July 6–13, 2000

city beat

Northern Blights

The blight stuff: John Chin says the mothballed power plant overlooking the Hing Wah Yuen development is just one of many dilapidated buildings blocking Chinatown’s growth. photo: Noel Weyrich

by Noel Weyrich

As John Chin leads a brief tour around the 51-home Hing Wah Yuen development at Eighth and Callowhill, it is difficult to ignore the hulking industrial building that looms over the new, neatly tended houses.

"There’s our lovely Trigen electrical plant," says Chin, executive director of the Chinatown Development Corporation, which built the homes. "It’s a real eyesore. It hasn’t been operating for I don’t know how long."

The development group’s chairman, Ignatius Wang, laughs at the memory of Mayor Rendell’s comment about the plant several years back.

"Ed Rendell said to me if you want it, it’s yours," Wang recalls. "But after we looked at it, we decided that we don’t want it."

With its corroded smokestacks and rusted sheetmetal cladding, the obsolete Trigen power plant at Ninth and Willow is a distressing symbol of the challenge facing Chinatown as its leaders try to expand northward, in hopes of replacing one of the city’s most dire post-industrial wastelands with a vibrant new community of homes and shops. Like a lot of the properties east of Broad Street from Vine to Spring Garden, the Trigen plant is a contaminated corpse of a building. Too old to repair, too costly to demolish, derelict real estate of this kind litters the landscape of what is now known officially by the City Planning Commission as Chinatown North.

Since Mayor Street launched his efforts to build a ballpark for the Phillies north and west of 11th and Vine Streets, the resulting fallout from Chinatown residents has tended to obscure just how far its community leaders have managed to stretch its boundaries north toward Spring Garden Street in a two-block-wide swath between Ninth and 11th Streets. The 51 homes at Hing Wah Yuen, with 11 more to follow nearby, are a beachhead of sorts, a residential outpost facing a frontier of hardscrabble businesses, abandoned factories, rundown warehouses and vacant weed-strewn land, crisscrossed in an "X" pattern by Ridge Avenue and the massive Reading rail viaduct.

Chin, Wang and most other Chinatown leaders predict nothing less then unmitigated disaster for their community should the city succeed in putting a ballpark along at the western edge of Chinatown North. But it is hard to see how a gleaming new stadium could possibly pose a bigger threat to Chinatown’s plans than the bewildering jumble of rundown industrial properties that make up most of the Chinatown North’s 44 acres. Stadium or no stadium, the future of Chinatown has been irrevocably staked to the taming of central Philadelphia’s most difficult urban geography.

Ignatius Wang, architect, Chinese immigrant and longtime member of the City Planning Commission, says he’s known the hard truth about Chinatown for a long time. Over the past 30 years, he explains, developments like the Gallery, Independence Mall and the Convention Center have whittled away at the community’s edges, sacrificing Chinese shops and homes along the way. Only hard bargaining with PennDOT prevented the Vine Expressway from cutting off its route to the north, he says, and ever since the highway’s completion in 1991, the plans for moving north have been central to Chinatown’s future development.

"This is a very important story to tell," says Wang. "All of a sudden, because of the stadium issue, people are saying to us, ‘Oh you haven’t done anything.’ We have a PR problem. We realize we haven’t told people our story."

The magnitude of Chinatown’s successes, he says, is not readily evident to the naked eye. For the Hing Wah Yuen project, for instance, it took seven years just to buy the three acres of land from 78 different property owners, including public agencies bound by various arcane rules for disposing of real estate. Then, although they could have built at least 75 homes on a site of that size, they were limited to 51 units because SEPTA wouldn’t let them build on top of the Commuter Rail Tunnel, which is buried between Eighth and Ninth Streets.

The rail tunnel, incidentally, also impacts on what seems to be Chinatown’s failure to fully develop more land at its core. Bound by the same prohibition on new construction above the tunnel, a line of squalid parking lots take up most of what should be valuable land between Eighth and Ninth streets north of Race.

Father Thomas Betz, pastor of Holy Redeemer Catholic Church and the Chinatown Development Corporation’s planning chair, recalls how the difficulties of completing Hing Wah Yuen drove him to the brink of despair one day, when a federal agency held up the project’s aid application because it was located too close to an expressway ramp.

"I remember standing on the steps of the church thinking, ‘I give up. I’m not going to do it,’" he says. "‘It’s too much work, it’s just impossible.’"

But Betz says he persevered, along with everyone else, in part because the project was vital to his own parish’s survival. "When I came here in 1991, Holy Redeemer was alone up here [in Chinatown North]. It was quite desolate," he says, noting that car break-ins were common in church parking lot, and several students in the grade school were assaulted. "We were the only thing viable up here, and I remember [wondering] how long can we stay in the midst of total, total blight?"

Since the completion of Hing Wah Yuen, after 400 families applied for the 51 homes, the nonprofit development corporation had little trouble securing financing for another 11 homes on an adjacent block. The result, says Wang, is that they’ve begun to make the neighborhood appealing for private investment.

"Our role has been to ‘seed’ the area," Wang says. "A private developer wouldn’t have put the time into acquiring the Hing Wah Yuen site. The staff hours would have broken the budget."

Already, he says, there has been a nibble or two from developers interested in building high-rise apartments. "We can show private developers they can make a profit investing in this area, especially the Asian developers," says Wang, who adds that his group has reached out to successful Asian business leaders in South Philadelphia and the Northeast.

Chin points out that until last year, much of Chinatown North was still zoned for industrial use, an arcane matter that is nonetheless of enormous importance to any residential developer. Until the Chinatown group managed to get City Council approval to re-zone much of land for "commercial use," a slaughterhouse could have moved in next door to new homes in Chinatown North, and there would be nothing the owners could do. Re-zoning was another of Chinatown North’s invisible accomplishments, says Wang. Without it, new residential construction would be impossible to finance.

The largest obstacle to forward progress now would seem to be a toxic wall of stone and steel called the Reading viaduct. An elevated railway, abandoned long ago, the viaduct is contaminated by cancer-causing electrical transformer coolants, and seems as immovable as a natural rock formation. It cuts its way across Chinatown North from 11th and Vine to Ninth and Spring Garden serves no other purpose than to depress property values in its shadows.

"It takes up a lot of room and it’s not a pretty sight," says Chin, who points out that the cost of demolition would only be matched by the cost of cleaning up or "remediating" the poisons the Reading trains left in their wakes. "As a person that’s going to purchase a brand-new home and would like the family to grow into the home, you’re not going to want to live next to that viaduct. But it’s just too expensive for our community to handle. Even the city doesn’t want to deal with it."

Wang and Chin fear that Mayor Street’s ballpark plan will destroy their vision for Chinatown North spreading from Vine to Spring Garden Street because no one, they say, will want to live near the stadium. Even at Hing Wah Yuen, they say, the nearby Eighth Street Lounge has caused problems with bar patrons using the private parking lot and urinating in the bushes outside their homes. Who would expect 50,000 Phillies fans to behave better?

A new stadium would attract the wrong kind of development to Chinatown North, says Wang. "They’re talking about taverns," says Wang of stadium proponents. "Meaning there will be drinking, meaning there will be other activities we’re not even going to name."

On the mayor’s behalf, spokesperson Barbara Grant says that the ballpark will be "a big civic project that will eliminate the whole blighted landscape and be a bright new point of civic pride." It will replace, she adds, "those [viaduct] tunnels where the prostitutes go at night." Drinking establishments, she says, won’t impinge on Chinatown North. "They won’t be there. Oh, no. [Chinatown’s leaders] have a dream for their community and the city’s going to be extremely sensitive with locating anything there that they think will be offensive."

"I’ll tell you," Grant says, "the mayor is committed to making Chinatown North one of the beneficiaries of the new development. He is. He’s a neighborhood person. His thing is not to destroy neighborhoods but strengthen them."

Fighting the mayor on the stadium issue would seem an unwise move for a community group with such grand plans, and in such dire need of help from the government. But Wang and Chin acknowledge that Mayor Street has placated the Chinatown leadership on at least one issue where there were worries that the stadium fight would exact a terrible cost on the community. During last year’s election campaign, then-candidate Street promised to help Chinatown build a new community center at 10th and Vine Streets. The center would be a gateway to Chinatown North, housing arts, culture and athletics groups, as well as a health clinic and social service offices. But since the stadium opposition emerged, some in Chinatown feared they might be putting the community center at risk.

"There was some innuendo that the community center was going to come only if the stadium was put there," said Chin. But at a recent meeting with Chinatown’s leadership, Chin says Street laid those fears to rest. "The Mayor said the two are isolated issues. One has nothing to do with the other."