Chinatown, Boston

Boston's Chinatown is the last surviving historic Chinese enclave in New England and one of Boston's most densely settled neighborhoods, occupying a few blocks just south of downtown between the Theater District and the South End. The first Chinese residents arrived in the eighteen seventies, drawn by work in shoe factories and laundries, and the community organized itself on a few blocks of Harrison Avenue and Beach Street. The neighborhood survived repeated assaults on its borders across the twentieth century.

The construction of the Massachusetts Turnpike extension and the elevated Central Artery took homes and businesses and a significant portion of the neighborhood's land in the nineteen fifties and sixties. A red-light district pressed against its edge for decades. Despite all of this, Chinatown held.

Today it is both a working residential neighborhood and a restaurant destination, home to many Chinese and Vietnamese restaurants and markets, and its ornamental gate on Beach Street is one of the most recognized landmarks in Boston.