Quote:
Originally Posted by Steely Dan
^ if you visit chinatown in san francisco or new york or toronto or london, they are fully integrated into the urban fabric of their cities. you can just be stumbling about toronto and accidentally come across their chinatown. it's just woven seamlessly into the urban core of the city. ditto for any of those other cities.
in chicago's case, no tourist in the entire history of tourists has ever just stumbled upon chicago's chinatown. you have to want to go to chinatown (and know how to get there) to ever end up there. with the abandoned railroad land to the north, the river and industrial no man's land to the west, the stevenson/dan ryan expressways to the south, and old project land and railroad ROWs on the east, chicago's chinatown absolutely feels cut-off and isolated into its own little world in a way that i've never experienced with any other city's chinatown.
yes, from some vistas wthin chinatown you can see the sears tower rising above in the distance to remind you that you're still in chicago, but if you ever tried to walk from chinatown back to the sears tower, it'd be a long, lonely, boring walk through a lot of no man's land. that's the disconnect i'm talking about.
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Yes. Chicago lacks the smooth transition from downtown to residential neighborhoods that you get in Manhattan, San Francisco, Boston, Philadelphia and Toronto. By "North Side-centric" I mean that the transition from downtown to the North Side is smoother than it is going to the West and South sides.
In terms of its location, it's more like Toronto's Gerard St. Chinatown.
Though it's true that its location keeps it more homogeneously Chinese and less threatened by gentrification, while in Manhattan, San Francisco and Toronto it flows more into other neighborhoods.
The Armour Square community area is 72% Asian, the vast majority Chinese, so that's probably a Chinese population of around 8,000 or so. Or a "greater Chinatown" of around 20,000 if Bridgeport is included.
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