Step off the Red Line at Cermak-Chinatown on a Saturday morning and the smell hits first: roast pork from a barbecue window on Wentworth, then steamed buns, then the green-tea bitterness of a herbalist’s open door. A block south, the green-tiled pagoda towers of the old On Leong building catch the light above grocery awnings stacked with bok choy and lychee. Grandmothers haggle in Taishanese. Teenagers film themselves at the painted gate. This is Chinatown Chicago, and unlike almost every other Chinese quarter in America, it is not shrinking. It is filling up.
Armour Square: The Place
Chicago’s Chinatown sits in the Armour Square community area, roughly two miles south of the Loop, centered where Wentworth Avenue crosses Cermak Road. It occupies the northern half of Armour Square, generally above 26th Street, hemmed in by the Chicago River, the Stevenson Expressway, and the railroad embankments that once defined the South Side. The Red Line’s Cermak-Chinatown station drops riders into its heart, with Bridgeport to the west and Bronzeville to the east. The housing runs from century-old brick two-flats and storefront blocks along Wentworth to newer mid-rise towers rising near the river.
How Armour Square Became Chinatown
Before the Chinese
The land that became Chinatown was not the community’s first home in Chicago. When Chinese immigrants began arriving in the early 1870s, they settled downtown, on South Clark Street between Van Buren and Harrison, in the shadow of the railroad depots that fed the Loop. Grand Central Station stood nearby, and the cheap rooms and constant foot traffic suited men running laundries, restaurants, and dry-goods stores. The Armour Square blocks to the south were then a working-class patchwork of Irish, German, and Italian families, packed between the stockyards and the river.
The Chinese Arrive
The first Chinese came east after 1869, when the transcontinental railroad was finished and the men who built its western span found themselves unemployed and unwanted. Anti-Chinese violence was spreading across California, and Chicago, with its booming post-fire economy, offered work and relative anonymity. The community on Clark Street grew slowly but steadily: 172 Chinese residents counted in 1880, climbing to 1,179 by 1900 and 2,353 by 1920. By the late 1880s roughly 600 people clustered along Clark, supporting at least sixteen Chinese-owned businesses.
This was overwhelmingly a community of one name. Among the thousands of immigration files generated in these decades, the surname Moy appears more than any other by a wide margin, the result of chain migration that pulled brother after cousin after clansman from the same villages in Guangdong. The Wong and Chin clans followed close behind. Kinship was not sentiment. It was capital, credit, and a job: family associations financed a man’s first laundry and hired only their own.
The clan that ran early Chinatown produced its first leader, too. Sam Moy arrived from the West Coast as a teenager in the 1870s, learned English fluently, and picked up enough law to argue Chinese immigrants’ cases in county courts. He became the settlement’s first unofficial “mayor,” the interpreter and fixer who dealt with City Hall, navigated the licensing rules stacked against Chinese restaurants, and made survival a little easier for the men around him. The Moy Family Association, founded in 1907, remains the oldest family association in the neighborhood.
Armour Square at Its Peak
By 1910 the Clark Street community was under pressure. Rents were climbing, anti-Chinese hostility was constant, and downtown landlords wanted the Chinese gone. So the community engineered its own escape. In 1912 the On Leong Merchants Association orchestrated a mass move two miles south to Wentworth and Cermak, then called 22nd Street, and proclaimed it the “New Chinatown.”
The move was a quiet act of strategy. Because outright racial discrimination kept Chinese buyers off the property rolls, the association worked through a white intermediary, the H. O. Stone Company, to secure roughly fifty ten-year leases on the blocks they wanted. The On Leong then built a headquarters along Cermak with room for fifteen stores, thirty apartments, and its own offices. For the first time the community controlled its own ground, and the new Chinatown took root fast: by the 1920s it held over a third of Chicago’s Chinese population, and by 1930 at least eleven restaurants lined its streets.
What followed was something other Chinatowns never managed. Where San Francisco and New York saw their cores squeezed by redevelopment and rising land values, Chicago’s stayed stable, anchored by the institutions the merchants had built and protected by the river and rail lines that boxed it in. The neighborhood weathered the Depression, the war, and the lean decades after without losing its center of gravity.
The Change
The turn came in the 1970s and accelerated through the 1990s. A new gate went up at Wentworth and Cermak in 1975, a deliberate signal of revival after years of slow decline. Then, in the late 1980s, the community pulled off its second great land grab. Civic leader Ping Tom and a group of business partners bought roughly thirty-two acres of an abandoned Santa Fe railroad yard north of the historic strip, land that let Chinatown expand for the first time in seventy years. Chinatown Square opened on it in 1993, and a riverfront park followed at the end of the decade. The enclave stopped being a relic and started growing again.
The Landmarks of Chinatown
The On Leong Merchants Association Building / Pui Tak Center (2216 S. Wentworth Ave.) is the neighborhood’s signature. Built between 1926 and 1928 by Norwegian-American architects Christian Michaelsen and Sigurd Rognstad, its twin pagoda towers and dragon-trimmed terra cotta made it, in the words of the era’s press, one of the most elaborate buildings ever raised by Chinese hands in America. For decades it served as Chinatown’s unofficial city hall, housing a language school and an informal court that settled disputes among residents. The Chinese Christian Union Church bought it in 1993 for $1.4 million, renamed it the Pui Tak Center, and runs it today as a community and immigrant-services hub. It is the only Chicago Landmark in Chinatown and was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2025.
The Chinatown Gate (Wentworth Avenue just south of Cermak) was designed by architect Peter Fung and completed in 1975. Its four large characters carry a line famous in early-twentieth-century China, often rendered as “the world belongs to all,” a motto of common purpose. Restrained where most Chinatown gates are ornate, it marks the entrance to the old commercial strip and remains the most photographed object in the neighborhood.
For ninety years the Won Kow Restaurant (2233 S. Wentworth Ave.) anchored that strip. Opened in 1928 in a building by the same architects who designed the On Leong, and founded by a member of the Moy clan, it was widely known as the oldest continuously operating Chinese restaurant in the city, a banquet hall where generations marked weddings and New Years. It closed in February 2018 when its owner retired with no one to take over, the end of a near-century run.
St. Therese Chinese Catholic Mission (218 W. Alexander St.) began in 1940, when Rev. John T. S. Mao, a priest from Nanjing, rented a storefront on Wentworth and started instruction classes. Designated a national parish for Chinese Catholics in 1947, the mission moved in 1963 into a handsome church just west of Wentworth that had been built by an Italian congregation, Santa Maria Incoronata, as that community moved away. It endures as the only Chinese Catholic parish in the Midwest.
Chinatown Square (2133 S. China Pl.) is the mall that let Chinatown grow north. Built in 1993 on the reclaimed rail yard and designed by Harry Weese and Associates, its two-tier plaza of shops and restaurants is ringed by twelve bronze statues of the Chinese zodiac, commissioned from the art department of Xiamen University in Fujian. On summer weekends its central square fills with night-market crowds.
Ping Tom Memorial Park (1700 S. Wentworth Ave.) gives Chinatown its river. The twelve-acre park opened on October 2, 1999, dedicated by Mayor Richard M. Daley to the civic leader who had assembled the land for Chinatown Square but died of cancer in 1995 before he could see it finished. With its red pagoda pavilion and boathouse on the Chicago River, it is the green heart of the neighborhood Ping Tom helped expand.
The Chinatown Branch of the Chicago Public Library (2100 S. Wentworth Ave.) is the newest landmark. Designed by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill and opened in August 2015, its curved, light-filled form won the 2017 Louis Sullivan Award, the top design honor of Illinois architects, and signaled the city’s bet that this neighborhood has a future worth building for.
Where the Chicago Chinese Came From
The founding generation came almost entirely from one place: Taishan and the surrounding counties of the Pearl River Delta in Guangdong province, the same Cantonese-speaking heartland that supplied most early Chinese migration to America. They arrived by way of the West Coast railroad camps, which is why so many shared a handful of surnames and a single regional dialect, and why the family associations could function as tight networks of obligation.
The later waves reshaped that map. After 1965, when American immigration law reopened, and again after Hong Kong’s 1997 handover, new arrivals came from Fujian province, from northern China, and from across the mainland, bringing Mandarin and Fujianese into a neighborhood that had spoken Taishanese for a century. It is this steady infusion of newcomers, settling near family and the institutions Chinatown built, that keeps the place young.
Chinatown Today
Chicago’s Chinatown is, by a striking measure, the only major Chinatown in the United States that is still growing. While the Asian populations of San Francisco’s and Manhattan’s historic cores have thinned since 1990, Chicago’s enclave has expanded the other way. By community counts the greater Chinatown area passed thirty thousand residents around 2020, and Asians are now the fastest-growing group in the city.
The growth is visible in concrete. New residential towers have gone up near the river and the rail yard, the 2015 library draws lines at story hour, and the population is spilling south and west into Bridgeport and McKinley Park, neighborhoods that a generation ago were Irish and Lithuanian strongholds. In 2024 Illinois named the area an official cultural district, formal recognition of what the numbers already showed.
It is not a museum piece, and it does not pretend to be. The lion dancers who weave down Wentworth each Lunar New Year are followed by crowds of recent immigrants and third-generation families alike, by Mandarin speakers and Taishanese speakers and English-only grandchildren. A neighborhood that a white intermediary once had to buy on the community’s behalf is now planning its next decade of towers. The story that began on Clark Street is still being written, one new arrival at a time.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Chinese immigrants settle in Chinatown Chicago?
The first Chinese came to Chicago in the 1870s after the transcontinental railroad was completed and anti-Chinese violence drove them off the West Coast. They first settled downtown on Clark Street, then in 1912 the On Leong Merchants Association moved the community south to Wentworth and Cermak, the heart of Chinatown Chicago today.
Is Chinatown Chicago still Chinese today?
Yes, very much so. Chinatown Chicago is the only major Chinatown in the United States that is still growing, with the greater area passing thirty thousand residents around 2020. Newer immigrants from Fujian and northern China continue to settle there, alongside the Cantonese families who founded it.
What are the most famous landmarks in Chinatown Chicago?
The pagoda-towered On Leong Merchants Association Building, now the Pui Tak Center, is the neighborhood’s signature landmark and dates to 1928. Other key sites include the 1975 Chinatown Gate on Wentworth Avenue, Chinatown Square mall, and Ping Tom Memorial Park on the Chicago River.
Where did the Chinese in Chicago come from?
The founding generation came almost entirely from Taishan and the Pearl River Delta in Guangdong province, speaking Taishanese and arriving by way of the West Coast railroad camps. Later waves, especially after 1965, came from Fujian province and northern China, adding Mandarin and Fujianese to the neighborhood.
When did the Chinese first arrive in Chicago?
Chinese immigrants began arriving in Chicago in the early 1870s, after the 1869 completion of the transcontinental railroad and the spread of anti-Chinese violence in California. The original settlement formed on South Clark Street downtown before the community relocated to its present site in 1912.
If your family’s story passed through the laundries of Clark Street or the banquet halls of Wentworth Avenue, that history deserves to be traced and kept. The same chain migration that built Chicago’s Chinatown links it to the older quarters in Manhattan’s Chinatown and San Francisco’s Chinatown, just as the Irish who once filled neighboring Bridgeport wrote their own South Side chapter.