For decades, Detroit’s Chinatown along the Cass Corridor whittled away, slowly becoming invisible as shops and restaurants shut their doors. 

And in 2023, community members thought the neighborhood was officially obsolete when Olympic Development of Michigan, an arm of the Ilitch empire, demolished a 140-year building at 3143 Cass Ave. that once provided resources for immigrant families. 

However in the past two years, the area anchored by Cass and Peterboro is in the midst of a revitalization. Michigan State Sen. Stephanie Chang (D-3rd District, Detroit) announced last year that $1 million will be provided from the state to improve the Chinatown streetscape. A street sign honoring Vincent Chin, a Detroit-area Chinese American who was beaten to death in 1982, was installed at the corner of Cass and Peterboro in June. And the owners of the former Chung’s restaurant, once a staple in Chinatown, are looking for tenants after completing renovations on the building this spring.

Helping to celebrate that renewed interest is the Detroit Chinatown Vision Committee, a volunteer initiative devoted to developing a new Pan-Asian neighborhood surrounding Detroit’s Chinatown. The group is hosting the inaugural Chinatown Block Party 12-8 p.m. Saturday at Cass and Peterboro. The free event will have food, DJs, children’s activities, movie screenings and more. The block party is a partnership between the committee and several businesses in the area, such as The Peterboro, Craig’s Coffee and Detroit Shipping Company. 

BridgeDetroit talked to Roland Hwang, a member of the Chinatown Vision Committee and cofounder of American Citizens for Justice, about the block party, the committee’s future plans, and why he believes the city’s Chinatown is gaining attention again. 

BridgeDetroit: How long has the committee been working on organizing the block party? 

Hwang: For several months, probably six months. Really, the Detroit Chinatown Vision Committee is the broader story in terms of what’s happening at Cass and Peterboro. Back in 2023, the historic Chinese Merchants Association building was demolished by Olympic Development of Michigan, despite a resolution from City Council to pause the demolition and study the relevance of that building. The block party is an attempt to try to make people know there is a history in that neighborhood that they should know about.

BridgeDetroit: What are some of the activities that will be happening throughout the day?

Hwang: We’ll have four DJs, several food trucks, lots of food vendors and a lot of merchandise. We’ve got two lion dance troops coming in, and we’ve got a lot of children’s activities. We’re going to be showing “Big Fight in Little Chinatown,” which is a film about the demise of various ethnic enclaves in Chinatowns in North America. That’s going to be shown at 2:30 p.m. and 5 p.m. down at the Masonic Temple. 

We’ll have elements of the Detroit Chinatown exhibit that was at the Detroit Historical Museum last year. It’s going to be in the former Chung’s building at the corner of Cass and Peterboro. So, if you missed the Chinatown exhibit when it was at the museum, you get an opportunity to see at least part of it this coming weekend. Curtis Chin is going to have a book signing. He wrote a book called “Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant.” 

BridgeDetroit: Major cities like New York, San Francisco and Chicago still have large Chinatowns. Why do you think Detroit’s Chinatown faded away? 

Hwang: Ethnic conclaves and particularly, Chinatowns, are fragile neighborhoods, and they’re not immune to economic factors and pressures from the outside. And so, all of them are individual cases of what’s going on in and around the neighborhood. Chinatowns are typically built in areas that are cheap to build on, an area of refuge for incoming immigrants and are usually old neighborhoods close to city centers. And so, developers look at these enclaves as cheap property that can be appropriated and then replaced with urban development. 

The second notion is that Chinatowns were areas of refuge for incoming immigrants when there was no fair housing law and there was housing discrimination. Sort of like the reason why Black Bottom existed and Paradise Valley existed because there was discrimination against an ethnic group that couldn’t expand to other areas and so, they concentrated in one area for self preservation. With fair housing laws and civil rights laws now, people are freer to move around, and so, the ethnic enclaves are perhaps less needed. But still, there’s a notion that if a neighborhood exists, it should be appreciated from a heritage and cultural preservation standpoint. There is an economic value, a tourist value and a residential value for having these sorts of neighborhoods.

They (Detroit’s Chinatown) weren’t able to survive the downturns, which there would be a turnaround, with LCA (Little Caesars Arena) a couple blocks away and the development on the upper Cass Corridor area to be fed by Wayne State’s development and the infusion of top-notch restaurants and businesses just a few blocks north. The Vision Committee just wants to have a piece of the action and to have a vision that includes cultural and historical preservation.

BridgeDetroit: Why do you think there’s a renewed interest in reviving Detroit’s Chinatown right now?

Hwang: I think that it’s a coming together of people in the community that can see growth in that neighborhood. It’s inevitable that it’s going to happen. And I think the neighborhood, the people that are there, want to have a hand in sort of creating a vision for what the neighborhood looks like. One idea is to, as part of the planning process that the city is engaged in right now, develop what that multi-block area is going to look like. We hope that it is replicated like what exists in other cities that have done better in terms of cultural and historical preservation. For example, Seattle has a Chinatown-International District around the Wing Luke Museum. Mesa, Arizona has an Asian district that has about 100 Asian businesses in Mekong Plaza. We hope that there’s some sort of a template out there that perhaps the Detroit planning process can fashion in terms of creating a Pan-Asian district. 

We (the committee) actually dream of the idea of having a community center to serve Cass and Peterboro with a building that sort of replicates what the Chinese Merchants Association was. It had the Shanghai Cafe on the first floor and a meeting space on the second floor. It’d be nice since that building was knocked down to perhaps envision a replacement for the community. 

BridgeDetroit: What do you hope people take away from the event?

Hwang: It’s just an opportunity for people to come down and experience the neighborhood, to see that it’s certainly evolved from what it was in the depths of the recession years during the early ’80s and ’90s. It’s time for people to revisit the neighborhood and also have a good time.