Chinatown residents have hopes -- and fears

On a warm spring evening in the Leather District, diners at Les Zygomates graze on foie gras, escargot, and lemon-crusted halibut, while just a few hundred yards away, across the Central Artery, a Chinatown family totes groceries past a smattering of used hypodermic needles and a boarded-up row house, where a homeless man named Tony sucks hard on a glass pipe filled with crack cocaine.

Since the Central Artery ripped through this section of the city more than 40 years ago, the divide has become one of the most distinct neighborhood boundaries in Boston. Now, as the Big Dig draws to a close, residents on both sides are anticipating the knitting together of their neighborhoods, some with loathing and others with longing.

In Chinatown, many residents hope the Greenway will lower the crime rate and possibly free up land for affordable housing. But at the same time, many fear the project's completion will usher in a blast of gentrification that could kill the neighborhood's cultural identity.

In the Leather District, the mostly non-Asian residents who plunked down hundreds of thousands of dollars for trendy lofts are eager to realize the uptown living they had envisioned, with an abatement of traffic and noise; more parklands; and a growing number of restaurants, wine merchants, and top-notch health clubs catering to their income bracket.

''In some respects, the hope for the future is already built into property values," said Christopher Betke, head of the Leather District Neighborhood Association. ''But the hope is that values will increase."

Five southbound lanes of screaming traffic now separate the dense byways of Chinatown from the Leather District, a nine-square-block swath of hundred-year-old brick buildings once occupied by ready-made clothing manufacturers. Interstate 93 runs underneath.

When the Big Dig is done and the corridor redeveloped, planners envision this section of Surface Road as a grand boulevard with wide sidewalks, outdoor cafes, and plenty of trees. A small public plaza, about eight-10ths of an acre, will be built near the Chinatown gate at Beach Street.

The promised improvements will elevate quality of life for residents in both neighborhoods and eliminate the divisive physical and mental barriers created by the Artery, said Mark Maloney, chief of the Boston Redevelopment Authority. Because of that, he said, people will flow more freely from one side to the other.

But those connections scare Chinatown residents like Siu Ching Tsang. The father of four, who has lived in Chinatown on and off since 1972, said the project's completion will accelerate the cycle of gentrification. When the neighborhood is a more attractive place to live, real estate prices go up, driving up property taxes and rents, and forcing business owners to raise prices.

''I worry because that is like a circle," Tsang said through a translator. ''This is a big problem. If the prices go so high, the average family cannot afford to live here. We cannot even afford to go for dim sum."

Some urban specialists contend the gentrification of Chinatown marks just another phase in the natural life cycle of Boston. The North End wasn't always Italian, they say, and Chinatown hasn't always been Chinese.

''This has been going on for 400 years now," said Charles Euchner, chief until this month of the Rappaport Institute of Greater Boston at Harvard University. ''You don't have to go back that far to see huge transformations."

Immigrants often start out in the city and eventually move to the suburbs as their community matures and its members become economically stable, he said. ''Is it a bad thing that Jews don't live in the North End?" Euchner said. ''I think it's absolutely wonderful that Chinatown has stayed as stable as it has for so long, but I wouldn't want to put it under amber like some kind of specimen."

It wasn't so long ago that the Leather District was part of Chinatown. It was the industrial section of Boston's Chinese hub.

Chinatown as its known today grew from an influx of immigrants in the mid-1800s -- including Irish, Italian, Syrian, Jewish, and Chinese. While others eventually moved to the suburbs, the Chinese community remained and grew. Chinese workers had settled in shacks and tents along Ping-On Alley near Beach Street in the late 1800s while they built the Pearl Street telephone exchange near South Station. By 1890, the neighborhood earned its current moniker, Chinatown. Changes to immigration laws in the 1930s meant more Chinese settled in the area, and a growing number of restaurants, laundries, and markets catering to the community sprang up. For years, it was said Chinese residents could live their entire lives between Kneeland and Essex streets without ever learning a word of English. In recent decades, immigrants from other Asian countries also made Chinatown home.

During the urban renewal boom of the '80s and '90s, many of the leatherworks warehouses, set off from Chinatown by the Central Artery, were considered ideal live-work spaces for artists and photographers. The warehouses, which had provided room for wholesale displays, offices, and work areas at the turn of the century, were remade into trendy, upscale lofts that now can fetch upwards of $500,000 each. City officials classify the Leather District a ''sub-neighborhood" of Chinatown, but with further growth it could be deemed a neighborhood of its own.

Preserving the Asian populationSo far Chinatown has held its own in the face of gentrification. Of the nearly 3,200 condominium sales citywide in 2003, only two were in Chinatown, according to a residential real estate market report by Boston broker Otis & Ahearn. Asian residents account for nearly 70 percent of the neighborhood population.

But the median household income for the 6,015 residents of Chinatown in 2000 was $14,829, less than half the citywide median of $39, 629, according to the BRA. Exact figures are not yet available for the Leather District, but the closest numbers from the US Census in 2000 place the area's median income at $52,917, with a population of 207 people, 190 of whom are Caucasian.

Tsang and other residents are mounting a fierce battle to shore up and preserve the Asian population in Chinatown by pressing for affordable housing on the site of a Massachusetts Turnpike ramp that is scheduled to be removed. They have formed a coalition, Hudson Street for Chinatown, and have been calling on Turnpike Authority officials to turn over the property for $1. The group believes the move would be a form of ''reparations" for Chinatown, considering the state took land from the neighborhood to build the highway in the first place.

''On a very basic level, people do view that land was taken from Chinatown without due compensation," said Douglas Ling, a member of the coalition and president of the nonprofit Asian American Development Corporation.

Officials at the Turnpike Authority said they generally agree with the concept of building affordable housing on the spot but declined to comment on the Chinatown group's desire that the land be handed over for a nominal price.

''We are working with them through the public process," said authority spokesman Doug Hanchett.

Many Chinatown residents say the need for the project is especially acute in the face of market-rate housing popping up in the area. About 1,070 condominium units are slated for construction in and bordering Chinatown, with only 245 designated as affordable housing, according to BRA records. ''Those luxury condo folks have different needs and therefore a very different agenda," Ling said.

So do many Leather District residents. For instance, they have complained about the Fung Wah buses, which provide cut-rate transportation to New York City but often drop off and pick up passengers at all hours of the day and night.

''They're a nuisance," said Larry Rosenblum, a filmmaker and architect, who has lived and worked out of his South Street loft since 1985.

Still, many Leather District residents said they are looking forward to the neighborhoods being stitched together. Many see Chinatown's late-night restaurants and other amenities like cut-rate manicures as a boon.

''They've got great sushi," said Betke, who said he was elected to head the neighborhood association this year in part to ease tensions with Chinatown.

Then and now There is perhaps no better example of times to come than the new World Journal bookstore, once a Kneeland Street staple. When their lease expired in Chinatown, the Chang family moved the shop across the Central Artery divide late last year, to a storefront on Lincoln Street in the Leather District.

Along with the store's traditional offerings of Chinese newspapers and books, customers now can pick up ''Feng Shui for Dummies"; ''The Rice Bible"; and ''Chinese: The Essence of Asian Cooking." The Changs also installed a cafe with marble-topped tables, where copies of InStyle magazine share space with Chinese newspapers and periodicals.

''We're trying to fit into the neighborhood," Alex Chang said. ''That means we have to try to cater to both markets."

But Ling, of the Asian American Development Corporation, sees the move as an ominous sign of things to come. ''It was a big loss for Chinatown," he said.

Not every aspect of Artery redevelopment fares so poorly among Chinatown residents. Many hope it will help lower the crime rate. The tangle of highway ramps and roadwork during the Big Dig have abetted drug use and crime in the area, police said, by providing drug dealers, prostitutes, and other criminals shadowy places in which to hide and hang out.

''There are a lot of isolated areas down there because of the construction," Boston Police Captain Bernard O'Rourke said.

In the shadow of the ramp to Interstate 90 on Hudson Street, drug dealers openly tout their wares and many residents live in fear. They grasp the hands of their children, urging them inside when someone twitching with withdrawal symptoms walks past.

In the shadow of the ramp, Tony, a homeless man who declined to give his last name for fear of being arrested, regularly crouches on the steps of a boarded-up building, smoking crack when he can afford it.

Police call the area a ''hot spot." Serious crime in Chinatown between January and April this year was up 40 percent from a year earlier, O'Rourke said, due in part to increased burglaries and thefts. But drugs are rampant.

''With some of this further development," O'Rourke said, ''we hope we can displace some of the bad with some good."