Walking down district 5, I noticed that there is a very large amount of Asians walking down the same street, however there weren’t any signs in the architecture of there being any Asians living in the district. Looking at the numbers I found that there are 21,522 Asians living in the district, out of 143,480, that makes it about 15.5% of the whole area, which is a very large number.
I ended up in Korea town, which is located between 31st and 32nd street on 5th avenue. Everything there was Korean, the food, the posters, the signs, the menus etc. It was so interesting because it felt like I was in a typical neighborhood in Korea, all the signs were written in Korean, there were food samples outside the restaurant allowing the other races to get drawn to the food. There were even some architectural design which gave you a completely different effect than the rest of New york. This whole block juxtaposed with the rest of the city, as it felt like a completely different country. Standing in the center of K town I felt like I left New York City, the feeling was riveting.
There was something very interesting about K town. After taking my images and I started making my poster, my roommate, who happened to be Japanese, told me that a couple of the signs were actually written in Japanese, and some of my images were Japanese themed. This came as a shock to me because I was in Korea town, so everything was meant to be Korean. I believe that the people that opened these stores and restaurants just thought that anyone that was not Korean, would not know the different between the Korean writing and Japanese writing.
I wanted to walk through China town, as well as J town because I thought it would be very interesting to compare the three cultures and see the differences, however it was not within my district so I wasn’t able to do that.
