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Manhattans Chinatown is an enclave located in the oldest section of New York City, Manhattans Lower East Side. For most who reside there, Chinatown serves as the quintessential microcosm. It is a place to do business, buy groceries, and raise families. For many Chinese immigrants, it provides a stepping stone to a perceived better life that may only be achieved through hard work, determination, sacrifice, and assimilation. Chinatowns main sources of income and employment lie in its many restaurants, factories, small shops, and businesses. However, for generations of New Yorkers and visitors, Chinatown represents the very embodiment of exotica. With its ancient tenements, temples, fragrant food aromas, neon signs, colorful sites and sounds, and aromatic curio shops, it provides the ultimate journey of the senses, revealing an energetic and vibrant world. Through vintage postcards, Manhattans Chinatown chronicles how this community has continually evolved over 150 years.
About the author
Daniel Ostrow has been collecting and researching Chinatown ephemera and history for more than three decades. Mary Sham, a first-generation Chinese American, provided the foreword. Sham has been a teacher in Chinatown for more than 30 years and also served as vice president of education for the Organization for the Chinese American.
