Chinatown, Greektown

Toronto, like many cities across North America, uses its street signs to identify neighbourhoods. Chinatown and Greektown are no exception.

In Greektown, which extends along the Danforth for several blocks, Greek signs are posted above the standard English signs. It’s more a token recognition of the neighbourhood’s historical ethnic character than anything else.

In the downtown Chinatown, however, all street signs are bilingual, and these Chinese/English signs can even be found on streets well outside the neighbourhood, like on the Queen Street West shopping district, across from MuchMusic and a block away from the Paramount entertainment complex.

Chinatown by Night

In comparison to the increasingly polished neighbourhoods around it, Boston’s Chinatown is an oasis of grit, a place that actually feels comfortable and well-worn, like an old pair of jeans.

Chinatown is Changing

In September, the owner of Swatow, an import/export business, announced he will replace his St. Laurent Blvd. store with a $20-million shopping centre – the first major real-estate investment in Chinatown since the 1980s – that will include a supermarket, office space, a rooftop banquet hall and small boutiques similar to those found in Toronto or Vancouver’s trendy Asian malls.

Earlier this year, a number of new businesses opened elsewhere in the neighbourhood, including the third Canadian location of Xiao Fei Yang, a Chinese hot pot chain with hundreds of locations across Asia.

These changes in Chinatown’s retail landscape – toward businesses that appeal to a wider segment of the population, like young people and Mandarin-speakers from the mainland – are happening as Montreal’s growing Chinese population is becoming increasingly dispersed throughout the city.

“The demographics of Chinatown are definitely changing,” said Ting Kwan Hung, a community organizer who lived in Hong Kong, Liverpool, New York and Toronto before coming to Montreal in 2004. “There are more and more non-Cantonese speaking people and you also see more Chinese youth who speak French.”

Nodes of Chinese businesses and services have emerged outside of Chinatown, especially in Brossard, home to the largest concentration of Chinese immigrants in the Montreal metropolitan area. Other neighbourhoods, like Ville St. Laurent, Côte des Neiges, Verdun and the west end of downtown, also have large or growing Chinese populations.

Now that Chinese supermarkets, restaurants, dentists and other services are found throughout the city, can Chinatown stay relevant to Chinese Montrealers?

“There’s a lot of new immigrants, but they don’t spend much money,” said Tran Tao Cam, the vice-president of the Montreal Chinese Chamber of Commerce. “There are also lots of students from very rich families, but they don’t come to Chinatown. Look at the area near Concordia, along Ste. Catherine. There used to be only two or three Chinese businesses, now there’s 30 or 40.”

Tran worries the high cost of parking, issues with cleanliness, competition from business in other parts of the city and even the rising dollar will keep people from coming to Chinatown in the future. Still, he said, it remains “a very special area for business,” one that continues to draw a large variety of people.

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Chinese Food Around Corner

Two generations of advertisements in downtown Boston

Signs of the Far East

The topic of old commercial signs is esoteric enough, but I’ve managed to find an even more obscure type of commercial signage: 1960s-era Chinatown signs that use Rickshaw or some other kind of orientalist typeface. Most of them have disappeared, for obvious reasons, but it’s still possible to find traces of them in cities around the continent.

These two examples are from Montreal and Boston. In Montreal, only the shadow — or rust stains, to be more precise — of Restaurant Leo Foo are visible on this aluminum-clad building on St. Laurent. In Boston, I was surprised to see this vintage sign for the See Sun Market (which sells Quality Oriental Food!) on a somewhat dilapidated building on Harrison Avenue.

Through the Door

Toy surname association, East Georgia St.

Single room occupancy hotel, East Georgia St.

Greeting card and lai see shop, Pender St.

Signs of Chinatown

In a city whose urban landscape sometimes seems too neat, too standardized, too inorganic, Vancouver’s Chinatown is a refreshing enclave of clutter, unabashed commerce and grime: visible signs of human occupation. One of my favourite things about it is the multitude of signs, layers upon layers of them. Above are just a few examples found on Pender, Keefer and East Georgia streets.

A Sunday in Chinatown

Fruit vendor on Clark Street

Posters on Clark Street

Chinese seniors’ home on de Bullion

Clean Up Montreal’s Chinatown

This Saturday is the annual Chinatown Clean-Up festival, organized by the Chinese Family Service of Greater Montreal, a non-profit community organization. It might sound kind of odd — a cleaning festival? — but it promises to be a lot of fun. Participants will spend a couple of hours sweeping up different sections of the neighbourhood while variety show presents music, sketches and other entertainment. Politicians will make speeches and do the photo-op thing. Best of all, volunteers will be rewarded with an organic cotton American Apparel t-shirt and a free lunch at the Man Sau Centre.

This year’s event is green-themed and co-sponsored, among others, by Éco-quartier and Green Life, a group dedicated to raising environmental awareness in the Chinese community and promoting a more city- and community-focused kind of environmentalism. While volunteers clean, a variety show in Sun Yat Sen Park will present sketches on recycling in Cantonese, Mandarin and French, and information booths will tell you how to reduce your environmental impact.

Perhaps the most important thing about Chinatown Clean-Up, though, is that it’s a a symbolic event designed to promote Chinatown and the Chinese community as an indispensable part of Montreal. “It’s meant to get the Chinese community together, but it’s also an intercultural exchange between everyone in Montreal,” says the event’s organizer, Laine Tam (who also happens to be a contributor for Urbanphoto). “I think it’s a great way to showcase what Montreal is all about, that it’s a multicultural and multilingual city, despite recent controversies.”

I’ve spent a lot of time in Chinatown over the past several months. It’s a bigger neighbourhood than most people realize, extending beyond the short commercial district between St. Urbain and St. Laurent, and a lot more diverse. Thousands of people live there, most of them elderly immigrants, and thousands more go there every day to shop. Most are Chinese, certainly, but they are Chinese from very different places: Mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Vietnam and a host of other countries. Shopowners and shoppers alike are a ployglot bunch, speaking Cantonese, Mandarin, Vietnamese, English and French.

For the community, that diversity means that events like the Chinatown Clean-Up are necessary to bring disparate elements of the community together. For other Montrealers, the Clean-Up is a great way to reacquaint themselves with their own city’s small but venerable Chinatown.

The 2007 Chinatown Clean-Up will take place on Saturday, September 8th from 11am–2pm, at the corner of Clark and La Gauchetière. Contact Laine Tam at lainecfs@gmail.com or (514) 861 5244, ext. 231, for more details.

Where Ulysses S. Grant Buys His Choi Sum

Among the dozens of groceries, butchers, bakeries and other businesses on Spadina Avenue in Toronto is Asian Farm, an oddly-named supermarket that stands out for two different reasons: the fact that it is open 24 hours a day and the fact that it features a portrait of Ulysses S. Grant on its sign. What exactly does a nineteenth century American president have to do with a place where you can buy fried tofu, bok choy and live turtles at three o’clock in the morning?

Not much, is the obvious answer. A Google search on Asian Farm’s strange sign reveals a certain record of insalubrity—it was closed for two days in February because “the operator failed to prevent gross unsanitary conditions; [failed] to provide adequate pest control; [and failed] to maintain room free of animals,” among other things—but no obvious connections to Grant. Perhaps it is an homage of sorts, to a president who, unlike those who followed him, actually encouraged Chinese immigration to the United States: in 1868 he signed the Burlingame Treaty with China, which secured the rights of Chinese nationals living in the US. In 1880, however, a few years after he left office, the treaty was amended to restrict Chinese immigration; in 1882, it was completely overturned with the passing of the Chinese Exclusion Act.

But this hardly explains why Grant is found on the sign of a Toronto supermarket. One hint might come from the portrait itself: look closely and you will see that it is identical to the portrait of Grant found on the American fifty dollar bill. Considering this relationship with with money, then, it is reasonable to assume that the owners of Asian Farm consider Grant’s image to be a symbol of wealth or good fortune.

Still, this raises more questions than it answers: why Grant and not the more recognizable image of George Washington, who is found on the one dollar bill? Alternately, why stop at fifty bucks when you can have one hundred, in the form of Ben Franklin?

A New “Chinatown” Grows in Montreal

On a cold January night, Fabian Jean and his mother, Lily, were enjoying a warming bowl of tong shui (sweet dessert soup) at the Chinese restaurant Prêt à Manger on Ste. Catherine St. West.

“I find it’s actually a lot better than the Chinese restaurants in Chinatown,” Fabian said.

“It’s so hard to park in Chinatown, too,” added his mother, who was born in Hong Kong, but moved to Montreal “too long ago to remember.”

Lily Jean (the name, which is Toisanese, is pronounced like the jean in blue jeans) and Montreal-born Fabian, an artist who lives on the Plateau, have seen the area west of Concordia University revitalized by students and immigrants.

“It was a struggling part of Ste. Catherine St. for many years,” Fabian said. “It’s refreshing to see a bit of life here.”

The transformation goes beyond Ste. Catherine. In the last few years, thousands of students, immigrants and business owners from Asia have turned the west end of downtown, from Guy St. to Atwater Ave., into a sort of Chinatown West.

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The Death of Chinatown?

Apparently, Toronto’s Chinatown is dying. “Most of the good restaurants have gone. Only a few fruit stands remain. Litter swirls around the cold and lonely sidewalks,” proclaimed the Toronto Star last March. As sensational as those claims may be, they merely echo the rumour that has been circulating for years: that the neighbourhood is in its death throes.

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An Evening in Chinatown

Montreal’s Chinatown, more than a century old, is small but bustling — almost as if to spite the zoning restrictions and megaprojects that have hindered its growth over the years.

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