A Midwestern Chinatown? Cleveland, Ohio in North American Context, 1900–2005

Abstract

The Chinatowns in North America's major cities have received considerable attention from scholars, but few have considered the experience of Chinatowns in interior, non-gateway cities. This paper seeks to explore such a Chinatown in Cleveland, Ohio and place its cultural-historical development and evolution in a broader context. The characteristics of Chinatowns in larger North American cities are reviewed and a framework is developed that identifies four different types: traditional, revitalized, commercial, and satellite. This framework is then applied to Cleveland to see how the city's historical and current Chinatowns fit into that wider perspective. The results show that, in fact, Cleveland has had three Chinatowns. The first Chinatown formed in the urban core in the early 1900s and has long since disappeared. Another arose on Rockwell Avenue in the 1930s and is now almost abandoned. Beginning in the 1980s, a vigorous new Chinatown neighborhood has developed in the Midtown neighborhood. While the city's first two Chinatowns can be clearly categorized as traditional, Cleveland's most recent Chinatown represents more of a hybrid type and reflects a certain uniqueness which distinguishes it from the Chinatown's currently evolving in North America's major urban centers.

Keywords:

• Chinatown
• ethnic communities
• ethnic neighborhood models
• urban enclaves
• Chinese immigration
• cultural-historical geography

Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge the constructive comments of three anonymous reviewers and the editors on an earlier draft of this paper. The research assistance of Thomas Craig has been critical in the revision of this paper and the cartographic skills of Jeff McKee were essential in the preparation of the final copies of the maps. The support of the Laboratory for Cartographic and Spatial Analysis and the Department of Geography and Planning at the University of Akron are much appreciated.