I’ve always liked New York’s Chinatown, and its unique, bilingual riff on standard street-naming has highlighted the special qualities of this neighborhood for as long as I can remember — distinguishing its corners from those in the surrounding blocks of the Lower East Side and the so-called Civic Center (that cluster of neoclassical courthouses and public buildings centered on Foley Square). So this article at the Times gave me a pang of sadness — zeroing in, as it does, on a small but meaningful detail that I’d also noticed, showing how cities can change slowly, then all at once.

Several years ago, I had the good fortune to work in the Municipal Building, on Centre Street, for some time. Being there daily afforded me frequent opportunities to cover the blocks of Chinatown on foot (as well as the various subparts of the Lower East Side and SoHo), block by block, during lunch hours. I noticed then that the center of gravity was moving eastward, with a commercial nexus increasingly focused on East Broadway, far from the old core along Canal, Mott, and Mulberry Streets.

I also noticed that the new street-name signs were rarely subtitled, like the older ones had been:

The Times essay, linked above, covers the history of these signs in the context of the history of the neighborhood. I do hope their decline is not a harbinger of rapid change. There have been rumors that Chinatown could soon be made a target for more intense gentrification; and some has already begun. But because it has not gone full-scale (yet), Chinatown is one of the few places in Lower Manhattan that retains some of the character of an older New York City — a messy, discordant, multilayered urban universe (photos by your webmaster) whose spirit has largely been tamed and curated into submission, elsewhere in the tangle of narrow downtown blocks that once teemed with so much human variety.

That is to say, Chinatown is still New York City, as it was meant to be. And I, for one, hope it will stay that way for a while longer.