Manhattan's Chinatown Pressured to Sell Out

"The closing of the factories knocks out one leg of the traditional economy of Chinatown," said Peter Kwong, a professor of urban planning at Hunter College and author of the forthcoming "Chinese America: A History in the Making." "But the truth is that the unions were very lax about maintaining labor standards and enforcing wage laws.

"The outcome of Chinatown's present decline," he added, "is that many immigrants are finding better ways to survive now that they aren't stuck in a repressive and controlling social and political culture."

Gentrification, fed by American and Chinese investors, casts nearly as long a shadow as Chinese textiles. Gucci and Prada-infested SoHo sits immediately to the north, and TriBeCa with its Wall Street clientele and $100-a-plate restaurants edges in from the west. Already, chic designers and artists have set up shop in Chinatown tenements.

Around the corner from Wong's factory, at 129 Lafayette St., a former factory has been converted into a condo. When it was a factory, space rented at $10 to $15 a square foot. As condo lofts, it goes for $1,000 per square foot.

"There's no place for factories, and there's no place for the Chinese immigrants to live," said Robert Weber, executive director of Rebuild Chinatown Initiative, set up in the aftermath of Sept. 11. "People double up in smaller and smaller spaces -- we had 10,000 applications for 52 subsidized housing units on Norfolk Street."

This is not to proclaim Chinatown's imminent demise. A walk through Chinatown's back streets reveals block after block of Chinese groceries and pharmacies and video halls. As Weber notes, there is just one Starbucks, and it is on Canal Street, the main drag.

But already the poorer Chinese immigrants, and quite a few of the factories, have migrated along the N subway line to Brooklyn's Chinatown. Others find their way to Flushing, Queens. Together those Chinatowns are larger than Manhattan's.

As for the garment factory owners? Some try to find their way by catering to young designers from New York's design schools. But Wong says this offers small volume and a fair amount of headaches. A number of his fellow owners have sold their factories and begun working as American representatives for Chinese factories.

He might go the same way.

"I give myself three years." He shrugs. "It's hard to fight history."