• 1 Josi Ward, “‘Dreams of Oriental Romance:’ Reinventing Chinatown in 1930s Los Angeles,” Buildings (...)
• 2 Mae Ngai explores the agency of Chinese self-representation in transcultural contexts, including t (...)
• 3 David Chuenyan Lai, “The Visual Character of Chinatowns,” in Paul Groth and Todd W. Bressi (eds.), (...)
• 4 Sujin Eom, “Traveling Chinatowns: Mobility of Urban Forms and Asia in Circulation,” Positions, vol (...)
• 5 Kay J. Anderson, “The Idea of Chinatown: The Power of Place and Institutional Practice in the Maki (...)

1Unlike its transcontinental peer in San Francisco—each having held the title of largest Chinatown in the West—New York Chinatown largely lacks the visual tropes common to more intentionally commodified ethnic enclaves. When San Francisco Chinatown was rebuilt in 1906 as an Orientalized commercial spectacle, its Chinese-inspired roofs and colorful ornament were designed by white architects informed by real estate interests that included Chinatown’s commercial elite. Los Angeles New Chinatown, built from scratch in 1938 by a consortium of Chinese American business people, similarly relied on white architects to translate Chinese architectural tradition for the urban Californian tourist market. Reducing Chinatown aesthetics to the purely economic, however, overlooks the diasporic Chinese agency in culturally or politically strategic self-representation.1 Echoing Mae Ngai’s thoughts on Chinese exhibits at world’s fairs around the turn of the 20th century, underpinning these aesthetic choices were goals both economic and ideological: “to make money” and to translate elements of Chinese culture for a largely white audience.2 David Chuen Lai outlined an iconography of Chinatowns: Chinese roofs; the colors red, yellow, and green; lanterns and dragons.3 The work of Sujin Eom, Chuo Li and Erica Allen-Kim exposes the political motivations underlying the conscious construction and proliferation of these forms in Chinatowns globally at mid-century and later.4 If, as Kay J. Anderson argues, “Chinatown is a social construction with a cultural history and a tradition of imagery and institutional practice that has given it a cognitive and material reality in and for the West,” how does that tradition of imagery serve its Chinese and Chinese American constituents?5

• 6 Greg (“Fritz”) Umbach and Dan Wishnoff, “Strategic Self-Orientalism: Urban Planning Policies and t (...)

2The lack of a unified architectural program in New York, despite periodic attempts to comprehensively plan, reveals something about the heterogeneity of the diasporic community as well as Chinatown’s internal and transnational politics. It may also account for the lack of scholarly interest in its built environment, about which little has been written. The scant previous scholarship has focused instead on the unbuilt environment, in particular the failed efforts to architecturally Sinicize Chinatown during the second half of the 20th century, dismissed as attempts at cultural commodification in service of the tourist trade.6

• 7 Lee receives brief mentions in many English-language histories of modern architecture in China, in (...)
• 8 彭长歆. 在族群与国家之间 ——纽约华裔军人忠烈坊设计回溯[J]. 新建筑. Changxin Peng, “Between Ethnicity and Country: Designing th (...)

4The deployment of Chinese architecture in Chinatown was backed by the ROC, but facilitated by New York native Chinese American architect Poy Gum Lee (1900-1968). Lee was unique as an American-born member of the first generation of Chinese professional architects instrumental to the development of modern Chinese architecture during the 1920s and 30s, and accordingly, this story has as much to do with architectural and political currents in China as in New York. This period in China’s modern architectural history is well documented, yet the understanding of Lee’s contributions remains fragmentary.7 Recent scholarship in both China and the U.S. seeks to piece together Lee’s remarkable transnational career, yet there remains much to be discovered. A definitive list of his commissions in China has yet to be established or documented, however the discovery of Lee’s papers in 2014 shed light on his work in China as well as his role as the most prolific yet forgotten Chinese American architect to practice in New York’s Chinatown.8

• 9 Charlotte Brooks, Between Mao and McCarthy: Chinese American Politics in the Cold War Years, Chica (...)
• 10 “Whom We Shall Welcome,” Report of the President’s Commission on Immigration and Naturalization, W (...)

6The change in immigration law was one component of the U.S.’s larger strategic embrace of Chinese Americans in service of its economic and ideological imperialism in Asia in the postwar period.9 Sanctioning acceptable expressions of Chinese cultural identity demonstrated the inclusion of Chinese in American society. This promoted a strategic narrative of racial diversity and freedom of ethnic expression as the U.S. attempted to counter the accusations of white supremacy levelled by the CCP and the Soviet Union, which, by the U.S. government’s own admission, “called attention to the color line drawn in United States immigration law” and its “implication of racial inferiority.”10

• 11 Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism, op. cit. (note 9), p. 19.
• 12 Ibid., p. 19, p. 41-60; Mary Ting Yi Lui, “Rehabilitating Chinatown at Mid-Century,” op. cit. (not (...)
• 13 Winston Kyan, “Electric Pagodas and Hyphenate Gates: Folklore, Folklife, and the Architecture of C (...)

7This strategic effort reflects what Christina Klein calls the “global imaginary of integration.”11 Klein, Mary Ting Yi Lui, and Ellen D. Wu, have demonstrated how the positive inclusion of Chinese in the mid-century American narrative was enacted in part through popular culture coverage of Chinatown, much of which avowed an appreciation of China’s ancient civilization and Confucian wisdom, while simultaneously making great effort to point out how the Chinese in America were heteronormatively fulfilling the expectations of modern American society.12 That embrace was extended to Chinatown’s built environment, which was already, in the words of folklorist Winston Kyan, “America’s preferred destination ghetto.”13 American fondness for consumption of Chinatown culture, which was largely conflated with Chinese culture, enabled the ROC to promote its “authentic” Chinese architecture to a receptive audience.

• 14 Henry K. Murphy, “Adaptation of Chinese Architecture,” The Oriental Engineer, vol. VII, no. 3, May (...)
• 15 Jeffrey W. Cody, Building in China: Henry K. Murphy's “Adaptive Architecture,” 1914–1935, op. cit. (...)

10In 1921-1922, his first encounter with projects in China, though at a distance, came as a draughtsman in the New York office of Murphy & Dana, later Murphy McGill & Hamlin. The firm’s Oriental Department was active in designing private and public projects in China that would fulfil principal Henry K. Murphy’s vision of “adaptive architecture,” which he described as “new Chinese architecture, or rather an old architecture, with a new use.” Drawing heavily on his love of Imperial Chinese architecture, Murphy wanted to create a Chinese architecture that “not only pleases foreigners but proves convincing to the Chinese themselves,” and believed he would succeed when “the Chinese take up the work we have started.”14 As an advisor to the Republican government, and with a large staff of foreign-educated Chinese architects, including Poy Gum Lee, Murphy’s influence on the practice of modern Chinese architecture is undisputable.15 In Murphy’s Oriental Department in New York, Lee detailed Chinese roofs and imperially-inspired ornament for “adaptive buildings” at Yenching University, a missionary college in Beijing. Through Murphy, Lee met Chinese architect Lu Yanzhi (1894-1929), with whom he would later collaborate in China.

• 16 “Lee [...] is one of the brightest and keenest young fellows I have run up against in a long time… (...)

11Like many of his Chinese American peers struggling against the racist power structure of the U.S., Lee saw greater prospects for a professional career in China. In 1923, he was hired as the first staff architect for the YMCA China Building Bureau in Shanghai, working under the direction of Arthur Q. Adamson. Lee’s artistic and architectural talents were recognized by the YMCA, and despite his relative inexperience, he was given a three-year contract.16

• 17 Neil McMillan Jr., “Report of A Study of the Young Men’s Christian Association Buildings in Japan, (...)

12At the YMCA, Lee was tasked with overseeing the final design and construction of Association buildings throughout China. To this point, much missionary architecture followed the Murphy model of applying Chinese roofs or ornament in a bid for local acceptance. During Lee’s three years in the China Building Bureau, however, the YMCA pursued what it felt was “a unique opportunity to influence Chinese ideas as to good foreign style architecture.”17 Of eight association buildings overseen or attributable at least in part to Lee between 1923 and 1927, seven were designed in Georgian, Spanish or Renaissance revival styles, while only one, a building in Chengdu designed by Danish architectural historian and missionary Johannes Prip-Møller, features a Chinese roof.

• 18 For a detailed and critical discussion of early architectural professionals in China see Peter G. (...)

13Lee entered private practice in Shanghai in 1927. This was the same year the precursor of Chinese Society of Architects was founded in Shanghai, the first professional organization for architects in China, of which Lee was a charter officer and member. During the first decades of the 20th century, many young Chinese were sent abroad to Japanese, American and European architecture and engineering schools with the intention of bringing back needed skills to a modernising and increasingly nationalistic China. These architects were to become members of China’s “first generation” of professional architects.18 Though born and trained in America, Poy Gum Lee would enter the architecture profession at a defining moment in Chinese architectural history, participating in the search for a representatively Chinese architectural modernism alongside this first generation.

• 19 To name only a few, scholarship on modern Chinese architectural history includes Tony Atkin, Nancy(...)
• 20 Delin Lai, “Idealizing a Chinese Style: Rethinking Early Writings on Chinese Architecture and the (...)

14The creativity and eclecticism of early Chinese modern architects developing a profession within the context of national politics complicates the notion of a singular stylistic expression of modernity in Chinese architecture. The incorporation of Western building materials with traditional Chinese elements and forms, at times denatured through material or context, was widely interpreted. These included buildings with greater Western influence, variously deemed the Adaptive or Chinese Renaissance; to a “National” or “Palace” style more clearly inspired by Chinese historical precedent; to stylized “neo-Chinese buildings that bore Chinese ornament but were more aligned with international modernism and functionalism.19 Regardless of externalities, these efforts sought, in the words of Lai Delin, “an architectural idiom that is simultaneously modern and uniquely national.”20

• 21 Mitchell Schwartzer, “The Sources of Architectural Nationalism,” in Darren Deane, Sarah Butler, Ra (...)

15The 1920s and 30s were a time of architectural experimentation with representation of Chinese identity, most conspicuously and reductively signified by the flying-eave roof. China was not alone in its pursuit of a national architectural identity, as the dislocations of modernity and internationalism gave rise to nationalism across the globe. Mitchell Schwarzer defines nationalism as “a set of political efforts aimed at better cohering the industrializing state with its modernizing subjects.”21 So too is architectural nationalism a project of coherence. In China, this entailed unifying geographically disparate, culturally and linguistically distinct peoples—including overseas Chinese living in Chinatowns—under the figurative and literal Chinese roof.

• 22 Lu & Lee Letterhead, New York (United States), Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA), Poy Gum Lee Co (...)

16Though not the designer, Lee was engaged to supervise construction of the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum in Nanjing, completed in 1929. The first national monument of the Chinese Republic, it was also the first most visible integration of East and West by a Chinese architect, Lee’s former colleague, Lu Yanzhi.22 (fig. 2) Lee also completed Lu’s Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall in Canton (1931). For the remainder of his career, he was closely associated with these two deeply nationalistic projects. Thirty years later, Lee would quote the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum in Chinatown.

• 23 “Ground to Be Broken Soon for Capital Theatre in Nanking,” The China Press, 3 May 1934. The Admini (...)

18Despite his foundational participation in the Society of Chinese Architects, his association with architects credited as the principal practitioners and theorists of modern Chinese architecture, and even his participation in major national architectural projects, there is no evidence that Lee himself was an architectural ideologue. In practice, Lee designed in a range of styles befitting the cosmopolitan experience of Shanghai. Rarely deploying the Chinese roof, Lee preferred to incorporate Chinese references more subtly in his commissions. Lee’s Moderne Woosung Quarantine Station (1935), for example, minimally complies with the official roof requirement by relegating it to the tower. (fig. 3) Some of his private commissions were referred to in the press as “neo-Chinese,” though Lee also favoured the Spanish and American Colonial revivals to which he might add a Chinese element, like his Spanish revival Cosmopolitan Apartments in Shanghai (1934) with its pagoda-inspired finial. (fig. 4) By the mid-1930s, however, Lee pursued international modernism, like the functionalist New Capital Theatre in Nanjing (1934), which he based on the Administration Building from the 1933 Century of Progress exhibition in Chicago; and his functionalist Yan Mansion in Shanghai (1936), that would not have been out of place in Europe.23

• 24 Though not completely away; the roof remains a recurring element and argument in modern Chinese ar (...)

19The Japanese occupation and the Chinese Civil War cut short Lee’s career in China. Between 1942-1945, Lee taught architectural design and engineering at St. John’s University in Shanghai, which had adopted a Bauhaus-influenced curriculum in the early 1940s, and was influential in moving Chinese architecture away from the big roofs of the Nanjing decade.24 No record of Lee’s time at St. John’s has come to light, frustrating researchers interested in understanding this transitional period in Lee’s career. At the chaotic close of the Second World War and amidst the ongoing Chinese Civil War, Lee’s two decades of professional practice in China ended with his repatriation to New York in late 1945.

• 25 “Bank of China of Shanghai Asks State to Permit It to Open Agency in This City,” New York Times, 2 (...)

20In July 1946, just months after Lee’s return, the Bank of China inaugurated a new branch office at the foot of Mott Street on the southern edge of Chinatown, which had been planned since August 1945. Originally founded in 1912 to function as a central bank for China, after 1928 it was responsible for commercial banking, financing much of the Nationalist government’s foreign trade and manging foreign financial transactions. Even as a commercial bank, under 50% ownership by the Nationalist government, Bank of China remained an essential financial and foreign relations tool of the Nationalist government. Bank chairman T.V. Soong was China’s former finance minister and the brother-in-law of General Chiang Kai-Shek.25 Chinatown’s merchant class would have relied heavily on the Bank of China to conduct their import/export businesses and transfer funds between New York and China.

• 26 Edward Denison and Guang Yu Ren, Luke Him Sau, Architect: China’s Missing Modern, Chichester: John (...)
• 27 The “pagoda roof” is mentioned in an article about the dedication of the True Light Lutheran Churc (...)
• 28 “New York’s Good Neighbor—Chinatown,” Washington (United States), Library of Congress, Prints & Ph (...)

21For an institution with its own architecture department, headed for many years by Chinese architect Luke Him Sau, architecture was clearly important and of symbolic significance to the Bank of China.26 Unlike its major investments in new architecture in Shanghai, Hong Kong, and elsewhere in China, however, in New York the bank occupied a small footprint within extant buildings. In Chinatown, a five-story, 19th-century former loft building at 198 Worth Street was remodelled to include what was termed at the time a “pagoda roof.” 27 What appears to have been a glorified elevator bulkhead with upturned eaves was topped in a tall, nine-ringed finial traditional to pagoda design. (fig. 5) Despite the c. 1870 façade visible on floors 3-5, with its sleek glass and aluminium storefront, the bank was described in 1946 as “the most modern building in Chinatown.”28

• 29 Sujin Eom, “Traveling Chinatowns,” op. cit. (note 4), p. 698-703; Charlotte Brooks, Between Mao an (...)

22Despite the relatively modest milieu, the grand opening of the Bank of China’s Chinatown branch was attended by bank chairman Soong, the past and present Consuls General of the Republic of China, and Woodrow Chan, CCBA president and KMT activist. The ROC and KMT were particularly interested in asserting a political presence in New York, which had emerged in the postwar era as the corporate and financial capital of the world. By late 1946, New York had been selected as the future site of the United Nations, and ROC’s lobbying efforts, through the proxy of Chinatown, would increase into the early 1950s. This phenomenon was not limited to New York: As Sujin Eom has described, ROC representatives participated in the reconstruction of Yokohama’s Chinatown in the early 1950s; and Ellen D. Wu and Charlotte Brooks have described similar ROC involvement in San Francisco Chinatown during the same period.29

• 30 Him Mark Lai, Chinese American Transnational Politics, edited by Madeline Y. Hsu, Chicago, IL: Uni (...)

23The presence of high-power political operatives at the opening of a modest bank branch office also illuminates the relationship between the ROC, KMT and the residents of Chinatown. After the KMT consolidated its power into the functioning ROC government in 1927, it strengthened ties with overseas Chinese communities in the U.S., who were at that time, after all, Chinese—legally and/or culturally unassimilated. The KMT relied on overseas Chinese to fund political efforts in China, and raise awareness of events in China to the American public. KMT loyalists were sent to Chinatowns to participate in local politics—including leadership positions of the CCBA—and to encourage overseas Chinese patriotism to China.30

• 31 “The Construction of the First Chinese Presbyterian Church” Pamphlet. New York (United States), Mu (...)
• 32 Charlotte Brooks, Between Mao and McCarthy, op. cit. (note 9).
• 33 “Report of the Chinatown Building Project Committee,” Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, (...)

24At the Bank opening, the dignitaries announced The Chinatown Building Project (CBP) urging the people of Chinatown to produce “splendid landmarks” since “in the post war era, New York is the centre of the world, yet Chinatown has no outstanding buildings.”31 The primary focus of the CBP was the construction of a new building for the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, or CCBA. Founded in 1883 and known as the Town Hall of Chinatown, the CCBA remains today an umbrella organization for the over 60 family, regional, and business associations that emerged to provide mutual aid through economic, social and cultural support in the wake of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.32 The CCBA had backed the KMT since before the 1911 revolution, and the Bank of China and Consul General of the Republic of China maintained honorary co-chairmanships of the committee.33

• 34 Fan Wenzhao (Robert Fan) is credited as the design architect of the Shanghai YMCA, and Lee as its (...)
• 35 “Chinatown to Have Own Town Hall,” New York Times, 22 May 1947.

27In 1947, Lee proposed a boxy modernist block incorporating modest Chinese decorative motifs. (fig. 6) Its massive stone base and central entry portal may reference the Beijing qianmen, or gatehouses, a reference Lee and his fellow architects Fan Wenzhao and Zhao Shen used in the Chinese YMCA in Shanghai (1931).34 A one-story wall topped with what looks like a Chinese-roofed walk extended south from the principal façade, enclosing the open space playground behind it. The interior would house association headquarters and community meeting space, a museum, a tea room, and auditorium, and the school; outside would feature a playground at grade and a garden and play area on the roof. It reflects the direction of Chinese architecture in the 1940s, which was moving away from the big roof as a defining feature.35

• 36 Ibid.

28A drawing published in the New York Times in May 1947, lacked Lee’s typically detailed drafting style, and appeared somewhat crude, but it made its way to Lee’s associates in China, several of whom sent letters of congratulations. Some may have recognized it as a version of Lee’s restrained “neo-Chinese” style, which relied more heavily on ornament and less on overt references to typologically Chinese precedents. Stripped of its “oriental” motifs, the design bore a resemblance to Lee’s unrealized design for the Rockford, Illinois YMCA of the same year.36 (fig. 7) Remarking on Lee’s proposed “Chinese building,” a correspondent from Shanghai noted:

• 37 Unknown to Poy Gum Lee, Letter dated 24 June 1947. New York (United States), Museum of Chinese in (...)
• 38 “New York Chinatown Builds their Townhall,” (unpublished manuscript). Ibid.

29The writer further congratulated Lee on having “the honor to introduce Chinese architecture into [sic] United States.”37 Though the primary constituency of the building was the Chinese American community, a press release by the CCBA noted that it would provide a suitably “Chinese ambience” in Chinatown that would equally benefit tourists. The majority of CCBA members had a stake in the tourist economy.38

• 39 Soo Yuen Association, Rolled architectural drawings, New York (United States), Municipal Archives, (...)
• 40 Hip Sing Association to Department of Housing and Buildings, 26 August 1946. New York (United Stat (...)

30Responding to the Bank of China’s call for “splendid landmarks,” Chinatown’s associations undertook remodelling efforts. Just north of the future Town Hall site, the Soo Yuen Association (68 Mott Street) filed plans to update their 1870s tenement building in July 1946 (Irving Fiertag, architect with Foo F. Louis, associate architect). This modest design, with metal dougong or bracket sets supporting the small flared roof over the fifth-floor fire escape, recalled the roofed balconies of the earliest days of Chinatown.39 In late August 1946, a month after the CBP announcement, the Hip Sing Tong filed plans with the New York City Department of Buildings to remodel their 19th-century four-story former loft building at 16 Pell Street to include a recessed balcony at the fourth floor surmounted by an elaborate false roof treatment mimicking traditional Chinese roof elements in corrugated metal and aluminium.40

• 41 Chinese Merchants Association building was estimated to cost $293,000. New York (United States), M (...)

35While Lee developed the concept and overall design direction for the On Leong, the final design and built version was attributed to the office of self-taught White architect Andrew J. Thomas (1875-1965), a prolific designer of housing who was not previously associated with Chinese architecture or Chinatown. Thomas’s office filed for the building permit in mid-1948.41

• 42 Brooks’ detailed political analysis provides greater detail and nuance than can be summarized here (...)

36A possible clue to the change in architect from the Lee to a “Western” firm is found in the political struggles between the CCBA and On Leong leadership at the time. The On Leong Tong had the money and power to complete their construction project, whereas the CCBA did not; each also had its own political agendas with respect to politics in China. According to Charlotte Brooks, “The On Leongs and their building embodied the threats that [KMT operative Woodrow] Chan saw to his prestige as CCBA-NY chairman.” As the architect for the CCBA’s Chinatown Building Project, Lee may have been caught between them.42 Nonetheless, Lee claimed the building on his resume.

• 43 “Chinatown Aglow for Business Fete,” New York Times, 7 November 1950.

37Lee’s loss of the commission may equally have been a matter of cost. However retrograde Lee’s design appeared, Thomas’s version reduced it to cartoon. Thomas adopted Lee’s general design, but in a three-story building that lacked Lee’s attention to detail and proportion. The balcony on Canal Street did not receive its Chinese roof, yet the cast stone balconies were reportedly adapted directly from “the Imperial Palace at Peiping,” an Imperial reference for a Republican building in line with Henry Murphy.43 As described by the New York Times,

• 45 “Chinatown Erupts in Tong Festivities,” New York Times, 9 November 1950.
• 46 “Chinatown Aglow for Business Fete,” op. cit. (note 43).

38Still the most iconic building in Chinatown, upon its opening, the On Leong Merchants Association was described by the New York Times as a “handsome Chinese-American styled building” that was "built along both Chinese and American lines [topped with] a genuine three-roofed pagoda.”45 The Times further suggested that it was two buildings in one, representing “some of the culture of Old China, generously blended with that of the New World.46 These interpretations mirrored the reception of modern Chinese architecture in the Chinese press two decades earlier, as well as reflecting the coverage of Chinese Americans themselves in the popular cultural “imaginary of integration.”

• 47 Ibid.

39Designed by Lee in 1948 in response to the CBP’s call for “splendid landmarks,” the On Leong building was completed by Thomas’s firm in November 1950, five months after the announcement of the China Village urban renewal plan. The New York Times noted that the On Leong building was a "forerunner" of other buildings proposed in the neighbourhood, which would "fit neatly into the design" of “hotly debated China Village,” though these plans were initiated in response to the CBP.47

• 48 Eng Suey Sun Association Announcements, Chinese Nationalist Daily [Min Qi Ri Bao], 17 October 1950 (...)
• 49 New York (United States), Municipal Archives, NYC Department of Records & Information Services, Bl (...)

40In October 1950, the Eng Suey Sun Association announced it had raised enough money from associations across the country to engage a “Western” construction firm to design and build its new building at 5 Mott Street, which it has been planning since 1948.48 Eng Suey Sun retained Andrew J. Thomas to adapt its former tenement into a modern Chinese style building.49 When it opened in April 1952, the sleek but modest four-story cast-stone-faced association revealed functionalist influences, and included a single-eaved flared hipped Chinese roof, at the time the second largest Chinese roof in Chinatown (no longer extant). (fig. 10) A year later, Poy Gum Lee designed an even larger roof for the Hoy Sun Ning Yung Association, farther north on Mott Street, but it was never realized. (fig. 11)

• 50 Christopher Lee Yip, “San Francisco’s Chinatown: An Architectural and Urban History,” PhD disserta (...)

42Since the late 19th century, Chinatowns had been associated in the popular imagination with substandard living conditions and disease. As early as the late 1930s, Chinatown in San Francisco and New York were proposed sites of public housing investment targeted at reducing the spread of disease outside of Chinatown as much as improving the material condition of its residents. The Federal Housing Act of 1949 provided a mechanism and funding for the provision of affordable housing through slum clearance. Ping Yuen (1951) in San Francisco became the first public housing complex designed and built specifically for Chinese Americans. Its White designers overlaid Sinicized ornament onto large-scale modern housing blocks in an attempt to fit this new typology into the Orientalized low-rise commercial architecture of Chinatown.50

• 51 “Chinatown Doomed to Make Way for a Bowery Park: Ulcer of Oriental Vice at the Heart of East Side (...)
• 52 Funding requirements, however, mandated that the housing could not be allocated on the basis of ra (...)

43The creation of public housing specifically for Chinese Americans was a milestone in American recognition of Chinese American citizens as fellow Americans. Eligibility for public housing, of course, depends on citizenship, and hundreds of units of quality affordable housing would materially acknowledge the presence—and acceptance—of a permanent Chinese American community. At least three previous city plans had called for the wholesale destruction of New York’s Chinatown to excise the “ulcer of Oriental vice.”51 The China Village Plan (1950) would be the first large-scale project in New York, intended to improve Chinatown for its residents.52

• 53 Herman T. Stichman to Robert Moses, 6 June 1950. New York (United States), LaGuardia & Wagner Arch (...)

44In early 1950, the 1000-member Lt. Benjamin R. Kimlau Chinese Memorial American Legion Post 1291, named for the Chinese American World War II hero, petitioned the State Housing Commissioner, Herman T. Stichman, to fund affordable housing in Chinatown. The War Brides Act of 1946 enabled many veterans to at last bring wives from China or other parts of Asia, unrestricted by immigration quotas, and with a greater number of Chinese American families searching for appropriate housing, the inadequacy of Chinatown’s outdated tenement housing stock became increasingly apparent: over 70% of units lacked private bathrooms and density averaged over 15 people per unit. As part of a Title I slum clearance effort, the State Housing Commission offered state aid to fund the construction of up to 1200 rental apartment units for low-income families in Chinatown. Development would be the responsibility of the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA).53

• 54 “Building up the New Chinatown: In the Next Five Years, Chinatown Will Have A New Look,” Chinese N (...)
• 55 “Plans to Rebuild Chinatown and 2 Other Slums Started: Modern Chinese Village is Goal,” New York T (...)

45The China Village Plan acknowledged the need for decent housing in Chinatown, and like the CBP, the necessity for Chinatown to maintain “authenticity” to remain attractive to tourists. The plan proposed to give Chinatown “a new look” through “a combination of up-to-date Western buildings with traditional Chinese temple or palace roofs.” 54 A New York Times article subtitled “Modern ‘Chinese Village’ is Goal”, reported that Commissioner Stichman assured the Chinese American veterans that the plans would “bend to their wishes”55 Though no drawings were produced to substantiate the pledged “Chinese characteristics”, the New York Times reported that

• 58 “Chinatown Awaits a New-Old Face: Shiny Housing Won’t Destroy Oriental Flavor,” New York Herald Tr (...)

47Stichman asked his underlings to prepare preliminary sketches, and rather than looking to China, he “sent for data on San Francisco’s Chinatown” to help fulfil his pledge that “China Village will have twenty times more Oriental color and architecture than Chinatown has.”58 In the published plan, however, a new Chinatown superblock of towers in the park was fringed with an odd assortment of Chinese-roofed commercial buildings. (fig. 12)

• 59 Robert Moses to Herman T. Stichman, 31 May 1950. New York (United States), LaGuardia & Wagner Arch (...)

48China Village was another avenue for ROC cultural lobbying, but with its generic designs created by the State Housing Commission, it was widely ridiculed as superficial “Hollywood” Orientalism, including by Robert Moses, who controlled most of the public construction in the city in this era and fought hard against China Village. Moses caricatured China Village as “Chow Mein Houses,” playing on NYCHA’s project naming convention and the absurdity of adding Chinese roofs to its signature bland brick towers. (fig. 12) In fact, Moses went to great lengths to discredit the plan, resorting to racist stereotypes in his official correspondence with Stichman, even accusing him of taking the Chinese “for a lovely rickshaw ride.”59

• 60 “Chinatown Plan Moves Forward,” New York Times, 30 December 1954.

49Merchants and associations, though initially supportive of the creation of affordable housing, opposed China Village replacing Chinatown.60 The assemblage of real estate accrued by Chinatown’s business owners, families, and associations over the course of a challenging 70 years was simply too valuable to sell out to make way for public housing. Chinatown’s tourist-centred economy was also too lucrative to risk.

• 61 Philip J. Cruise to Stuart Constable, 27 July 1954. New York (United States), LaGuardia & Wagner A (...)

50In 1954, in the face of mounting opposition from within Chinatown and without, the State Housing Commission and NYCHA agreed to a significantly scaled-back, jointly-developed China Village outside of Chinatown proper.61 The smaller project was proposed for the triangular block south of Worth Street, between the Chatham Square and Baxter Street, where the Bank of China’s Chinatown branch with its pagoda roof still stood.

• 63 Many of Lee’s plans for this work (over 300 drawings) are held in the Museum of Chinese in America (...)

52Poy Gum Lee kept a copy of the editorial among his personal papers. Though evidence that Lee was attuned to the China Village Plan, it is unclear how Lee felt about Goodman's assertion that it was “an insult.” One of the exigencies of American life, and the reduced circumstances in which Lee found himself, was the need for a steady job. Lee was the go-to architect for all scales of work in Chinatown—he was a prolific filer of plans for plumbing upgrades, restaurant façades and seating layouts, and tenement renovation; his major contributions to Chinatown’s modernisation came through this quotidian work more so than his high-profile commissions.63

• 64 Untitled, 1953 (ink on tracing paper), signed “Poy Gum Lee, Architect;” Untitled diazo print, sign (...)
• 65 The land was turned over to a middle income housing cooperative. Chatham Towers (1959-1966) consis (...)

54No architect had been selected, yet in late 1954, the State produced a rendering labelled in the press as “An architect’s suggestion for redevelopment of triangle, retaining Chinese influence,” depicting tiered roofs topping two outsized housing slabs; and a tiered-roofed tower on a small-scale Chinese-roofed commercial or mixed-use building at the corner. The design, ridiculed in an internal NYCHA memo as “awful,” bears striking conceptual similarity to Lee’s design a year earlier.64 By 1956, China Village was renamed “Cathay Houses,” yet still no progress had been made in its design or development. In early 1957, NYCHA abandoned the project entirely.65

• 66 “Plans for a New Center Maintain Chinatown’s Sense of Tradition: ‘Changeless’ Chinatown Bows, But (...)

56Lee’s composition for the new CCBA—the xieshan roof, a gable and hip type associated with official architecture in China, and the two stone masses bookending the façade—explicitly quotes the emblematic monument of Republican China, the Sun Yat-Sen Mausoleum Lee helped complete nearly three decades earlier. (figs. 2, 14) Given the CCBA's allegiance to the KMT and ROC, this potent symbolism would not be a coincidence, yet it came at a moment when the KMT’s overseas influence was on the wane. The symmetrical four-story stone-faced building was to feature an inset balcony at the second story above which was a decorative metal screen between tall slender columns supporting a timber and tile roof. Though depicted in black and white, the drawing shows traditional painting patterns on the timbers. The New York Times described it as “Combining [Chinese] ancient customs with some of modernity’s advantages”. 66

• 67 Only an oblique photo of this mural by prolific Chinatown sign painter S.W. Chan, is evidence of t (...)
• 68 Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, Report of the Chinatown Building Project Committee, o (...)

57Though the Times credits Lee as architect, Lee was apparently working with Chinese architect Wei-Foo Chun; a mural and drawing of the 1957 design used to promote fundraising efforts in Chinatown were signed by Lee as “consultant” or “delineator,” and Chun as “designer.”67 This fits a pattern of Lee’s “behind the scenes” design in Chinatown, and explains much of why his contributions have been forgotten. Whether Lee sought to distance himself from what he considered retrograde designs, or was prevented by his day job at NYCHA from claiming credit remains unknown. Regardless, Lee and Chun failed to receive the final commission because they could not cooperate with each other on the final design.68

• 69 Cantonese Andrew S. Yuen (1911-2006), AIA (Yuen Sik-Hop), came to the U.S. to pursue a Bachelor of (...)
• 70 A mimeographed copy of Lee’s proposal is held by the Chinese Chamber of Commerce office in Chinato (...)
• 71 “Chinatown Open Work on Centre: Ground Broken for Modern Oriental Cultural Building Amidst Old Ten (...)

58In 1960, the Chinatown Building Project was at last fulfilled. In 1958, Guangdong-native Andrew S. Yuen was hired after the CCBA advertised in both “Chinese and Western newspapers” for an architect, indicating that Chinese heritage was not a prerequisite.69 Lee’s proposal, different to the two previous, was not selected.70 Yuen’s four-story CCBA is a mid-century take on stripped Classicism, with only subtle Chinese architectural references, such as the cast-stone cloud motif at the parapet, and notably no Chinese roof. (fig. 15) It is formally closer to the Socialist modernism the CBP was quite literally intended to combat. What started out at an effort to reflect Chinese culture in Chinatown’s civic architecture devolved over the years into an unremarkable new building. Conceived at the start of Chinese inclusion, the new CCBA officially opened on the symbolic date of 10 October 1960, commemorating the anniversary of the 1911 revolution.71

• 72 Changxin Peng, “Between Ethnicity and Country,” op. cit. (note 8).

59Though the CCBA maintained strong ties to the ROC—and it still does today—the minimization of the overtly Chinese elements may not have been simply a matter of selecting a “lesser” or less ornate design. It may have, instead, marked a moment of transition in Chinese America. Between 1959 and 1962, Poy Gum Lee developed two designs for a monument commemorating Chinese American sacrifice in the Second World War. The Lt. Benjamin Ralph Kimlau War Monument takes the form of a two-pillar paifang (二柱牌坊), or ceremonial gateway. (fig. 16) Lee’s original design (1959) was a richly ornamented traditional structure, bearing poetic references to Chinese nationalism. The second, approved, design, from 1961, is a modern paifang, stripped of its Chinese ornament and nationalistic references. As scholar Changxin Peng contends, creating a traditional Chinese monument to represent Chinese Americans in New York would cause a “confusion of ethnic identification.” This move away from strictly Chinese cultural symbolism was important to associating the monument, and those it memorializes, with Chinese Americanness.72

• 73 Frank Rasky, “Chinatown’s Own Supreme Court,” New York Herald Tribune, 18 March 1951.

61Press coverage deployed a dichotomy similar to that which defined Chinese architectural modernism: an acceptable embrace of the essence of Chineseness, which in mid-century America, associated Chinese culture with ancient Confucian wisdom; paired with a concurrent “functional” modernity, equated with Chinese American adoption of American norms. An early 1951 article demystifying the workings of the CCBA was illustrated with a photo captioned: “Old and New: This Chinese boy uses both chopsticks and a fork.”73 In January 1951, an article appeared in the New York Times, entitled “The Culture of Old Cathay Lives Anew in the Hearts of Chinatown’s Children.” After describing the CCBA-run Chinese School curriculum in detail, down to the bamboo-handled calligraphy brushes, the report assured the reader the “these children are thoroughly Americanized. They affect cowboy suits and bobby sox, and among them are Dodgers fans as rabid as any in Brooklyn.” The article, ostensibly about the Chinese School, is in fact a political promotion of China Village and the anti-communism of the proposed Lee-designed CCBA building.