A plaque remaining from the Big Apple Night Club at West 135th Street and Seventh Avenue in Harlem.

Above, a 1934 plaque from the Big Apple Night Club at West 135th Street and Seventh Avenue in Harlem. Discarded as trash in 2006. Now a Popeyes fast food restaurant on Google Maps.

Recent entries:
“Don’t be a chaser, be the one who gets chased. You are the tequila, not the lime” (3/28)
“Shoutout to ATM fees for making me buy my own money” (3/27)
“Thank you, ATM fees, for allowing me to buy my own money” (3/27)
“Anyone else boil the kettle twice? Just in case the boiling water has gone cold…” (3/27)
“Shout out to ATM fees for making me buy my own money” (3/27)
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Entry from January 20, 2016
Little Fuzhou or Fuzhou Town (East Broadway, Manhattan; Sunset Park, Brooklyn)

Manhattan’s Chinatown originally had Cantonese speakers. In the 1980s and 1990s, Mandarin speakers from the Fujian Province of China moved in, especially around East Broadway. The nickname “Little Fuzhou” (or “Fuzhou Town”) has been cited in print since at least 1998.
 
Sunset Park, Brooklyn also has a Chinatown and “Little Fuzhou.”
 
   
Wikipedia: Little Fuzhou
Little Fuzhou (Chinese: 小福州; pinyin: Xiǎo Fúzhōu), or Fuzhou Town (Chinese: 福州埠; pinyin: Fúzhōu Bù), is a neighborhood in the Two Bridges and Lower East Side areas of the borough of Manhattan in New York City in the United States. It is a prime destination for immigrants from the Fujian Province of China. The term is now also being used to describe a similar neighborhood developing rapidly in the adjacent borough of Brooklyn. Manhattan’s Little Fuzhou is centered on the street of East Broadway, bordering its main Chinatown / Manhattan’s Little Hong Kong/Guangdong.
(...)
Manhattan enclave
It was during the 1980s when an influx of Fuzhou immigrants flooded East Broadway and a Little Fuzhou enclave evolved on the street, it became fully part of Chinatown, also known as the New Chinatown of Manhattan.
 
The Fuzhou immigrants often speak Mandarin along with their Fuzhou dialect and while all of the other Mandarin speakers were settling in and creating a more Mandarin-Speaking Chinatown or Mandarin Town (國語埠) in Flushing’s Chinatown, and an even smaller one in Elmhurst all in Queens because they could not relate to the traditional Cantonese dominance in Manhattan’s Chinatown, the Fuzhou immigrants were the only exceptional Non-Cantonese Chinese group to largely settle in Manhattan’s Chinatown.
(...)
Recent Decline
Since the 2000s, the growth of newly arriving Fuzhou immigrants to Manhattan’s Chinatown began to slow down, as the epicenter of Fuzhou immigration has relocated to Brooklyn due to increasing gentrification in Manhattan’s Chinatown.
   
Google Books
The National Geographic Magazine
Volume 194
1998
Pg. 62:
Newcomers call East Broadway “Little Fuzhou,” after the capital of Fujian, the province from which many of them emigrated.
 
American Heritage
Chinatown
A walk with my great-grandfather through the last foreign country in New York City

Bruce Edward Hall
April 1999 | Volume 50,  Issue 2
(...)
OF COURSE, CHINATOWN IS STILL CHINATOWN, but, like anywhere else, it is changing. The new immigrants swelling its ranks-its population is now estimated at 250,000, compared with 30,000 in 1960-are mostly from Fujian Province, just up the coast from Cantonese Toishan, but they have their own dialect and customs. East Broadway, on the other side of Chatham Square, is now called Little Fuzhou, and it is the Fujianese power brokers who are courted by New York’s politicians while the Toi-shan old guard from the CCBA goes largely ignored.
     
Google Books
Must-See New York
By Tony Kelly
Peterborough, UK: Thomas Cook Pub.; Guilford, CT: Distributed in the U.S.A. by the Globe Pequot Press
2000
Pg. ?:
Today’s Chinatown is still centred on Mott, Pell and Bayard Streets but with a population of 100,000 it has had to expand. East Broadway is now known as ‘Little Fuzhou’ after the many illegal immigrants from the Chinese province of Fujian, ...
 
Google Books
Encyclopedia of American Immigration
By James Ciment
Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe
2001
Pg. 1159:
Since the 1980s, a Little Fuzhou has coexisted within the larger Chinatown in lower Manhattan, which is dominated by Cantonese-speaking Chinese. Fujianese Chinese came from the province of Fujian, adjacent to Guangdong where Cantonese is spoken, but the two dialects are almost incomprehensible to each other.
 
Google Books
The Rough Guide to New York City
By Martin Dunford
London: Rough Guides
2007
Pg. 87:
East Broadway, often called Little Fuzhou, is the main commercial avenue.
 
Google Books
The New Americans:
A Guide to Immigration Since 1965

By Mary C. Waters, Reed Ueda and Helen B. Marrow
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
2007
Pg. 343:
In fact, the heavy concentration of Fujianese in “Little Fuzhou,” in the two-block stretch between East Broadway and Division Street in New York City, has made the area the most densely populated Chinatown outside Asia. Even in traditionally Cantonese-dominated urban Chinatowns, such as those in California, the vast majority of residents new represent various Mandarin speech groups.
 
Chandavkl’s Blog
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
Little Fuzhou—How Did They Know?
(...)
The entirety of Manhattan Chinatown east of Bowery has been referred at times as “Little Fuzhou.” This is to distinguish it from the original Chinatown core from Bowery and west which is Cantonese/Toishanese in origin going back to the 19th century. As Manhattan Chinatown has expanded past its original core into formerly non-Chinese areas of the Lower East Side, this expansion has been fueled by immigrants from Fuzhou as opposed to the historic immigration from the area formerly known as Canton. Keep in mind that this Fujianese immigration largely represents lower end working class migrants, who by the way are mostly not of legal status. Indeed, many of them are merely passing through New York on their way to new jobs at Chinese businesses all over the east, midwest and south, wherever there’s a bus connection from under the Manhattan Bridge.
   
ABC News
#BrooklynIsOver: Why The VMAs Can’t Kill Brooklyn (And Didn’t Make It Better)
By ALEX ALVAREZ
Aug. 26, 2013
(...)
Brooklyn has its own Chinatown, Little Fuzhou.
   
Google Books
Rice:
A Global History

By Renee Marton
London: Reaktion Books Ltd.
2014
Pg. ?:
Fujianese chicken with fermented red rice paste can be found in Queens, New York and in Little Fuzhou, in Brooklyn, New York.
   
The Brooklyn Ink
East Meets West in Sunset Park
Beijing wants to honor the big Chinese community of Sunset Park with a big metal archway, signifying friendship.

by Teri Washington
on August 28, 2014
The majority of the people in Sunset Park’s Chinatown are Fujian immigrants who have migrated to the area seeking opportunity in what is known as “Fuzhou Town.” The archway—called a Paifang— is an important symbol in the Chinese culture.

Posted by Barry Popik
New York CityNeighborhoods • Wednesday, January 20, 2016 • Permalink


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