April 2001: The struggle against a stadium in Chinatown

Not just a Chinatown issue...

"And when we talked to city officials and the Redevelopment Authority, they would say, 'Chinatown can't stand in the way of progress!' And when we complained that our houses and stores were threatened, they said, 'Well, we could move Chinatown to the Northern Liberties.' Or new immigrants could live in barracks until they became acculturated. You wouldn't believe what people said. So the more we heard of this, we said, 'This is an attempt at cultural genocide.'" --Mary Yee

The comments above reflect past struggles, but resonate chillingly with the events of this year. Since 1966, Chinatown residents have had to fight development projects: the Vine Street Expressway (through the center of Chinatown), the Gallery, an urban shopping mall (followed by the Ninth Street ramp into the Gallery) which cut into the eastern side of the neighborhood, and the Eleventh Street ramp into the Convention Center. This year, the northwestern side of the neighborhood is at risk, and Chinatown is involved in a fight for its life, as the city proposes to build a 1.2 billion dollar baseball stadium in the community.

This is not "just a Chinatown issue." It goes to the heart of how we, as a city, plan for our future. Although Philadelphia has long claimed to be a city of neighborhoods, we have been more quick to claim this as a promotional tag than to develop processes and strategies for investing in the diversity (and protecting the sustainability) of our many different neighborhoods.

Chinatown is a significant neighborhood, more than 150 years old. Businesses, services, family roots, community festivals, and observances uniquely in Chinatown draw and link people from across the region. But the neighborhood and the extended communities it enables seem virtually invisible to outsiders, who see the community as a collection of restaurants. Proponents of the stadium glibly speak of the benefits Chinatown will reap, and accuse Chinatown of taking a "not-in-my-backyard" stance, when in fact, its back yard, front yard, side yards, and core have been built on, eroded, and undercut repeatedly. We all have a stake in protecting Chinatown. Learning how to do right by Chinatown could teach us how to practice growth and make choices that invest in the quality of life of all of our neighborhoods, Doing right by Chinatown could help us make choices that matter for all of the people who choose to live here.

Biodiversity gets respect these days: we need to begin to think about cultural diversity in the same way. Rather than erasing community differences, we should be preserving those neighborhoods that serve important and unique functions in our cultural ecosystem. -- Debora Kodish

A vision for our city
by Debbie Wei

While much has been said about the economic costs of the proposed Philadelphia stadium boondoggle, little attention has been paid to the project's social costs - costs that cannot be measured in dollars and cents. As African American activist Jimmy Boggs said nearly fifteen years ago in reflecting on the city of Detroit, "We have to stop seeing the city as just a place to which you come to get a job or to make a living, and start seeing it as the place where the humanity of people is enriched because they have the opportunity to live with people of many different ethnic and social backgrounds." The foundations of our city are the people living in communities. In strong, sustainable communities, we all know we are responsible for each other. In order for our cities to survive, we have to ensure that our children are raised to place more value on social ties than on material wealth - on the development of our neighborhoods, and not on profits for a few.

There is nothing sacred about developing industries based on tourists and commuters who have no commitment to our city, our neighborhoods, and our children. Such development renders our neighborhoods invisible. In the fantasy development vision for this city's downtown core, residential neighborhoods are imagined only as chic quaint areas inhabited by yuppies. In this fantasy Philadelphia, there are no children, no elderly, no working class people. It is no wonder that in the year 2000 Chinatown is the only low-income community left standing in what is considered to be Center City. It is no wonder that Chinatown is the last intact community of color in the downtown core.

Our dying formerly industrial cities are desperate to find a way out of the devastation wreaked by globalization of our economy. As jobs have moved out of our cities, wastelands have appeared. Our young people see little hope for the future. Promises that luxurious sports complexes will replace the jobs once provided by industry have proven false time and again across the country. The only real beneficiaries of the new corporate welfare of publicly funded stadium construction are team owners and fat cats who use the luxury boxes to wine and dine other fat cats, and downtown business interests. And all the while they are all busy building higher and higher fences to keep out the people of the neighborhoods. Ask the neighborhood people of Baltimore or Cleveland if life has improved. Are the schools better? Is housing better? Are the streets cleaner? Are jobs more plentiful? Are communities safer? Are neighborhoods flourishing?

The stadium struggle is a cultural and spiritual struggle as much as it is an economic and political one. Detroit activist Grace Lee Boggs asks, "Do we want our children to grow up to be passive consumers and spectators, living only for their own pleasures and self-gratification, only for the excitement of the moment? Or do we want them to become productive, self-reliant and self-determining citizens? These profoundly moral and spiritual questions are at the heart of this struggle."

Proponents of this project have often talked about economic spin-off from stadiums. They paternalistically tell residents of Chinatown that "it will be good for you. People will come to eat at your restaurants." Aside from the patently racist stereotyping of Chinatown as simply a collection of restaurants, and in spite of the continuing assertions by Chinatown business owners that big projects such as conventions ultimately hurt their business, it is clear that the City measures economic growth in terms of the needs of its business and industry friends. This is like counting bodies without seeing whether or not there is any breath in the bodies. We need to demand other ways of calculating benefit, social health and real progress. On the evening of the Council hearings on stadium finance this past June, dozens of youth waited for over twelve hours to testify, and the elderly of Chinatown sat patiently holding signs, even though they did not understand a word being said. The restaurants in Chinatown mobilized to provide over two hundred dinners for the people who were in council chambers fighting for the community. Those dinners would never show up on the economic growth charts of the city. They would never be considered "development." But for those of us who measure the health of communities in terms of compassion, caring and collective responsibility and not just dollars, this act of solidarity is a sure sign of the vital breath in our communities that the city is seeking to extinguish.

The Mayor touts a $1.2 billion dollar stadium plan (a now conservative estimate) while at the same time applauding himself for perhaps being able to get $20 million for public education. Worse than "robbing Peter to pay Paul" this is robbing our children of their future to pay for a project which will destroy a community and give nothing back to the neighborhoods. If the Mayor's proposal is allowed to go forward, it will up the ante in every other city in the country where false visions of "economic prosperity" are codes for boondoggles and corporate welfare schemes that benefit the few and the wealthy, at the expense of the majority, and the poor. Around the globe there are now massive movements to defy globalization and to retrieve the humanity that is being lost in the relentless drive for ever-increasing profit margins in the face of ever-widening disparity. It's time to take a page from our brothers and sisters around the globe who have started movements to reclaim a way of life which will sustain and nurture their communities.

Finally, we should wonder whether we are being asked to pay for men's games and big boys' toys. I want to raise the question of gender equity involved in the jobs being created by these proposals and the prime beneficiaries of such proposals. In these discussions of stadiums, men's games have come to take precedence over women's and children's lives. The continued absence of a gender analysis in this discussion blinds us to the reality of what all these games are really about. It is time to understand the real costs, and the real values and visions, that lie behind these insidious proposals to wreck a community, misuse public funds, and build the wrong things in the wrong places for the wrong people. For those of us who truly care about the future of our city and the communities which constitute the heart and soul of this city, it is past time to oppose this stadium project.