Manhattan Chinatown · Flushing · Sunset Park

How New York Built Its Chinatowns

From Mott Street to Flushing and Sunset Park, the people, migrations and meals that shaped Chinese New York.

By J. Jiang · History · Food picks are Researched · How we review

Order roast duck on Mott Street, lamb skewers in Flushing and pork-stuffed fish balls on Eighth Avenue in Sunset Park. You have just eaten three different versions of Chinese New York.

Roast ducks, soy sauce chickens and roast pork hanging in a Cantonese barbecue shop window. — Roast duck, soy sauce chicken and roast pork in a Cantonese barbecue window.

Each one has its own story. Manhattan Chinatown grew from a small Cantonese-speaking community in the 1870s. Flushing took off a century later, when Mandarin-speaking families from Taiwan chose Queens and built something new. Sunset Park grew in the 1980s, when families from Manhattan and overseas followed the N train to cheaper homes in Brooklyn. Later arrivals, from nearly every province in China, changed all three.

Different people, different languages, different food. The three neighborhoods are siblings, not copies.

How Big Is Chinese New York?

New York has the largest Chinese population of any city outside Asia. About 628,200 Chinese New Yorkers lived in the five boroughs in 2023. Count the suburbs and the metro area passes 900,000. Chinese immigrants are now the city’s largest foreign-born group.

That community stretches far beyond three neighborhoods. Elmhurst in Queens, Bensonhurst and Avenue U in Brooklyn, and East Harlem in Manhattan all have busy Chinese main streets. Staten Island’s Chinese population nearly doubled between 2018 and 2023, and Asian-owned shops keep opening on New Dorp Lane. New Jersey and Long Island have suburban hubs too, in places like Edison, Parsippany and Nassau County.

These are lively places and worth the trip. But three neighborhoods play at a different scale. They are whole districts where Chinese is the language of the street, the bank and the doctor’s office. Manhattan Chinatown, Flushing and Sunset Park are the big three, and this story is about them.

Manhattan Chinatown: Where It All Started

How it started

Manhattan Chinatown is the oldest of the three. Its story usually starts with Ah Ken, a Cantonese businessman who arrived around 1858. He ran a boarding house on Mott Street and a cigar shop on Park Row, and he is often called the first Chinese person to settle here for good.

Pell Street in Manhattan Chinatown around 1899, crowded with men, Chinese shop signs and the elevated train at the end of the block. — Pell Street, around 1899, with the Bowery elevated train at the end of the block.

By the 1870s, a small neighborhood had formed on Mott, Pell and Doyers Streets. Most settlers came from Taishan (Toisan) in Guangdong province and spoke Taishanese and Cantonese. Many had worked out West, then moved east as anti-Chinese violence spread in California. In New York, work meant hand laundries, cigar rolling and small restaurants.

In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act. It was the first US law to ban immigrants by race. Chinese workers could not come in, and Chinese immigrants already here could not become citizens. The ban lasted 61 years.

Few families could form under those rules. For decades, Chinatown was a “bachelor society” of men living far from their wives and children. It stayed tiny, a few thousand people in a handful of blocks.

So the community built its own support system. The Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association (CCBA), founded in 1883, became Chinatown’s unofficial city hall. It settled disputes, helped with business deals and spoke up for residents when the city would not. Its president was known as the “Mayor of Chinatown.” Family and hometown associations did the same on a smaller scale. More than 140 years later, the CCBA is still on Mott Street, at number 62, and still offers low-cost English classes to new immigrants.

Who came next

The Exclusion Act was repealed in 1943, when China was a US ally in World War II. Chinese immigrants could finally become citizens, but the new quota was tiny, about 105 people a year.

The real change came in 1965. The Immigration and Nationality Act ended quotas based on national origin, and families could finally reunite. Chinatown grew fast, spilling past Canal Street into Little Italy and the Lower East Side. Garment factories filled old lofts, and new restaurants opened for the families moving in.

In the late 1980s and 1990s, immigrants from Fujian province arrived, many from around Fuzhou. They settled along East Broadway, which became known as Little Fuzhou. They brought their own language, Fuzhounese, their own businesses and their own food, like fish balls stuffed with pork and peanut butter noodles. Cantonese Chinatown and Fujianese Chinatown now share the same streets.

The streets today

The historic core is a tiny triangle of Mott, Pell and Doyers Streets, with Bayard Street and Chatham Square at its edges. From there, Chinatown spread in every direction.

Pell Street today, with Chinese restaurant signs, fire escapes and paper lanterns strung overhead. — Pell Street today, still lined with restaurants more than a century later.

Today it runs roughly from Worth Street north to Delancey Street, and from Lafayette Street east along East Broadway, under the Manhattan Bridge and beyond. Canal Street is the main artery. Mott, Mulberry, Elizabeth and Grand Streets carry the fish markets, bakeries and roast meat windows. East Broadway and the blocks around Division Street are the Fujianese side. You can walk across the whole thing in about 20 minutes.

The neighborhood has taken hits. After 9/11, street closures near City Hall cut off traffic and hurt local business for years. Rising rents have pushed families to Queens and Brooklyn. In 2020, the pandemic emptied the streets and many family shops closed for good.

But the old core is still there. Walk down Doyers Street and you are walking the same crooked block Ah Ken’s neighbors walked 150 years ago.