Chinese immigrants, driven out of the West by anti-Chinese violence and legislation and drawn to Philadelphia by work in laundries and restaurants, settled around Ninth and Race Streets in the 1870s, and the Chinatown you are walking through is the oldest on the East Coast of the United States. The community survived a century of discrimination, including the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 that barred further Chinese immigration for sixty years. It also survived the construction of the Convention Center in the 1980s and 90s, which displaced several blocks of the neighborhood, and periodic proposals to build stadiums, highways, and other infrastructure through its heart.
The Chinatown Arch at Tenth and Arch Streets was a gift from Philadelphia's sister city Tianjin, China and dedicated in 1984. The neighborhood today is home to a dense concentration of restaurants, bakeries, grocery stores, and community organizations serving a broader Chinese American community that extends across the Delaware Valley. Dim sum restaurants along Race Street serve weekend brunch to long lines of diners from the entire region.
The bookstores and community associations on the side streets record the history of a community that has been here for a hundred and fifty years.