Business

The Slow Rebirth of an Area Once Known as Detroit's Chinatown

February 03, 2016, 7:59 AM


Chung's after it closed

The area at Peterboro and Cass Avenue in Detroit once served as the city's Chinatown from the early 1960s until the last holdout, Chung’s, finally shut in 2000.

After that, if officially became a just another blighted commercial strip.

Serena Maria Daniels and Maximilian de la Garza write in Metro Times about a gradual comeback of the area that soon will include The Peterboro restaurant, that will serve Asian-inspired cuisine:

The new restaurant will sit right around the corner of a trendy new bottle shop, 8 Degrees Plato, and Iconic Tattoo. Across the street, another new restaurant — a new location for the reinvented Jim Brady's Detroit is in the works. Later this year, a team of developers hopes to construct a new food hall, made entirely out of shipping containers. Not far, the buzz of construction of the new Red Wings arena carries on.

Rewind a couple of years ago and the same block was occupied by an assorted hodgepodge of drug dealers and other transients who gathered around a small grouping of buildings with faded signs scrawled in Cantonese symbols and crumbling pagoda rooftops.

If you asked most Detroiters what they thought of this run-down part of town, they would have probably mentioned the storied Cass Corridor, wrought with hookers, hustlers, and drug addicts. If you suggested that this was once Detroit's Chinatown, you just might get a look of disbelief.


Read more:  Metro Times


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