CultureNOW - Chinatown Gate at Beach Street: Peter Vanderwarker

Chinatown Gate at Beach Street
Cultural Landmarks

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Description

ABOUT THE HISTORICAL PHOTOGRAPHS
Beach Street in Boston's Chinatown takes its name from the fact that it once marked the water's edge of the original Boston peninsula. In his 1972 book, What Time Is This Place? urbanist Kevin Lynch claims that on this street, "If you look closely at the ground, you can trace the outline of the former shore." It would be wonderful to have a photograph of Beach Street as it looked when it was indeed a beach, before the South Cove landfill of the 1830s. But the two photos reproduced here depict a change almost as great, one that took place only in the past half-century. Hard as it is to believe, these photos are made from
the same place, looking in the same direction.

The older photo, taken in 1923, looks westward along Beach Street. On the right you can clearly see a section of the old Atlantic Avenue elevated line, which looped down Beach Street.(This elevated line opened in 1901, closed in 1938, and was demolished for wartime steel scrap in 1942.) The buildings at the left were built, for the most part, in the 1880s. The photo shows no evidence of Chinese inhabitants, yet there must have
been many nearby, for even as early as 1900 there were about 500 Chinese in the South Cove area.

The new photo, made in 1986, looks not down a street but across Surface, Road, above the stretch of highway that becomes the Central Artery, for which all these buildings were demolished starting in 1954. At the time, according to a contemporary news account, Chinese merchants and residents "bitterly opposed" the demolitions. Many families and businesses were displaced. In recent years the Chinese
community has again been expanding, and Chinatown's presence as a special quarter of the city is now symbolized by the new Chinese Gate, a gift from the government of the Republic of China (Taiwan) that was erected in 1982.

-Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker, "CITYSCAPES - To Chinatown", Boston Globe, 13 April 1986

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Location

Beach St & Surface Rd
Boston, MA 02111
United States

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