[wardlow]

I don’t think any of North America’s historic Chinatowns are the dominant landing place for Chinese immigrants anymore, and probably haven’t been since the 1950s. Just like Italians coming to Toronto most likely don’t move to Little Italy. But some of these historic Chinatowns continue to have a great cultural or familial significance to the region’s Chinese people.

The issue with Winnipeg’s Chinatown is that there does not seem to be any group taking the lead on even talking about the future of the neighbourhood. The Chinatown Development Corp. has been around for almost 50 years and has sometimes been very long on vision (they hired Gustavo Da Rosa to develop an urban renewal scheme in the early ‘70s) but mostly short on money to execute their vision. I don’t know where they’re at now – I think the last thing they did was demolish the Shanghai Restaurant, which was arguably the most important Chinatown landmark of them all. I worry they are unwilling to let go of the Chinatown ‘brand’ while continuing to the see the physical fabric of the neighbourhood gradually disappear. Decades of property owners waiting for the Second Coming of the Core Area Initiative has eaten away at the small scale buildings, the texture, the colour, and the interest that makes historic Chinatowns successful. Currently it’s more or less a wasteland that only really sees crowds on Sundays when the suburbs come for dim sum.

Meanwhile, I would imagine neither the City, the BIZ, the Market Lands team, or anyone else would ever do anything but defer to the Chinatown Development Corp. and whatever’s left of the Chinatown business community. They wouldn’t want to look like they’re erasing the cultural history of the neighbourhood by moving away from the Chinatown image.