Houston’s first Chinatown to disappear if I-45 project moves forward

There were ghosts in EaDo before the Interstate 45 rebuild was announced, but up to that point, Long Sing Supermarket had stood strong. Mimi and Cho Woo watched for decades as other business owners packed up for Bellaire Boulevard, but they continued hawking specialty Asian groceries and some of the best Chinese barbecue in Houston until 2017, when they could hold out no longer. Their supermarket laid directly in the project’s footprint — on Walker between Chartres and St. Emanuel Streets — along with almost everything else in Houston’s original Chinatown. In the Woos’ opinion, there was no use in trying to beat back the tide of inevitable progress. They closed shop and moved to Midtown to open a new barbecue joint, Siu Lap City.

“I wouldn’t say (I was) upset, but it is sad to see the original old Chinatown disappear. Not too many kids nowadays know there was an old Chinatown in downtown, but it’s also a part of life. Technology and trends will continue to advance, which will bring about change, and it’s not a bad thing,” Mimi Woo said. The area around Long Sing Supermarket has long since given way to the bars and restaurants that now make up EaDo, but between about 1950 and 1990, Chinese American life in Houston revolved around these few square blocks near downtown. Newly arrived immigrants could grab pastries at Garden Bakery or, on special occasions, attend a dance at the On Leong Chinese Merchants Association. The Woos would often see Chinese movies at the Bo Bo Lang Theater, where Mimi Woo worked, before they bought the place and turned it into a grocery in 1989. The area is unrecognizable, now, but hints of its Chinese American history remain in buildings like the now-abandoned supermarket, which retained the theater’s pagoda roof, and the other Asian architectural motifs that endure in warehouses around the area. If the I-45 project moves forward, it could erase even those few final remnants of the original Chinatown. But some Chinese Americans who remember the neighborhood of their youth can only meet the news with a shrug. The neighborhood has already “lost its charm,” they say, and little of what remains is in use. “It’s progress, you’re not going to stop it,” said Calvin Yep, 72, on the day they returned to the site of his father’s long-since demolished grocery store with a reporter and photographer. His wife, Jewelry Lim Yep, pointed out it’s the first time they’d spent time on the property in “many years.” “It doesn’t feel good,” he said of being back.