I signed up for a location which is near China Town called Confucius Plaza. While looking for archives, I contacted the New York public Library looking for archives. I found some that seemed to be out of the State of New York which is a bit hard to access. So I started doing my research online, just incase to see if I was able to find any that would help me.
First I started off with doing some research about the place itself to get an understanding of what the place is, how it came to be, how it got its name and so on. I needed to do some amount of background research for it as I had never heard of it before.
Some notes on the place:
- Confucius Plaza is one of the largest buildings in chinatown. It was developed as a project for and by the Chinese American and Chinese immigrant population. The Confucius plaza apartments are considered to be a large milestone for the Asian American community.
- find an online copy of new york before chinatown book by professor John Kuo Wei Tchen of NYU. He states, The use of Chinese things, ideas and people in the United States, in various imagined and real forms has been instrumental in forming this nation’s cultural identity.
- Since New York is considered to be one of the ‘port’ cities or the commercial city. New York was able to play an important role in representing the Chinese community. towards the start of the 19th century, the lower part of Manhattan was considered to be one of the multicultural neighborhoods, where a combination of the Irish and Chinese community and many other nationalities and cultures joined that community too.
- Over time, the Chinese population increased as the number of Chinese women increased. The women were restricted due to sexist and racist assumptions made by many of them being prostitutes. As the Chinese population grew, it was known to cluster around Doyers street and Mott pell.
- The construction of Confucius plaza only began towards the end of the 20th century. it all started by a Chinese American store owner, whose name was Kumshui Stephen law. He organized a committee. He was able to increase the word of mouth and by using the Chinese newspaper.
- The whole project was funded by a housing program called Mitchell-Lama Housing Programme. The project was centered around a topic of protest which was led by the Asian community regarding equal employment. towards the end, many other communities such as the Black and Puerto Rican Coalition joined the protests. the protests seemed to be extremely successful considering the AAFEE’s hired 40 Asian American workers.
- To this day, Confucius plaza is considered to be a physically imposing structure in the heart of chinatown, it is also considered to be a cultural centre for Chinese Americans. It also provides amenities for its residents such as day care services and care for the elderly. There are shuttle buses that run from Confucius plaza for easy access to the rest of the city.
After doing some amount of research, I was able to find an archive.
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- Asians Picket Building Site- Charging Bias:
- Here is an image that I found online
- Here is the website that I found the archive on.
- The archive is a digitized version of an article which is a print from The Time’s, before they started an online publication in 1996. In order to preserve the articles as they originally are, ‘The Time’ does not change, update or edit the articles.
- The archive talks about the protest that took place in 1974, where Asian Americans went to protest for the right of Equal Employment. They had various signs that were helped us such as “The Asians built the railroad; Why not Confucius Plaza” and “DeMatteis, you are big racist”. DeMatteis was the contractor for the 764 unit building that was being built with support from the city. This was a protest something that was common in other communities too, and was relatively new to china town. The president of the company, evidently defended is company by saying that more than 40 percent of the laborers at the site were from the minority groups.
- Man Bun Lee is the chairman of the Chinese consolidated Benevolent Association, he said that his group supported the objective of more jobs for Chinese. Places with more traditional jobs such as working at a factory and restaurants also had a decrease in employment, hence it was important for them to look for jobs in other industries. Mr.Lee even offered to negotiate with the DeMatteis organization which helped setting up more office jobs for people looking for employment.
