Lydia Lowe, Author at Sampan

Lydia Lowe

Boston May 23, 2025 0

Let’s Rename Phillips Square After Beloved City Activist Tunney Lee

As the Boston Transportation Department continues to engage community members in plans to improve Phillips Square in Chinatown, a new idea has caught on with neighborhood residents, community leaders, and advocates. At a hands-on design workshop last month, residents and community workers of all ages gathered around tables with maps and pictures to develop a vision for that section of Harrison Avenue with tables and chairs between Essex Street and Oxford Place. Five different groups reported on their ideas, and […]

Boston May 27, 2023 0

Chinatown Needs Green Space Now

Boston’s first Urban Renewal Project, bulldozing the New York Streets neighborhood, resulted in decades of injustice for Chinatown and other working class neighborhoods, particularly communities of color and immigrants. After more than three hundred buildings were razed, Chinatown’s land was turned over to construction of the Central Artery in 1954 (“Interstate 93”) and the Massachusetts Turnpike Extension in 1963 (“Interstate 90”), truncating a vibrant family neighborhood at its southern and eastern ends. Throughout highway construction, institutional expansion, then downtown revitalization, […]

Front Page December 13, 2022 0

Opinion: Affirmative Action and Asian American Admissions

Some 45 years ago, I was a young Asian American college student in California, who worked with Chicano and Black students statewide to protest the first major attack on minority admissions. This grew out of a lawsuit by a rejected white applicant to UC Davis named Allan Bakke, who charged that he had suffered “reverse discrimination.” In 1978, so many Asian American college students realized that an attack on affirmative admissions programs would be a setback for Asian Americans that […]

Boston August 5, 2022 0

Preserving Chinatown, One Row House at A Time

To afford the average purchase price of a Boston home, a household would need to earn at least $181,000 a year, according to a recent Boston Globe story. In Chinatown, property values have skyrocketed since the luxury development boom and remain high despite the current recession. What has that meant for Chinatown’s immigrant, working class residents? The signs of gentrification now visible throughout the city took root early in this community. American Community Survey data for 2017 revealed that the […]

Reggie Wong Park brings local sports teams together during August Moon Tournament

September 2019, before the Covid pandemic shut the world down, was the 75th annual North American Chinese Invitational Volleyball Tournament, involving 162 teams from across the continent who gathered to compete in the traditional Chinese American sport of 9-man volleyball. Last year’s tournament was held in Toronto, but in 2024, the tournament will come home to Boston’s Chinatown. 9-man Volleyball History 9-man volleyball is a team sport utilizing nine players per side and a slightly larger (10 x 20 meter) […]

Boston August 21, 2020 0

Chinatown Master Plan 2020 covers a broad spectrum of future development and community needs

The Chinatown Master Plan Committee released Master Plan 2020 with two recent launch events, involving more than a hundred participants from the community, local officials, and other interested stakeholders. Chinatown Master Plan 2020 is a 91-page report, with English and Chinese language versions, that includes data snapshots, updated community development priorities, and identification of four “opportunity areas” where development could support community health and stability. Drafted out of a year-and-a-half planning process involving residents, small business owners, community organizations, and […]

Lydia Lowe

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