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Chinatown Information
The established Chinatown within New England is located in the downtown area
of Boston, Massachusetts. The district centers on Beach Street near Boston's
South Station. The area is roughly bounded by Kneeland Street to the south,
Surface Road to the east, Essex Street to the north, and Tremont Street to the
West, with additional development extending down Tyler and Harrison streets to
the Massachusetts Turnpike. The northwest corner extends near Boston Common.
In the pre-Chinatown era, the area was settled in succession by middle-class
White Anglo Saxon Protestants from post-colonial times up to the 1830s and then
by Irish, Jewish, Italian, and Syrian immigrants as each group replaced another
to take advantage of low cost housing and job opportunities in the area. The
Syrians were later succeeded by Chinese immigrants, and Chinatown was
established in 1890. The remnants of the Syrian community began faded out by the
1940s. From the 1960s through the 1980s Boston's red light district, the Combat
Zone, was located next to Chinatown. But sandwiched between the dual expansions
of Chinatown from the East and Emerson College from the West, the Combat Zone
has shrunk to almost nothing. Currently, Boston's Chinatown is experiencing a
threat from gentrification policies as large luxury residential towers are built
in and surrounding an area that was overwhelmingly three, four, and five-story
small apartment buildings intermixed with retail and light-industrial spaces.
Today, the area hosts many Chinese, Japanese, Cambodian, and Vietnamese
restaurants and markets. While there are many employment opportunities in the
district, a common sight each morning are vans from suburban restaurants,
picking up both supplies from the many Asian markets and workers for the
restaurants.
Two bus services (Fung Wah and Lucky Star/Travelpack) provide hourly connections
with New York's Chinatown with the ride taking about four hours.
The traditional Chinatown Gate (paifang), surrounded by lions, is located at the
intersection of Beach Street and Surface Road. Once a run-down area housing
little more than a fan building for the Central Artery Tunnel, a garden is now
being constructed at this site as part of Boston's Big Dig. The Gate is visible
from the South Station Bus Terminal and is a popular tourist destination and
photo opportunity.