A few months back, we wandered down Mott Street, which we dubbed Chinatown’s Main Street. Now, we’re heading east down Bayard Street and wandering toward the Bowery.

One of the best parts of this newsletter is looking at the successive layers that accumulate like coats of paint, and boy oh boy, do we have paint here.

Bayard Street here feels crowded and penned in, with the jail looming over one end and Confucius Plaza rising on the other, and rows of tenements edging the crowded street. Among the tourists waiting in lines for pandan ice cream, the cute cartoon kitties peddling boba, and the people just trying to get where they’re going, it’s easy to miss that this block has for years been a flashpoint.

The Dead Rabbits and Bowery Boys violently battled over turf here in the 19th century. (That’s too much for this post, but we’ll probably get there eventually.) Gangs operated openly in the 70s through the 90s. And in 1975, a minor car collision here helped ignite one of the most notable but least remembered Chinese American protests in New York.

Today, this stretch is crowded with tourists as well as civic organizations and residents, though the Chinese population here has declined as other neighborhoods of Brooklyn and Queens have grown. And over the years it’s remained a place for outsiders to swoop in, sample something they considered exotic, and carry a piece home.²

(Photos were taken in July + August.)

Love the red on this one. This was a bakery in the 1890s, according to the historic district designation, and was designed by the Herter Brothers who worked on tons of the anonymous tenements we know and love today, including the Esther Apartments we visited last year on Rivington Street.

A hundred years after activist and muckraker Jacob Riis photographed crowded tenements around here in 1889, photographer Bud Glick spent time in Chinatown in the 1980s and took some of the best portraits you’ll ever see. Among them is a 1982 photo of “Mr. Ng” in his apartment here.

Because of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, many Chinese men were barred from bringing wives and children as they sought work in the United States. Immigration quotas weren’t abolished until 1965, but their effects lasted for decades. In some Chinese communities, the ratio of men to women was as high as 27 to 1, according to the Museum of Chinese in America.

That helped lead to “bachelor” apartments like the one Mr. Ng shared with three other single men. The bedroom was rented out for social occasions, while the four men slept in corners of the living room, the photographer recollected.

In 1975, tensions between the residents and police were already festering when a driver hit a double-parked car at the corner of Bayard and Elizabeth. The cars rammed each other and the driver brushed several pedestrians as he fled to a nearby precinct, according to n+1. A crowd followed the car, police intervened, and when a mechanical engineering student named Peter Yew told officers to stop hitting a 15-year-old, they dragged Yew into the station and “stripped him and beat him, wounding his forehead and spraining his wrist.”

In the ensuing weeks, thousands of people marched to protest the beating, ultimately leading to some better relations between the department and the community, as well as the dropping of Yew’s felony charges.

Some of this was captured by Corky Lee, whose photo of a protestor covered in blood made the cover of the New York Post and was referred to as “the sole defining visual for the Asian American Civil Rights Movement,” writes the Museum of Chinese in America.

If you walked into the Acme appliance shop at 55 Bayard in the early 1950s, you might have gotten your first exposure to popular Chinese music, including Mandarin songs influenced by American jazz and Cantonese operas. (One ad in a progressive weekly from the time invited people to come to “Hear weird, sensuous love songs recorded in villages of China. Something really different!”)

The New Yorker visited the store in 1952 and, while pouring on the ethnic condescension nice and thick, described a handful of elderly men listening to music that seemed to be made by “stringed instruments, alternately screeching and twanging, and voices that first sobbed like infants and then howled like cats.”

The store and listening outpost was the project of Louis Chu, who was raised in Newark and served in the U.S. Army before becoming one of the store’s proprietors.

But his real reach came through the airwaves. For 90 minutes on weeknights, he hosted an early Chinese-language radio program called Chinese Festival. “Mr. Chu's agents report, eight out of ten laundries to which they make deliveries between 9 and 10:30 P. M., Monday through Thursday, are tuned into ‘Chinese Festival,’” The Times wrote in 1960. “Perhaps this might be considered an insufficient sampling by Madison Avenue's button-down collar statisticians, but Mr. Chu's clients are apparently willing to bet their shirts on its accuracy.”

At some point in the mid-50s, Chu moved the store to the Bowery. In 1961, he published “Eat a Bowl of Tea” about a married couple living among Chinatown’s bachelor community. It didn’t get much attention at the time, but has since become a foundational book about Chinese immigrant life in New York.

The meat market is renowned for its good deals. A Grub Street writer christened the $3 chicken cracklings at the meat market one of the best things they ate in 2024. “The chicken chips tasted freshly fried with an airy crunch that made it hard to stop eating them, especially after I doused them in Crystal hot sauce,” the columnist wrote.

But I had the fishballs at Chang Lai and you should too.

Feed your inner green dragon at this ice cream factory, which has been here since 1978. The stars are flavors like lychee, durian, and pandan, while vanilla, chocolate, and rocky road are classified as “exotic.”

In interviews, Christina Seid, the daughter of the original owner, has described growing up in the shop scooping, stocking, and sweeping, eventually taking it over in her 20s. Over the years, the family-owned cone zone survived gang extortion, bad kids hanging around the arcade machine in the back, and rising bills.

Today, it’s a hit with the tourists and anyone else who likes fun.

Many of the tenements here today emerged in the late 1800s, as Jewish, Italian, and early Chinese immigrants settled into the crowded streets of Lower Manhattan. To liven things up, architects like the Herter Brothers and Schneider & Herter integrated the Queen Anne style with contrasting shades of brick, and eclectic usage of masks, shields, arches, and other decorative elements.

Tenement historian Zachary Violette dubbed this one on the corner of Elizabeth Street the Rachel Kurzman tenement, after the developer who built this in 1887. The shared Jewish and Chinese landscape is literally pressed into the facade here, with Stars of David sitting above arches that carry caricatures of what have been described as horned gremlins with Chinese faces.

A hundred years before Buffalo Exchange, the corner of Elizabeth and Bayard was a peddler’s paradise, with clothes for sale on the sidewalks, the street, and in the bars. “There, trousers and coat brokers, with goods upon their arms, move along the streets and make sales in the saloons, which are the chief exchanges,” reads a passage in John C. Van Dyke’s The New New York from 1909. “The modest charge of the saloon is that after each sale the seller must buy a drink.”

Peddlers made their way across residential neighborhoods, buying used clothes from housewives and reselling them here. There was a bit of controversy around this time when hawkers here were allowed to flout a new law forbidding clothes buyers from calling out. A New York Sun article from around this time quoted Louis Stein, a peddler for 25 years:

“Der city it owes us a liffing? Say you so? Vell, then. How vill beoples know vat we vant unless ve make cries? Uddervise, ve might as well chump in der river! Ledt us write to Bresident Roosevelt!”

Well, there’s still a somewhat thriving clothes market these days, though it’s just a stall or two attached to a van.

The Minecraft-masonry-blah here occupies one of the most history-laden corners on the street.

In the 1850s, this was the home of a hotel and accompanying stables where “a cabal of prominent politicos and businessmen who helped guide “Boss” William M. Tweed’s scandalous political career,” according to Eric Ferrara’s detailed book about The Bowery. It was later a power station for the Third Avenue El and then a collection of stores.

When this newer building was first advertised for rent in 1963, a newspaper ad offered prices from $115 to $225 for a two-bedroom unit. Today it’s condos. Somewhat affordable, for Manhattan anyways.

This was the home of Esther Eng, a groundbreaking Chinese-American filmmaker who was an early woman director in Hong Kong. (Interestingly, her 1941 movie Golden Gate Girl starred a 3-month-old Bruce Lee.) When she arrived in New York, she continued to make movies and later opened up several restaurants in Manhattan in the 50s and 60s. She wore gender-neutral clothing and went by the name “Brother Ha” and lived here until she died in 1970.

On the Bayard Street side of this corner building, restaurant 69 Bayard was legendary for the gravy noodles and dollar bills taped to the walls and ceilings, many with messages written on them. It was a hit with late-night crowds and even Andy Warhol.

In the 1970s, this was territory for the Ghost Shadows gang, which claimed much of this street and often fought the rival gang, the Flying Dragons. By 1991, when an NYPD officer gave a New Yorker writer a tour of the disputed territory, extortion, robberies, and kidnapping were common:

“On our way up Bayard Street, we passed a number of stores shuttered with heavy metal screens. “See those big, expensive locks on the gates? The gangs Krazy Glue ‘em if the stores don’t pay.”

Rapper China Mac was a member of the Ghost Shadows in the 1980s and 90s before spending 10 years in prison for shooting a member of a rival set. In 2017, he told writer Lei Takanashi for Mass Appeal Magazine how his memory of 69 Bayard was different than most. “I saw my first dead body as a kid laying right there in front of that restaurant… So that location had a lot more personal meaning to me than just a cool looking location.”

When 69 closed in 2016, the owner said the cash would be shared among the staff and one filmmaker captured one of its final nights.

The storefront is a Malaysian place now that’s supposed to be pretty good. But a place called Eldridge Street Store still has some of the signs from 69 and other long gone places.

Anyway with all the culinary possibilities, what did I eat? Xi’an Famous Foods, of course. I’m loyal to my spicy cumin lamb noodles.

That’s a wrap. This is only a fraction of the cool things on this block, some of which I haven’t even researched. But 2,000 words is my limit, friends.

What’s Good: What’s not to love? There’s history, cool buildings, fish balls.

What’s Not: I’m no fan of 50 Bayard, but whaddaya gonna do.

Block Rating: 8/10