One City, Two Tales

On your way to the compound of court buildings on Centre St., you'll be offered cheap designer purses, dubbed DVDs and the latest in fashionable knockoff eyewear. It's best not to show up to the courthouse with these goods in your possession.

Manhattan's Chinatown and Halls of Justice grew up next to each other and they still reside in an odd partnership of geography and history. Chinatown exists in a paradoxical web of legality and has since its beginning. Although Chinese traders had been present for some time, the real growth of Chinatown began in the mid-19th century and continued in spite of The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, limiting immigration. Legal and extralegal, meaning discriminatory, measures limited Chinese immigrants to the rough boundaries of Chinatown. The insular nature of the community allowed them to form their own governing bodies, like The Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association overseeing everything from marital disputes to taxes, in the shadows of New York City's courts.

Steps away, in what was more or less a swamp, the city's criminal and civil justice system found a home atop a drained pond, once called Collect Pond--pure poetry for a pond of filth. The pond had become so toxic from the factories and poor sanitation around it that the city filled it in, leaving only the small, gray dead space between court houses named Collect Pond Park as a memory of the sludge that used to characterize the neighborhood. With the fumes of city living and tanneries gone, a new neighbor arrived in 1838--the Manhattan Detention Complex, which still stands today though not with its original facade. Bit by bit the judicial center expanded with a Neoclassical Supreme Courthouse, an Art Deco Criminal Courthouse and a Modern Civil Courthouse. Granite, limestone, steel--these are the elements of State in action. And next door--pagodas, bins of produce, cramped tenement buildings--the elements of a community at best ignored and at worst penalized by that same State.

Even today the relationship is uneasy. In its 2011 Community District Needs Statement, the board representing Chinatown and the Lower East Side mentioned a tense relationship with the police and the Department of Health. But at lunchtime, when the lawyers, clerks and family members of defendants need something to eat, they don't hesitate to venture into Chinatown for dim sum.

I've found myself among that lunch crowd, though fortunately not as a family member of a defendant, and the experience is memorable in its oddity. I once ended up sharing a table with a couple of lawyers and the sight of these soldiers of civil society sitting in the middle of a neighborhood that, in many ways, thumbs its nose at that society was a picture I hope never to forget. I hope I never forget that the best place to get movies before they even leave the theater is a block from a detention complex. I hope I never forget how the weight and soaring scale of the imposing and ordered buildings of our justice system give way to the crowded streets of Chinatown that have an order all their own. These are the neighbors of a city. These are the neighbors of New York. But as Soho creeps into Chinatown, will this community have to find somewhere else to go? And will New Yorkers forget the dual pillars of legality and illegality that built this city?

(photo from Wikipedia)