The New York City restaurant business may return to life, but Chinatown continues to struggle – thanks to growing anti-Asian crimes and a stagnant tourism industry.
“You can throw a bowling ball in the middle of Chinatown and not kill anyone,” said Wellington Chen, executive director of Chinatown’s Business Improvement District and Chinatown Partnership LDC.
The crisis of the neighborhood came after ASEAN was inaugurated, dumped on topless buildings across the Big Apple and uprooted. This is part of the violence that is only adding to the troubles of Chinatown because restaurant workers are afraid of being out at night, or even riding the metro.
“Some restaurants are asking their employees to leave early, and to travel in pairs for safety,” Chen said.
Chen says that even as he realizes he is “alive to be lucky”, a stranger stabs a pedestrian with an eight-inch knife as he walks the center of Chinatown’s social life in Columbus. Walking on the road near the park.
“The man ran from behind … running fast like an ice skater,” Chen said of the February incident. “He took the man to Paradise Square, where (Martin) Scorsese shot ‘Gangs of New York’,” Chen said, adding that the area is also known as Five Points.
The victim survived but lost a kidney. “He was in his early 30s with his fiance. His life was not even started, ”said Chen. “It was a life-changing event without any reason. The police did not call it a hate crime. But how can you come to Chinatown with an eight-inch knife and not be premeditated?”
The city is just the latest punch for Chinatown due to a shortage of tourists with ever-increasing violence, which intensified last year and earlier, with fears that coronavirus originated in China. The resulting damage is already having a lasting impact on the historic Manhattan neighborhood.
Jing Fong – a third-generation eatery renowned for its traditional dim sum trains, its sprawling three-story space and its unionized workforce – is downsizing after more than a year of conflict.
It will close the once-thriving 800-seater space for good on May 31 and move to a smaller space that is just 125 people at the end of June, said Claudia Leo’s marketing director.
It is smaller than the 150-seat space when it was founded in 1978 on Elizabeth Street. “The big place was uncertain. We finally gave up.
“Chinatown depends on tourism. Without it, no restaurant can sustain itself, ”Leo said.
The city’s largest Chinese restaurant, Jing Fong, had previously closed its doors in March – even before that. Cuomo had ordered the restaurant to be closed – as people were escaping from Chinatown at the time. It resumed in late June 2020, for take-out and delivery only. But unlike other parts of NYC, the business never really picked up again.
According to the chain, more than a third of the neighborhood’s 312 restaurants have closed permanently since last year. When landlords are allowed to start evicting tenants again, the numbers are likely to deteriorate.
Meanwhile, locals complain that it is unclear what the city’s public officials are helping.
“We need more support at the government level,” Johnny Liu, the owner of Chinatown’s second-largest restaurant Golden Unicorn, said through his son, Darren Liu. “We don’t get any money for arts and tourism despite bringing in taxes.”
Liu said that as he passes through the neighboring Lower East Side, his outdoor dining area and sidewalks are disturbed by life. But a few blocks run from the south to Chinatown – especially in the evening – and it almost looked as if the city was still under lockdown mode.
Even with indoor feeding capacity of up to 50 percent, the Golden Unicorn, famous for its traditional dim sum cart, is still generating just 10 percent to 20 percent of its pre-pandemic revenue, Liu said. In contrast, other restaurants in the city have claimed side dishes for pre-epidemic sales of 80 percent or more.
This appears to be part of a larger problem, according to a recently released report by the New York Federal Reserve and AARP, which found that Asian American businesses did worse than all other businesses during the epidemic.
Approximately 90 percent of small businesses lost revenue in 2020 by Asians, compared to 85 percent of black Americans; 81 percent of businesses owned by Hispanics, and 77 percent for whites.
Earlier this year, city officials allocated $ 35 million to small businesses in lower-income neighborhoods and communities of color-butt abandoned large swathes of Chinatown.
Mayor de Blasio announced another plan last week, offering $ 155 million to help small business recovery and on-the-job training – but nothing that specifically targets Chinabown.
“We need grants and loans specifically for the Chinatown community,” Leo said.
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