Houston’s first Chinatown to disappear if I-45 project moves forward

There were ghosts in EaDo before the Interstate 45 rebuild was announced, but up to that point, Long Sing Supermarket had stood strong. Mimi and Cho Woo watched for decades as other business owners packed up for Bellaire Boulevard, but they continued hawking specialty Asian groceries and some of the best Chinese barbecue in Houston until 2017, when they could hold out no longer. Their supermarket laid directly in the project’s footprint — on Walker between Chartres and St. Emanuel Streets — along with almost everything else in Houston’s original Chinatown. In the Woos’ opinion, there was no use in trying to beat back the tide of inevitable progress. They closed shop and moved to Midtown to open a new barbecue joint, Siu Lap City. “I wouldn’t say (I was) upset, but it is sad to see the original old Chinatown disappear. Not too many kids nowadays know there was an old Chinatown in downtown, but it’s also a part of life. Technology and trends will continue to advance, which will bring about change, and it’s not a bad thing,” Mimi Woo said. The area around Long Sing Supermarket has long since given way to the bars and restaurants that now make up EaDo, but between about 1950 and 1990, Chinese American life in Houston revolved around these few square blocks near downtown. Newly arrived immigrants could grab pastries at Garden Bakery or, on special occasions, attend a dance at the On Leong Chinese Merchants Association. The Woos would often see Chinese movies at the Bo Bo Lang Theater, where Mimi Woo worked, before they bought the place and turned it into a grocery in 1989. The area is unrecognizable, now, but hints of its Chinese American history remain in buildings like the now-abandoned supermarket, which retained the theater’s pagoda roof, and the other Asian architectural motifs that endure in warehouses around the area. If the I-45 project moves forward, it could erase even those few final remnants of the original Chinatown. But some Chinese Americans who remember the neighborhood of their youth can only meet the news with a shrug. The neighborhood has already “lost its charm,” they say, and little of what remains is in use. “It’s progress, you’re not going to stop it,” said Calvin Yep, 72, on the day he and his wife returned to the site of his father’s long-since demolished grocery store with a reporter and photographer. His wife, Jewelry Lim Yep, pointed out it’s the first time they’d spent time on the property in “many years.” “It doesn’t feel good,” he said of being back. History and progress Not everyone who grew up frequenting the neighborhood thinks that the $10 billion expansion will hurt its prospects. Gordan Quan, an immigration attorney and chairperson for the area’s Tax Increment Reinvestment Zone, grew up eating at the Sun Deluxe Cafe and attending the Chinese New Year celebrations at the On Leong Chinese Merchants Association. He noted that TxDOT had marked off space for a potential park in the area, but it would have to be developed by another entity. Quan believes a park over the below ground portion of the freeway near EaDo would increase property values in the area and could serve as a great venue for historical place markers or art that could pay homage to the neighborhood’s Chinese American history. “There’s no question the Bellaire Chinatown is the Chinatown nowadays, so I don’t see a need to necessarily redevelop this into a Chinatown, but certainly it’s worth keeping alive the memory of the early people who came,” Quan said. The I-45 project, including I-69’s expansion into EaDo, is largely on pause while the Federal Highway Authority reviews complaints that the project would disproportionately harm Black and brown communities by displacing people from their homes and increasing air pollution in low-income and minority neighborhoods. TxDOT has argued that the expansion will improve safety on the city’s freeways and the quality of life in the affected areas. Regardless of whether the project moves forward, it has already left its stamp on the area. BAYOU CITY HISTORY: Inside the history of Houston's bilingual street signs Around the corner from Calvin Yep’s childhood home, is a store with a sign that advised shoppers of its future address a few blocks away. It read “for when the I-45/59 highway expansion project for our freeways starts to happen.” The Yeps took a final look around the neighborhood and got into their car to drive home to Sugar Land, unlikely to return anytime soon. They would have no reason to, because the neighborhood they knew and loved had mostly disappeared decades ago. Soon, there might not be anything left at all. sam.kelly@chron.com yi-chin.lee@chron.com

40 years ago, Old Chinatown was booming. Now the I-45 project could erase it entirely.

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