New Plans in the Works for Houston’s ‘Old Chinatown’

Historic enclave awaits facelift, rebirth

By Andrew Chow
AsianWeek Staff Writer

Just blocks from Houston’s new baseball stadium and its expanding convention center, Dan Nip sees an opportunity to revive a unique piece of Asian Pacific American heritage.

The 50-block area — bounded by U.S. 59 to the west, Interstate 45 to the south, Dowling Street to the east and Texas Avenue to the north — was once the city’s bustling Chinatown district, where restaurants and stores attracted lunchtime crowds and provided services for Houston’s Chinese American community.

Plagued with crime and sewer-infrastructure problems, the “Old Chinatown” area has long been forgotten, said Nip, who founded Houston’s nonprofit Chinatown Community Development Corporation.

“Even today you cannot open a new restaurant in Old Chinatown because there’s not enough sewage capacity — not to mention a hotel or bigger [structure],” said Nip, who also chairs the district’s Tax Increment Reinvestment Zone.

“The street paving was terrible, there was no sidewalk and no landscaping,” he explained. “After five o’clock nobody’s there — it’s a ghost town. And all this time, the Old Chinatown image is that it is unsafe.”

Map of Houston’s Old Chinatown.

Good things have been forecast for years in Old Chinatown, which lies on the edge of downtown. But the opening of the George R. Brown Convention Center in 1987, followed by the nearby baseball park more than a decade later, never fulfilled the predictions.

A few restaurants, lofts and shops dot the area, but many buildings are boarded up, and much of the space is used for unglamorous wholesale businesses.

Nip, a native of China who lived in Hong Kong before immigrating to the United States, envisions a new farmer’s market, an international food court and other retail centers to lure a mostly non-Asian clientele. It would be a contrast to New Chinatown in southwest Houston, which caters toward the APAs living in the area.

Houston’s APA population has boomed in recent years, according to census figures. Nearly 105,000 APAs call the city home, comprising nearly 5.5 percent of the population. Metropolitan Houston’s APA communities include the nation’s second-largest Vietnamese American community, along with a growing South Asian American population.

But there are no guarantees in the attempt to redevelop Old Chinatown, said townhouse developer Larry Davis, who contends skyrocketing land prices in east downtown dampen residential development and send buyers to more established neartown neighborhoods.

Indeed, Nip’s efforts aren’t the first time an APA in Houston has tried to revive Old Chinatown. Businessman Lang Yee “Bobo” Wu, who died about 10 years ago, first developed roughly four acres in the district next to the historic On Leong Association building. The development included a theater that showcased Hong Kong and Taiwanese films, along with a grocery store, restaurants and souvenir stores.

Nip’s ideas for Old Chinatown include somewhat of a makeover for the district whose plain buildings never lived up to visitors’ expectations of an “Asian-looking” Chinatown neighborhood.

“That’s another problem,” Nip said. “We had the name ‘Chinatown,’ but people cannot find anything similar to other Chinatowns in the country.”

Bobo Wu “had a vision” to build a Chinese entrance gate to the district, but was unable to raise enough money before he died, Nip said. Now a decade later, the new plans for Old Chinatown will include at least one Chinatown gate, Nip said — thanks in part to Houston’s sister-city relationship with Shenzhen, China.

“I convinced the then-mayor of Shenzhen in 1995 to donate to us those Chinese ceramic tiles,” Nip said. “I told him, ‘I want to build a Chinese gate.’

“We wanted to break ground [on the gate] three years ago,” Nip continued, “but then the convention center said, ‘We’re going to have an expansion, blocking off two more streets between Old Chinatown and downtown.’ One of those streets was McKinney, which is what we’d picked as the center of Old Chinatown. … They knew that we were supposed to build the gate there. But the convention center had more money and was seen as more important than Chinatown.”

With new plans still in the works, “we’re not only going to have one gate, but two or three,” Nip said. “We’re waiting. … All those tile materials are still sitting in a warehouse.”

Another issue is whether to keep the name ‘Chinatown’ at all, Nip said, as locals associate the area with crime. Further, Vietnamese Americans now outnumber Chinese Americans in the district, he said.

Still, in a few short years, Nip hopes to see new life in the district that was Houston’s only Chinatown when he arrived in the city more than 20 years ago.

“I know everybody in Old Chinatown, and it’s sad to see it falling behind,” Nip said. “My heart is still here.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Reach Andrew Chow at achow@asianweek.com.