From mural art to fashion and music, the vibrance of the Chinese diaspora seeps from every pore of Manhattan’s Mott Street and showcases the community’s culture. Now, the city seems to want in on the culture, too.

In February, Mayor Eric Adams and the New York City Department of Transportation (DOT) announced the $55.8 million Chinatown Connections project to “beautify” and “draw visitors to the neighborhood” by constructing a Welcome Gateway and street art installations in Kimlau Square and along the shuttered Park Row thoroughfare, where the New York Police Department (NYPD) headquarters are located. According to Manhattan Community Board 3, part of the project will be “coordinated” with NYPD in order “to reorganize French barricades and parking.”

Some locals are doubtful that the endeavor will uplift Chinatown’s history, legacy, and community. In an interview with Hyperallergic, Amy Chin, a board member of the nonprofit Think!Chinatown, expressed concerns that the project could draw attention away from what many locals believe to be over-policing, contributing to neighborhood gentrification and the erasure of its longtime residents. 

“Has anyone asked for pretty art on the police barricades?” Chin said. “Why are we spending our money this way?”

At an open street fair on Saturday, August 24, DOT announced the four artists selected for Chinatown Connections who will each receive up to $20,000 for their project: Deanna Lee, Isolina Minjeong, Chenlin Cai, and Singha Hon. Attendees were invited to participate in surveys conducted by two of the artists to share feedback on the project. A working group for Chinatown Connections, however, wasn’t given the correct date for the event and received only 24 hours’ notice to provide feedback, according to correspondence reviewed by Hyperallergic. This miscommunication mirrored what community leaders perceive as an overall disconnect between Chinatown residents and the project itself.

The NYC Department of Transportation did not respond to Hyperallergic’s request for comment.

The project comes amid community-led calls to reopen the crucial Park Row thoroughfare that once connected Chinatown to other parts of Lower Manhattan. According to Chin, the Park Row garage was originally given to the neighborhood in exchange for NYPD building its One Police Plaza headquarters, which many activists now recognize as a hub for processing arrested protestors. But after 9/11, NYPD took over the garage and closed the entire Park Row street, citing precautions against terrorist threats. The “frozen zone,” which remains in place, cut off local businesses from parking and a critical transportation route. In a July 24 press release, Chinatown Core Block Association Founder Jan Lee argued that this takeover has potentially lost the city $1 billion because the NYPD now uses the once-affordable garage for free, explaining that “customers and residents of Chinatown have lost 23 years of parking equaling 3,358,000 parking days.” 

“The police took back their giveback,” Chin said.

Lee said that the frozen zone has led to at least five lawsuits filed against NYPD over the years. In 2004, the New York State Supreme Court sided with Chinatown locals over the closure. Another was settled in 2008, after which the city and NYPD agreed to “reduce the impact of the closure on pedestrians and ambulances traveling to Downtown Hospital” and to “meet with residents to discuss larger changes.” At a town hall held at the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association on July 25, Chin and several others claimed that police had been parking on the streets without the proper placards, another blow to locals who need the spaces to conduct business.

Tensions continue to mount with claims of underreported police harassment and the construction of the city’s mega jail, which has physically damaged homes and shuttered businesses. Artist-led organizations including Chinatown Art Brigade and Art Against Displacement have long protested the project, and beginning in 2020, the Museum of Chinese in America and then-President Nancy Yao faced backlash after the institution received money in connection with the jail’s construction.

But some see Chinatown Connections and the street art installations as a productive opportunity, including participating artist Deanna Lee, who hopes the project can help thwart gentrification in the neighborhood.

“The NYPD is considered by many as an oppressive, occupying presence in Chinatown, which is demonstrated by what looks like the permanent transformation of Park Row from Kimlau Square to Frankfort Street into an extension of the campus of the police headquarters,” she said, adding that the project may “motivate some actions about the nature of public spaces and how they are used and controlled.” Hyperallergic has contacted the three other artists selected for the project for their thoughts.

Alison Kuo, a local sculptor, did not apply for the Chinatown Connections project in protest of its potential role in the neighborhood’s erasure. 

“Many socially conscious artists reject the idea that police make us safer,” Kuo told Hyperallergic in an interview. “Why then should we be tasked with decorating a traffic barricade on what is essentially land stolen from Chinatown by the NYPD?”

Chinatown’s historic tensions with the NYPD far predate the 2001 closure of Park Row. In 1975, police beat a Chinese-American man named Peter Yew after he intervened in their attack on a 15-year-old driver during a minor traffic incident. The assault sparked a massive protest weeks later, with thousands of people flooding the streets and local businesses shutting down. The iconic photographer Corky Lee documented the historic demonstration, during which protesters demanded that the NYPD not only drop charges against Yew but also end its practice of targeting undocumented people and forcing “any people who look Asian” to show their papers. During Donald Trump’s presidency, the Marshall Project reported on NYPD’s frequent involvement in deportation proceedings, thousands of which were filed against Chinese people.

Jeanie Chin, an original member of Chinatown’s historic Basement Workshop artist-activist collective, attended many of these protests during the ’70s and has led efforts to reopen Park Row. She called the Connections project a “harbinger of gentrification” in an interview with Hyperallergic.

“It’s really painting over something that should not be there,” she said. “We would like to see the barricades gone, so putting artwork on them is really not helping us. It is just trying to beautify the problem.”

Kuo also commented on the city’s lack of investment in existing art and culture organizations in Chinatown. “Public art has to come from our community and emanate out,” Amy Chin echoed.

In 2022, the Center on Poverty and Social Policy reported that 24% of Asian New Yorkers experience poverty, more than twice the rate of their White counterparts. For many who live in the neighborhood, art installations like the Chinatown Connections project don’t make up for high poverty rates, skyrocketing costs of living due to gentrification, or the frequently unspoken negative interactions with police.

Some even see the plan for a Welcome Gateway as a direct sign of the city’s disregard for the Chinatown community’s own vision for art and culture, Kuo explained.

“Chinatown doesn’t need the city to manage how it creates art, culture, and social services,” she added. “We already do all these things for ourselves.”