t rush hour Friday evening I went looking for Chinatown.
I knew it once had a vibrant crossroads at Seventh and H Streets, N.W. The streets going in all directions used to be lined with tasty, funky Chinese restaurants with Peking ducks hanging in the steamed up front windows. Chinese residents of the Wah Luck House at Sixth and H would shop at the food stores and get well at Dr. Lee’s offices up on I Street. You could buy ginseng from a Chinese herbalist. We even had a touch of organized Asian crime.
But as I approached what once was Chinatown from Fifth and H Streets, heading toward the Friendship Archway at Seventh, I saw not one Chinese person. I passed a few down-at-the-heels Chinese joints. Eat First and Full Kee are still in operation. Tony Cheng’s Mongolian restaurant is still there. As for ethnic character, I saw an Indian family, waiting for the Chinatown bus to New York.
I used to joke that D.C. didn’t really have a Chinatown, like the bustling Asian warrens in New York or Philly or San Francisco.
Instead, we had a Chinablock.
Come quickly if you want to see Chinablock; it’s disappearing by the day.
“It’s still a destination for great eating,” says a local restaurateur, “but not for Chinese restaurants. The ethnic restaurants are getting squeezed out.”
Now people throng to Seventh and H Streets to eat at Clyde’s and national restaurant chains like Hooters and Legal Seafood. At the corner of Seventh and H, once the heart of the Asian ‘hood, you can get a latte at Starbucks, a burger at Fuddrucker’s, a phone at the AT&T store, and, in a few months, an oyster at J. Paul’s.
There isn’t a Chinese restaurant in sight. There’s an Irish pub on Seventh and a Texas barbecue joint on H. You want ethnic? Stop by the German Cultural Center across from Hooters.
“The Chinese moved out in the real estate boom,” a local developer tells me. “They sold their property at a huge profit.”
Terry Lynch, director of the Downtown Cluster of Congregations and an architect in the city’s urban resurgence, says the disappearing Chinablock is to be expected.
“It used to be a German neighborhood, then the Chinese moved in,” he says.
“Change is constant. Georgetown was once all black. The Chinese immigrants made money, moved up the ladder, and moved out. It’s the nature of urban dynamics.”
Offices are moving in to replace Chinese storefronts. Condos are crowding Chinatown along Massachusetts Avenue. The Verizon Center and Gallery Place and the museums along G Street make the East End one of the hottest places in town.
The only way you know you are in Chinablock is that signs on banks and stores and sports clubs have to have Chinese lettering.
Otherwise, you might think you were Anywhere, U.S.A.
