Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [894]
CHINATOWN
Although the Chinese came in minuscule numbers, compared to the great waves of Southern and Eastern Europeans, the establishment of the first Asian-American community in New York City triggered powerful responses of fascination and fear. For all the tensions evoked among old-stock New Yorkers by the emergence of Polish and Italian enclaves, as Europeans they shared far more with one another than any of them did with men and women from the opposite side of the planet.
There had long been a floating population of Chinese merchants and mariners in Manhattan, for the same sea lanes that carried tea, silk, and porcelain brought traders and transient sailors. By the 1850s a tiny handful, fewer than 150, had established a quasi-permanent presence.
Some, like Ah Sue, served Asian travelers. Cook and steward on a Hong Kong New York packet line, Ah Sue had wearied of maritime travel and in 1847 opened a modest tobacco and candy store on Cherry Street. He operated as well a small boardinghouse for the Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Hindu, Maori, Hawaiian, Malay, and Annamese seamen whose vessels docked a few blocks away. More boardinghouses emerged, hosting other seamen who switched to land labor, usually in hopes of making a fortune and returning to China. Work was hard to come by, however, and many resorted to peddling cigars and Chinese candies around City Hall Park and the Bowery. Becoming familiar figures, they were collectively referred to as John Chinaman.
At the other end of the tiny group’s class spectrum were men like Quimbo Appo. Having survived the British bombing of Shanghai during the Opium Wars, Appo took to the trade routes, tried his luck in the newly opened goldfields of California, then moved to New York and in a Spring Street store began retailing tea, the city’s major Chinese import. Like other merchants, Appo mastered English speech and American mores as a requirement of doing business. With no Chinese women in town, Appo, like between a fourth and a third of the resident Chinese men, married a local woman, the Irish-American Catherine Fitzpatrick; wedlock between Irish “apple women” and Asian cigar peddlers was particularly common. Such unions ruffled racists, but the tiny numbers of Chinese involved did not raise the kinds of anxiety black-white “amalgamation” did.
After the Civil War, the community grew somewhat—reaching at most two thousand by 1880—with newcomers arriving from China by way of Cuba. When slavery was banished from British and Spanish colonies, sugar planters in Peru, Guiana, Brazil, Cuba, and Jamaica imported “coolie” laborers from impoverished sections of south China, a practice widely denounced in the United States as cruel and inhuman. In the 1860s Cuban cigarmakers recruited some of these Chinese from the sugar fields to work as hand rollers, a task at which they became expert. Given abysmal wage levels, many then traveled north on the thriving Cuban-New York trade routes. In the city, pioneer Cuban-American cigar manufacturers snapped up the highly skilled Chinese, paying some of them more than they did Germans.
This growth in the number of permanent and land-based residents fostered the emergence of an inland “Chinese Quarter,” moving away from the Fourth Ward docks into the Sixth Ward blocks above Chatham Square. Along Baxter Street and lower Mott, where it spilled into Chatham Square, a small number of stores, boardinghouses, mutual aid associations, and shrines emerged to serve the community.
In 1872 Wo Kee, a former Hong Kong merchant, moved his general goods store from Oliver to Mott, dropping the first commercial anchor in the area that would soon be known as Chinatown. A Sun reporter, visiting the store in 1880, marveled at the array of goods crammed into front and back rooms of the former residence: Chinese medicines, incense sticks, jade bracelets, dried shark fins, ducks split and baked in peanut oil, opium and pipes