced to close. Right now, to my count, there is only one Chinese grocer and one pan-Asian grocer left. That more than anything else may both portend the end of the neighborhood as a proper Chinatown, and hasten the demise.
Clearly two trends are behind this. Real estate values are being driven up, both by development and by the general cleaning up of the neighborhood, so that middle-class city-dwellers feel safe, even walking down Lafayette at night. On the demand side, as residents move out to suburbs or more distant neighborhoods, the Asian communities become more dispersed. Fields Corner is the new epicenter for Vietnamese-American Boston. The Chinese community has an outpost on Mission Hill and perhaps elsewhere. And Quincy has a Super88 Market, suggesting a sizeable South Shore Asian immigrant presence.
Not only are these developments relevant to the fate of Chinatown, but they speak to the likelihood that Boston is conforming to a new national trend: cities with middle-class (even bourgeois) centers and immigrant reclamation of inner suburbs. As the Brookings Institution put it in their excellent report on current immigration patterns: “By 2000 more immigrants in metropolitan areas lived in suburbs than cities, and their growth rates there exceeded those in the cities. Most notably, immigrants in emerging gateways are far more likely to live in the suburbs than in central cities.” Even though it’s what the report calls a continuous immigration gateway, Boston may be becoming more like the emerging-gateway city of Atlanta. No disrespect to the emerging-gateway cities - who I’m sure see worthy cultural effects of immigration as well - but I think something would be lost if Boston city center loses all but its ethnic restaurants.
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