Mary Yee
This, along with “No Arena in Chinatown,” are the rallying cries of the Save Chinatown Coalition against the 76er’s plan to build an 18,000-seat arena on the southern border of Chinatown. If built, this portends the destruction of our community—a cultural, spiritual, and physical center for the Asian American community. For over 150 years Chinatown is where it is and has survived both because of racial discrimination and despite it. Our community is historically significant and historically symbolic because it remains a site of resistance to institutional racism and emblematic of other marginalized communities of color. Chinatown is the only ethnic/racial community left in Center City. It was neighbors to Skid Row until that was demolished in 1973. Its real estate became coveted because of its proximity to the Vine Street Expressway and Center City.
Since the 1960s we have endured these projects within or adjacent to Chinatown: Vine Street Expressway Expansion; Market Street East; the Convention Center; a federal prison; Phillies baseball stadium; and Foxwood and Mohegan Sun casinos. While we stopped the last four projects, over the years we have paid a heavy price with losing half of our affordable housing and small businesses and significant business revenue during construction and convention center events. Now our community is divided north to south by an interstate highway and limited where it can grow. Yet, we are one of the few North American Chinatowns that is still thriving and growing.
Chinatowns have always been places of refuge, social support, employment, and mutual aid for immigrant families. Since the 1970s our Chinatown has fostered new housing; a public school; arts, youth, and civic organizations; neighborhood commercial; and scores of new small businesses. For successive generations, Chinatown has been a place to honor our cultural and linguistic heritage; forge social relationships; and find solidarity against the racial insults of American society. This is a place where we are not seen as the “other,”—where people look like us, talk like us, and eat the same “exotic” food. It is a place of belonging. What the 76ers and the other governmental, institutional, and private entities have tried to tell us is that we don’t belong. Moreover, we don’t deserve to be here, because we are told repeatedly we are impeding “progress.” To the rich and politically powerful, we Asians are invisible until they want our land or want to blame us for spying or spreading a virus.
Although strongly substantiated that sports venues are not successful economic development tools, municipalities and media continue to bow to the interests of billionaires like Adelman, the 76ers owner. We know from past history that the traffic, parking, construction effects, and accelerating property rents and values will mean, at best, the creation of a Disney-like tourist zone of national chains and high-rent commercial and residential development. For us, this is environmental racism and social injustice in the broadest sense.
To other communities that know the threat of displacement or gentrification, we say “The struggle goes on!” Please stand with us against big business that values profits over people’s lives. We will not be moved!
