The N train climbs out of the dark somewhere under Brooklyn and breaks into open air, and that is the cue. For decades, Chinese newcomers who could not yet read the English station signs were told one thing before they boarded at Canal Street: look for the blue sky. When the windows fill with daylight, you have reached Eighth Avenue. Step off, and the avenue unfurls below you in red and gold, crates of bok choy stacked on the sidewalk, live carp thrashing in market tanks, a hanging produce scale swinging over a delivery van, and bakery windows fogged with the steam of pork buns.
The Chinese in Sunset Park built this. In a single generation they turned a faded waterfront district of shuttered factories into one of the largest and fastest growing Chinatowns in New York, a place where Cantonese gave way to the rolling tones of Fuzhou and where a subway stop became a promise.
Sunset Park: The Place
Sunset Park sits on the western edge of Brooklyn, a slope of brick rowhouses and limestone stoops running down from a hilltop green toward the harbor. Its Chinatown spine is Eighth Avenue, lined with shops roughly from 42nd Street to 68th Street, with the commercial energy spilling east and west into the side blocks. The BMT N line, the old Sea Beach route, runs the length of it and delivers a one-seat ride to Manhattan’s Chinatown. The housing is dense and durable: two and three-family brick houses, walk-up apartments, and the vast turn-of-the-century industrial belt of Bush Terminal along the water.
How Eighth Avenue Became Chinese
Before the Chinese
Long before the dim sum carts, Sunset Park was a port worker’s neighborhood. Irish laborers fleeing the famine arrived in the 1840s and built the streets, the rail cuts, and the docks. Norwegians and Finns followed late in the century, drawn by shipbuilding and the harbor trades, and the Norwegian stretch between 45th and 60th Streets became known to its own people as Lapskaus Boulevard.
The Finns left a distinctive mark, including cooperative bakeries and the early apartment houses Alku and Alku Toinen, often cited among the first nonprofit housing cooperatives in the country. When the waterfront jobs collapsed in the 1960s and the Gowanus Expressway sliced through the district, many of those families moved out. Puerto Rican families became the neighborhood’s heart through the 1960s and 1970s, and the Puerto Rican presence along Fifth Avenue endures to this day. Into the emptied factories and cheap rents of the 1980s, the Chinese arrived.
The Chinese Arrive
The first arrivals in the early 1980s were Cantonese, many of them already working in Manhattan’s Chinatown garment shops and restaurants and priced out of the Lower East Side. Two practical facts drew them to Eighth Avenue. The rents and the property were cheap, and the N train was a fast, reliable ride straight to the work downtown. The pioneers planted the first anchors quickly. In 1983 the Choi Yung grocery opened on Fort Hamilton Parkway, recorded as Brooklyn’s first Chinese American grocery store. A Cantonese seafood restaurant followed on Eighth Avenue in 1985, and Winley Supermarket opened on the avenue in 1986.
There is a second reason Eighth Avenue specifically caught on, repeated so often it has become neighborhood lore. In Chinese, the word for “eight” sounds close to the word for prosperity, and an avenue numbered eight read like a good omen to merchants looking for a corner. Historians who have studied the area, including Tarry Hum in her book on the neighborhood, treat the lucky-eight story as community legend that grew up alongside the harder logic of the subway map. Both are true to how people there tell it: the number gave a blessing to a choice the N train had already made sensible.
The growth was startling. In the mid-1980s a few thousand Chinese lived around the avenue with perhaps twenty Asian-owned storefronts. By the end of the decade their numbers had roughly tripled. Reverend Samuel Wong founded the Chinese Promise Baptist Church in 1983 and later moved it to 41st Street, in what had been Finn Town, a small sign of one community settling into the bones left by another.
Sunset Park at Its Peak
The 1990s remade the avenue. As rents rose in Manhattan, garment contractors followed their workers across the river, and at its height Sunset Park counted around three hundred sewing factories, clustered in Bush Terminal and in the blocks around the Eighth Avenue station. Whole families cut and stitched piecework while their children translated at the bank. The labor was brutal and often unprotected. In 1995, Congresswoman Nydia Velazquez and local union and elected officials led a march down Eighth Avenue to protest sweatshop conditions, a rare public reckoning with the cost of the boom.
Civic life grew up around the commerce. The Brooklyn Chinese-American Association, founded in 1982 and later led by Paul Mak, organized the neighborhood’s first Lunar New Year parade in 1988, an event widely seen as the moment the strip announced itself. The association expanded into a network of after-school programs, senior centers, and legal aid, the connective tissue of a community that was now arriving faster than the city could count.
The Change
Around 2000 the avenue’s accent shifted. Immigrants from Fuzhou, the capital of Fujian province, had first concentrated on Manhattan’s East Broadway, but as that corner of Chinatown filled and rents climbed, the Fujianese influx turned to Brooklyn in far greater numbers. They came to outnumber the Cantonese on Eighth Avenue at a pace Manhattan never matched, and Sunset Park became the city’s primary Fuzhou center, sometimes nicknamed Little Fuzhou.
You can hear the change in church. At Reverend Wong’s congregation, Mandarin translation was added for services in 1994 and had replaced Cantonese entirely by 2004, the congregation overwhelmingly Fujianese within a decade. The garment shops thinned as manufacturing left the city, and the work shifted toward restaurants, home health care, and small trade. The avenue did not shrink. It changed hands.
The Landmarks of Sunset Park’s Chinatown
The Eighth Avenue N station (Eighth Avenue at 62nd Street). This is the symbolic gate of the neighborhood, the first stop where the line surfaces into daylight in Brooklyn. Newcomers who could not read English learned to ride home by watching for the open air, and the stop earned the affectionate name the “blue sky” station, a phrase that carried both a literal cue and a sense of hope.
Brooklyn Chinese-American Association (5000 Eighth Avenue area). Founded in 1982, the association staged the 1988 Lunar New Year parade that put the strip on the map and grew into the neighborhood’s largest social-service provider. Its red-trimmed headquarters on the avenue remains a first stop for new arrivals seeking English classes, citizenship help, or a senior lunch.
Fei Long Market (6301 Eighth Avenue). Its name means “flying dragon,” and the supermarket anchors the southern end of the strip with tanks of live frogs and soft-shell turtles, a frozen aisle holding more than a hundred kinds of dumpling, and a food court praised for its roast pork and noodle soups. On weekends the aisles move like a train platform at rush hour.
Pacificana (813 55th Street). Opened in 2004, this cavernous Cantonese hall became the best known of Sunset Park’s dim sum rooms, the kind of place where servers still wheel carts of har gow and stamp your card as the steam baskets pass. For years it was where families marked weddings and the New Year over rolling carts.
Park Asia (6521 Eighth Avenue) and East Harbor Seafood Palace (714 65th Street). These two banquet houses carry the dim sum and seafood torch today, drawing weekend crowds for cart service, lazy-Susan family dinners, and the occasional wedding. East Harbor, just off Seventh Avenue, is a longtime favorite for the early-morning push-cart ritual.
The Eighth Avenue produce and fish stalls (around 56th to 60th Streets). No single address defines the avenue’s pulse so much as the open-air markets, where vendors weigh greens on hanging scales beside parked vans, lay out longan and lychee in season, and keep fish on ice and lobsters crawling in tanks. This is the daily theater of the neighborhood, the reason residents say it still feels like a small town.
Where the Sunset Park Chinese Came From
The first wave came largely from Guangdong, the Cantonese-speaking south, many by way of Manhattan’s older Chinatown and towns like Toishan that had been sending people to America for a century. They were restaurant workers, garment hands, and shopkeepers who saw cheaper rent and open storefronts one subway ride away.
The wave that defines the avenue now comes from Fujian province on the southeast coast, above all the countryside around Fuzhou and towns like Changle. Fujianese migration to New York surged in the 1980s and 1990s, and when Manhattan’s Fuzhou quarter filled, Sunset Park became the landing place. Today the avenue speaks Mandarin and the Fuzhou dialect far more than Cantonese, a map of one province’s villages redrawn along a Brooklyn street.
Sunset Park Today
Eighth Avenue today is loud, crowded, and unmistakably alive. The bakeries and bubble-tea counters multiply, the markets overflow onto the sidewalk, and weekend crowds press into the dim sum halls. By Asian population the borough’s center of gravity is shifting south: Bensonhurst now holds more Asian residents than Sunset Park, and Flushing in Queens remains the single largest Chinese settlement in the city. But Sunset Park is still Brooklyn’s founding Chinatown and one of its fastest growing, the seedbed from which the others grew.
That growth is exactly what now strains it. The reborn factory district at Industry City has brought studios, breweries, and office tenants to the waterfront a few blocks away, and residents argue hard about whether that development lifts the neighborhood or prices out the families who rebuilt it. New condos rise where single-family houses stood, and the same affordability squeeze that pushed the Cantonese out of Manhattan now presses on Eighth Avenue.
The community’s answer has been to spread rather than scatter. Satellite Chinatowns have taken root on Avenue U in Sheepshead Bay and across Bensonhurst, branches of a tree planted on Eighth Avenue four decades ago. The newcomer who once searched the train window for blue sky now has a half-dozen Brooklyn stops that feel like home, and the avenue that taught them the trick keeps filling, block by block, with the next arrival.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did the Chinese settle in Sunset Park?
In the early 1980s, Cantonese immigrants working in Manhattan’s Chinatown found Eighth Avenue cheaper and roomier, with a one-seat N train ride straight to their jobs. The Chinese in Sunset Park were also drawn by the avenue’s lucky number eight, which sounds like the word for prosperity, a piece of community lore that grew up alongside the practical pull of the subway.
Is Sunset Park still a Chinese neighborhood today?
Yes, very much so. The Chinese in Sunset Park anchor a bustling commercial strip along Eighth Avenue, though the population has shifted from Cantonese to heavily Fujianese since 2000. The neighborhood remains Brooklyn’s founding Chinatown even as newer Chinese enclaves grow in Bensonhurst and on Avenue U.
What are the most famous landmarks in Sunset Park’s Chinatown?
The “blue sky” Eighth Avenue N station, the Brooklyn Chinese-American Association, and the Fei Long Market are touchstones, along with dim sum halls like Pacificana, Park Asia, and East Harbor Seafood Palace. The open-air produce and fish markets near 56th to 60th Streets are the neighborhood’s daily heartbeat.
Where did the Sunset Park Chinese come from?
The first settlers came mainly from Guangdong province, the Cantonese-speaking south, many by way of Manhattan’s older Chinatown. The later and larger wave came from Fujian province, especially the area around Fuzhou and towns such as Changle, making the avenue heavily Fujianese today.
When did the Chinese first arrive in Sunset Park?
The first Chinese businesses opened in the early 1980s, with Brooklyn’s first Chinese American grocery in 1983 and the first Lunar New Year parade in 1988. The community then grew rapidly through the 1990s and surged again with Fujianese arrivals after 2000.
If your family’s story passed through the markets and walk-ups of Sunset Park, or through any of New York’s Chinatowns, the threads are worth following. You can trace the same journey through the Chinese of Manhattan’s Chinatown, the rise of Flushing’s Chinese community in Queens, and the South Asian story of the Bangladeshis of Kensington just to the east.