Like the neighborhood itself, the Chinatown gate has seen good days and bad.
Retired architect Yu Sing Jung recently recalled one of the low points in the life of the structure that today has become an icon for the neighborhood. Last week, while sifting through cardboard storage boxes filled with yellowing documents related to the gate, Jung remembered that shortly after the long overdue completion of the gate in 1982, the shiny green-glazed ceramic tiles and dragon-shaped ornaments that decorated the gate began to crack during their first exposure to Boston's icy winter.
"Chunks were coming down -- the tiles were defective and cracking," said Jung, a lively 79-year-old with dark gray hair and glasses.
Those decorative works -- weighing from about three to 180 pounds each -- were some of the most important pieces of the gate, symbolizing traditional Chinese architecture and culture. And they were suddenly considered a safety hazard by the city.
But that wasn't the worst of it. What came next was. The city had the tiles removed and replaced with embarrassingly inappropriate green asphalt shingles.
"It looked like an ordinary house roof," said Jung. "Everybody was unhappy because it looked ugly and ridiculous."
Jung, who left his native Hong Kong to study architecture in Canada during the late 1940s, was one of the many people involved in the construction of the gate, a group that included -- at various stages -- former neighborhood activist Peter Chan, retired Chinatown businessmen and brothers Frank and Bill Chin, former Boston Redevelopment Authority planner Alice Boelter, and executive secretary Robert J. Fleming of Boston's Trust Office. While he was a principal of his architectural firm Jung Brannen Associates, Jung spent more than two decades on and off with the gate -- a project that was projected to last only a couple of years. He began working with the gate at age 48, shortly before his contract with the city commenced in 1976.
"I was 71 years old when it was finished," he half-joked, referring to the long-delayed retiling of the gate that didn't begin until 1999, long after the gate’s completion in 1982.
A Lesson in Patience
Because of the failing memories of those involved and because documents related to the gate are not all centrally located, it's difficult to trace the gate’s history from the very beginning.
Frank Chin, a former purchasing agent for the city, recalls that the earliest mention of a Chinatown gate was around 1969, during the so-called "Grievance Taskforce Hearing." At the hearing, Chinatown residents told city officials their neighborhood concerns, such as crime and the need for bilingual education.
"One of the questions raised in the hearing was a Chinatown gateway to get more tourism to Chinatown," said Chin.
Chin was the only person interviewed for this story that could pinpoint the conception of the gate. It should be noted, however, that most Chinatowns in the U.S. did not have a gate prior to 1969. San Francisco's gate was not constructed until 1970; Chicago's came five years later, and Philadelphia's in 1983, followed by Washington D.C.'s in 1986. In addition, another community leader present at the hearing, Caroline Chang, said she didn't remember talk of the gate.
But it does appear that the idea did originate in the early 1970s and from community groups, mainly the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, which requested the gateway materials from Taiwan.
Peter Chan, who worked in the so-called "Chinatown Little City Hall," a neighborhood liaison office for then-mayor Kevin White, said that the neighborhood wanted the gate to show that it was, in fact, an official Chinatown.
"Before the building of the gateway, we had the hurtful memory of the Central Artery and the Surface Artery being built in Chinatown, taking down existing buildings, removing homes that were already here," said Chan, who was also involved in the Benevolent Association in the 1970s. "So…having a gateway meant that we would have something that symbolized that we have a Chinatown."
The most well-recorded history of the gate starts around 1976. That year, one day after the United States celebrated its bicentennial, a 25-ton shipment from Taiwan arrived in Boston, a sister city of Taipei. Inside the 64 wooden cases were hundreds of green tiles, four 2,000-pound white marble lion statues, various ornaments, and flags. Their first stop: a warehouse in what was then the South Boston Army Base. To the dismay of many in Chinatown, that was where the crates would spend the next five years, unopened.
A series of events -- both local and international -- would complicate and delay the gate's construction, which was once expected to be completed in time for the August Moon festival of 1978.
First came a minor planning bump. Though the materials Taiwan gave Boston were identical to those given to Chicago, the Hub's gate needed to be resized because streets in the Windy City are wider than Beantown's. Then came trouble underneath. After considering where to place the gate (at one point, the intersection of Harrison Avenue and Beach Street was named as a possible location), construction crews and planners discovered a tangle of electrical, telephone, and sewer lines underneath Beach and Hudson Streets. In addition, the traffic at the site would need to be redirected.
"We thought the biggest issue was dealing with utilities," said Alice Boelter, a former planner with the BRA, who started work on the gate in 1976. "There was a lot of structure in the street, so it was very difficult to find where you could put it."
After settling on where to build the foundation, she said, "the question was: Where does the money come from to put it up? All that the government of Taiwan did was give us the boxes" of tiles and ornaments. "They gave us the pieces, and it was our job to put the puzzle together."
Costs ended up increasing from an expected $100,000 to $300,000 and, later, hundreds of thousands of dollars more.
And apparently, some of the city money directed to the gate was misspent. Boelter told the Sampan in 1979 that a $40,000 city grant that was supposed to go to the construction of the gate never made it.
"Peter Chan and I tried to find it for a long time," she was quoted as saying about the missing money. "It's probably new trees in Mattapan some place."
More money ended up coming in from a city trust fund, the Edward Ingersoll Browne Fund, and other sources. The Chin brothers claim they worked behind the scenes with city councilors and Mayor White to help push money towards the gate's construction.
They approached White one day in 1977 with a proposal for the city to give money towards the gate's construction.
White's reaction to the proposal?
"He threw it on the sofa," said Bill Chin. White followed the action by asking the Chins how many voters they had organized in Chinatown, according to Frank Chin.
After the brothers told White that they had registered a large number of Chinatown voters, White became more cooperative, they claimed. News reports do show that 1977 was the year the Boston City Council was to vote on whether it would approve a quarter million dollar Browne Fund grant for the gateway.
***
But another problem was imminent. As Jung flipped through his records on the planning for the gate last week, he said that very little happened from 1977 to 1980.
"The reason is because the PRC" -- People’s Republic of China, or mainland China -- "is now recognized...They had trouble whether this is politically correct or not."
Several years after President Richard Nixon's earlier help warming U.S. ties with Communist China, the United States, in 1979 under President Jimmy Carter, officially began recognizing Beijing instead of Taipei.
The change in U.S. relations with China was such a problem for the gate, said Boelter, that a member of the Browne Fund got cold feet.
"The worry was that it would offend Communist China," she said, if Boston put up a Taiwan-donated gate. After the U.S. State Department gave the go-ahead for the project, planning proceeded.
But the incident does highlight the question of why Taiwan gave the gate in the first place.
According to an August 31, 1976, letter from Shi-ying Woo, Consul General of Taiwan in Boston, the gift was for the 200-year birthday of the United States and the 100-year birthday of Boston's Chinatown.
Author and urban studies professor Peter Kwong, however, suspects there was more than goodwill involved.
Taiwan and China had been competing to win over support from Chinese Americans, said Kwong, co-author of "Chinese America." That's why Taiwan began giving gates to cities such as Boston and Chicago.
"Giving gates and sending people back to Taiwan on trips and so on, that was all a PR offensive" by Taiwan, he said. But, after the U.S. recognized the PRC, he said, problems like the one with Boston's gate arose. "In New York, the debate was so intense that it became so controversial that the whole thing did not proceed." The Big Apple's gate was never built.
***
Finally, after the 64 crates had sat for five years collecting dust in the South Boston warehouse, construction began, and during the 1982 August Moon celebration, a dedication ceremony was held for Chinatown's 36-foot-high archway.
"People were somewhat incredulous because it finally happened," recalled Boelter, who joined the event 25 years ago with city, state and Taiwanese officials. "There it was, seven years later and the bicentennial had long since gone by, and people are saying 'What the heck?...Gee, thanks.'….I thought I was going to go to my grave before I saw that go up."
A Sampan news report of the long-delayed ceremony quoted Peter Chan as joking that day: "We're not cutting red tape today, but cutting a beautiful red ribbon symbolizing the dedication of the Chinatown gateway…"
Of course, when it came to the gate, work was never really finished.
Jung, during his interview for this story, pulled out a series of Polaroid photos, and pointed to one of the lions, broken and toppled over. Just months after the dedication ceremony, a truck smashed into it.
Next came the weather damage to the ceramic tiles. They wouldn't be properly replaced until about eight years ago.
But the work didn't stop there. Earlier this year, four new lions identical to the originals and costing more than $6,000 each were purchased while construction crews were working on the soon-to-be-completed Chinatown Park. The contractor, Modern Continental, which now owns the old statues, feared they would have broken during removal and reinstallation and thus decided to completely replace them. Only two have been installed so far. Interestingly, the new lions are from Xiamen, a southern city of Mainland China.
2007 Year of the Chinatown Gate
The year 2007, however, could just be the new Year of the Gate. It will soon get its proper backdrop, where residents, nearby workers, and tourists can finally enjoy the gate without the rush of traffic and city busyness.
Later this summer, the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority is expected to open the Chinatown Park at the mouth of the archway. The narrow park, which will extend along Surface Road to Essex Street, will replace what was once a messy soot-stained and heavily-trafficked section of Boston with a stone waterfall, red bamboo-like frames, art structures such as a Chinese chessboard and an abstract sampan sail and, most uncommon in Chinatown, greenery. During warmer months, the area will be colored with lacebark pines, weeping willows, cherry trees, ginkgoes, Chinese lacebark elms, golden rain trees, and bamboo.
The $5 million Chinatown Park is the smallest of the Rose Kennedy Greenway parks, roughly 30 acres of green space extending along the old elevated Central Artery, from Chinatown through the Wharf District and North End to the TD Bank North Garden. But many are holding out hope that it will brighten a previously dark corner of the neighborhood where highway work once tore apart communities and relocated families. Neighborhood activists also hope the park will create what some feel is an overdue gathering place for the gateway.
Boelter, who stopped her involvement with the gate when she left the BRA in the early 1980s, said the new park could finally make the area "a center for real community involvement."
Even after the gate's completion in 1982 and with the small plaza next to it, "you still had all the traffic going through there and it was a confusing place. It gave Chinatown, I think, a monument, but it wasn't a place that you could go for routine assembly," she said.
***
Despite its complicated history of high hopes, long delays, and veiled political motives, the Chinatown gate, just as those in other cities, has taken on a life of its own.
"Chinatowns have been established in many parts of the world by people who are not very rich and by people who are living in places that the earlier generations left off. Therefore, if you go to Chinatown, there are very few distinctive architectural structures that define it" as Chinese, said Kwong, chair of the Asian American Studies Program at Hunter College in New York. "Basically, the Chinese reside in places where the Irish and Italians used to live, so there is no distinctiveness other than the population and the lifestyles…. Chinatown gates do give something very distinctively ethnic, cultural....If you have a gate, then this somehow puts a stake in it -- this is a Chinatown."
Retired architect Yu Sing Jung recently recalled one of the low points in the life of the structure that today has become an icon for the neighborhood. Last week, while sifting through cardboard storage boxes filled with yellowing documents related to the gate, Jung remembered that shortly after the long overdue completion of the gate in 1982, the shiny green-glazed ceramic tiles and dragon-shaped ornaments that decorated the gate began to crack during their first exposure to Boston's icy winter.
"Chunks were coming down -- the tiles were defective and cracking," said Jung, a lively 79-year-old with dark gray hair and glasses.
Those decorative works -- weighing from about three to 180 pounds each -- were some of the most important pieces of the gate, symbolizing traditional Chinese architecture and culture. And they were suddenly considered a safety hazard by the city.
But that wasn't the worst of it. What came next was. The city had the tiles removed and replaced with embarrassingly inappropriate green asphalt shingles.
"It looked like an ordinary house roof," said Jung. "Everybody was unhappy because it looked ugly and ridiculous."
Jung, who left his native Hong Kong to study architecture in Canada during the late 1940s, was one of the many people involved in the construction of the gate, a group that included -- at various stages -- former neighborhood activist Peter Chan, retired Chinatown businessmen and brothers Frank and Bill Chin, former Boston Redevelopment Authority planner Alice Boelter, and executive secretary Robert J. Fleming of Boston's Trust Office. While he was a principal of his architectural firm Jung Brannen Associates, Jung spent more than two decades on and off with the gate -- a project that was projected to last only a couple of years. He began working with the gate at age 48, shortly before his contract with the city commenced in 1976.
"I was 71 years old when it was finished," he half-joked, referring to the long-delayed retiling of the gate that didn't begin until 1999, long after the gate’s completion in 1982.
A Lesson in Patience
Because of the failing memories of those involved and because documents related to the gate are not all centrally located, it's difficult to trace the gate’s history from the very beginning.
Frank Chin, a former purchasing agent for the city, recalls that the earliest mention of a Chinatown gate was around 1969, during the so-called "Grievance Taskforce Hearing." At the hearing, Chinatown residents told city officials their neighborhood concerns, such as crime and the need for bilingual education.
"One of the questions raised in the hearing was a Chinatown gateway to get more tourism to Chinatown," said Chin.
Chin was the only person interviewed for this story that could pinpoint the conception of the gate. It should be noted, however, that most Chinatowns in the U.S. did not have a gate prior to 1969. San Francisco's gate was not constructed until 1970; Chicago's came five years later, and Philadelphia's in 1983, followed by Washington D.C.'s in 1986. In addition, another community leader present at the hearing, Caroline Chang, said she didn't remember talk of the gate.
But it does appear that the idea did originate in the early 1970s and from community groups, mainly the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, which requested the gateway materials from Taiwan.
Peter Chan, who worked in the so-called "Chinatown Little City Hall," a neighborhood liaison office for then-mayor Kevin White, said that the neighborhood wanted the gate to show that it was, in fact, an official Chinatown.
"Before the building of the gateway, we had the hurtful memory of the Central Artery and the Surface Artery being built in Chinatown, taking down existing buildings, removing homes that were already here," said Chan, who was also involved in the Benevolent Association in the 1970s. "So…having a gateway meant that we would have something that symbolized that we have a Chinatown."
The most well-recorded history of the gate starts around 1976. That year, one day after the United States celebrated its bicentennial, a 25-ton shipment from Taiwan arrived in Boston, a sister city of Taipei. Inside the 64 wooden cases were hundreds of green tiles, four 2,000-pound white marble lion statues, various ornaments, and flags. Their first stop: a warehouse in what was then the South Boston Army Base. To the dismay of many in Chinatown, that was where the crates would spend the next five years, unopened.
A series of events -- both local and international -- would complicate and delay the gate's construction, which was once expected to be completed in time for the August Moon festival of 1978.
First came a minor planning bump. Though the materials Taiwan gave Boston were identical to those given to Chicago, the Hub's gate needed to be resized because streets in the Windy City are wider than Beantown's. Then came trouble underneath. After considering where to place the gate (at one point, the intersection of Harrison Avenue and Beach Street was named as a possible location), construction crews and planners discovered a tangle of electrical, telephone, and sewer lines underneath Beach and Hudson Streets. In addition, the traffic at the site would need to be redirected.
"We thought the biggest issue was dealing with utilities," said Alice Boelter, a former planner with the BRA, who started work on the gate in 1976. "There was a lot of structure in the street, so it was very difficult to find where you could put it."
After settling on where to build the foundation, she said, "the question was: Where does the money come from to put it up? All that the government of Taiwan did was give us the boxes" of tiles and ornaments. "They gave us the pieces, and it was our job to put the puzzle together."
Costs ended up increasing from an expected $100,000 to $300,000 and, later, hundreds of thousands of dollars more.
And apparently, some of the city money directed to the gate was misspent. Boelter told the Sampan in 1979 that a $40,000 city grant that was supposed to go to the construction of the gate never made it.
"Peter Chan and I tried to find it for a long time," she was quoted as saying about the missing money. "It's probably new trees in Mattapan some place."
More money ended up coming in from a city trust fund, the Edward Ingersoll Browne Fund, and other sources. The Chin brothers claim they worked behind the scenes with city councilors and Mayor White to help push money towards the gate's construction.
They approached White one day in 1977 with a proposal for the city to give money towards the gate's construction.
White's reaction to the proposal?
"He threw it on the sofa," said Bill Chin. White followed the action by asking the Chins how many voters they had organized in Chinatown, according to Frank Chin.
After the brothers told White that they had registered a large number of Chinatown voters, White became more cooperative, they claimed. News reports do show that 1977 was the year the Boston City Council was to vote on whether it would approve a quarter million dollar Browne Fund grant for the gateway.
***
But another problem was imminent. As Jung flipped through his records on the planning for the gate last week, he said that very little happened from 1977 to 1980.
"The reason is because the PRC" -- People’s Republic of China, or mainland China -- "is now recognized...They had trouble whether this is politically correct or not."
Several years after President Richard Nixon's earlier help warming U.S. ties with Communist China, the United States, in 1979 under President Jimmy Carter, officially began recognizing Beijing instead of Taipei.
The change in U.S. relations with China was such a problem for the gate, said Boelter, that a member of the Browne Fund got cold feet.
"The worry was that it would offend Communist China," she said, if Boston put up a Taiwan-donated gate. After the U.S. State Department gave the go-ahead for the project, planning proceeded.
But the incident does highlight the question of why Taiwan gave the gate in the first place.
According to an August 31, 1976, letter from Shi-ying Woo, Consul General of Taiwan in Boston, the gift was for the 200-year birthday of the United States and the 100-year birthday of Boston's Chinatown.
Author and urban studies professor Peter Kwong, however, suspects there was more than goodwill involved.
Taiwan and China had been competing to win over support from Chinese Americans, said Kwong, co-author of "Chinese America." That's why Taiwan began giving gates to cities such as Boston and Chicago.
"Giving gates and sending people back to Taiwan on trips and so on, that was all a PR offensive" by Taiwan, he said. But, after the U.S. recognized the PRC, he said, problems like the one with Boston's gate arose. "In New York, the debate was so intense that it became so controversial that the whole thing did not proceed." The Big Apple's gate was never built.
***
Finally, after the 64 crates had sat for five years collecting dust in the South Boston warehouse, construction began, and during the 1982 August Moon celebration, a dedication ceremony was held for Chinatown's 36-foot-high archway.
"People were somewhat incredulous because it finally happened," recalled Boelter, who joined the event 25 years ago with city, state and Taiwanese officials. "There it was, seven years later and the bicentennial had long since gone by, and people are saying 'What the heck?...Gee, thanks.'….I thought I was going to go to my grave before I saw that go up."
A Sampan news report of the long-delayed ceremony quoted Peter Chan as joking that day: "We're not cutting red tape today, but cutting a beautiful red ribbon symbolizing the dedication of the Chinatown gateway…"
Of course, when it came to the gate, work was never really finished.
Jung, during his interview for this story, pulled out a series of Polaroid photos, and pointed to one of the lions, broken and toppled over. Just months after the dedication ceremony, a truck smashed into it.
Next came the weather damage to the ceramic tiles. They wouldn't be properly replaced until about eight years ago.
But the work didn't stop there. Earlier this year, four new lions identical to the originals and costing more than $6,000 each were purchased while construction crews were working on the soon-to-be-completed Chinatown Park. The contractor, Modern Continental, which now owns the old statues, feared they would have broken during removal and reinstallation and thus decided to completely replace them. Only two have been installed so far. Interestingly, the new lions are from Xiamen, a southern city of Mainland China.
2007 Year of the Chinatown Gate
The year 2007, however, could just be the new Year of the Gate. It will soon get its proper backdrop, where residents, nearby workers, and tourists can finally enjoy the gate without the rush of traffic and city busyness.
Later this summer, the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority is expected to open the Chinatown Park at the mouth of the archway. The narrow park, which will extend along Surface Road to Essex Street, will replace what was once a messy soot-stained and heavily-trafficked section of Boston with a stone waterfall, red bamboo-like frames, art structures such as a Chinese chessboard and an abstract sampan sail and, most uncommon in Chinatown, greenery. During warmer months, the area will be colored with lacebark pines, weeping willows, cherry trees, ginkgoes, Chinese lacebark elms, golden rain trees, and bamboo.
The $5 million Chinatown Park is the smallest of the Rose Kennedy Greenway parks, roughly 30 acres of green space extending along the old elevated Central Artery, from Chinatown through the Wharf District and North End to the TD Bank North Garden. But many are holding out hope that it will brighten a previously dark corner of the neighborhood where highway work once tore apart communities and relocated families. Neighborhood activists also hope the park will create what some feel is an overdue gathering place for the gateway.
Boelter, who stopped her involvement with the gate when she left the BRA in the early 1980s, said the new park could finally make the area "a center for real community involvement."
Even after the gate's completion in 1982 and with the small plaza next to it, "you still had all the traffic going through there and it was a confusing place. It gave Chinatown, I think, a monument, but it wasn't a place that you could go for routine assembly," she said.
***
Despite its complicated history of high hopes, long delays, and veiled political motives, the Chinatown gate, just as those in other cities, has taken on a life of its own.
"Chinatowns have been established in many parts of the world by people who are not very rich and by people who are living in places that the earlier generations left off. Therefore, if you go to Chinatown, there are very few distinctive architectural structures that define it" as Chinese, said Kwong, chair of the Asian American Studies Program at Hunter College in New York. "Basically, the Chinese reside in places where the Irish and Italians used to live, so there is no distinctiveness other than the population and the lifestyles…. Chinatown gates do give something very distinctively ethnic, cultural....If you have a gate, then this somehow puts a stake in it -- this is a Chinatown."
Article Reference: http://www.sampan.org/show_article.php?display=1227
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