The oil bust of 1982, which devastated Houston’s economy, leaving unemployment and mass foreclosures in its wake, coincided with changing demographics.Īgainst this backdrop, developers saw opportunity. Beltway 8 didn’t exist yet.”Īsiatown’s growth was “unique because of that particular moment in time,” she says. “It was grassland, I mean, there were literally cows grazing on the grass. About two miles away in Midtown, Vietnamese refugees settled around Travis and Milam Streets, creating a Little Saigon that prospered into the 2000s. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which lifted long-standing restrictions on Asian immigration, and the fall of Saigon in 1975 brought new waves of Asian immigrants and Southeast Asian refugees to Houston. Still, historic Chinatown remained important to Houston’s growing Asian population through the 1970s and 1980s.
“Mainly it was dry goods that they would get, imports from China,” Calvert recalls.Ĭhange came in the 1960s, when US 59 was constructed close to Chinatown, and the Texas Eastern Corporation bought up 32 contiguous blocks nearby and razed them. Every weekend, her family and friends went to Chinatown to attend the Chinese Baptist Church, eat, and shop for groceries they couldn’t find anywhere else. The second of four children in a Cantonese family, the now-74-year-old was born and raised in Third Ward, where her parents ran a grocery store. Nail salon owners refresh their supplies at the wholesale shop, where you can find anything for the business from jugs of lotion to reception desks.įor Asian American community leader Rogene Gee Calvert, this small Chinatown was an indispensable part of her youth. Parents take their children to bakeries for treats as a reward for sitting through hours of weekend Chinese school. Outside of home and school, it was where I spent the most time. I visited the neighborhood regularly when I was a kid. Considerably younger than the legendary Chinatowns of this country, it lacks the purposely ornate Orientalist architecture of San Francisco Chinatown (established 1848, rebuilt as we know it after the 1906 earthquake) or the pedestrian density of Manhattan Chinatown (established in the 1870s), with banners and lanterns strung across its streets.īut Asiatown, with its six miles of eateries and shops announced in cluttered strip mall signage, has its own kind of vibrancy-and, dare I say, better food. Houston’s Asiatown took root 40 years ago, when the first Chinese businesses opened on this stretch of Bellaire.
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