The Campaign

Aroused by T-NEMC’s and the CNC’s deafness to their concerns, opponents of the Parcel C garage began to campaign furiously as soon as the coalition was formed. During the eighteen-month campaign, the Asian American Resource Workshop and the CPA dedicated their entire staffs (each contributing a half-dozen people) to the work. The workshop took responsibility for media and administrative support. CPA concentrated on community organizing. The law students associated with the legal service lawyers began to investigate various legal options to stop the construction. The Parcel C Coalition actively drew on Chinatown’s history as a victimized community to mobilize residents, directly defying the city and its plans.8

Lydia Lowe was responsible for coordinating CPA’s campaign against the garage. She was a transplanted Californian who had come east to attend college in the 1980s. Lowe had been an enthusiastic and capable student organizer and had contributed to building a network of Asian American student organizations on the East Coast. She had joined CPA staff in 1987 after volunteering on the support committee for the P&L garment workers. In 1991, after becoming its executive director, she had spent a summer in Hong Kong to learn the Cantonese dialect so she could organize in Chinatown.

On the opposite side of the issue was Richard Chin, who represented the Chinatown YMCA on the CNC and was a supporter of the garage. Born in Chinatown and now living in the South End, Chin was the son of a laundryman and a garment worker. He had spent time at the Y in his youth and, after graduating from college, worked in a succession of community service organizations before assuming the directorship there. While Chin was aware of the systemic racism in Chinatown’s history, he believed residents needed to work within the constraints of existing structures to improve the conditions of the community.

Lowe and Chin held two very different conceptions of Chinatown. Lowe saw it as a critical refuge for working people and the center of the region’s Chinese community. She strongly felt that it would lose those roles if Chinese residents were no longer able to live in the area.9 Chin believed that Chinatown needed to accommodate development to save whatever community it had left—to give up something to gain something else.10 These opposing perspectives played out between the factions in the Parcel C garage campaign.

The Parcel C Coalition began by employing organizing methods that previous neighborhood campaigns had developed: petitions to the mayor and the BRA, community meetings, and public demonstrations. The issue resonated in the neighborhood: the coalition collected 2,500 petition signatures, and three hundred people attended the first demonstration. The Workshop developed an intense and relentless media campaign with frequent press-release blitzes. Terri Oshiro, its program director, remembers writing and putting out releases daily during the height of the campaign. The coalition intended to keep the issue in the public eye. Over the course of eighteen months, it generated seventy-five articles, letters to the editor, and editorial pieces in the Chinese- and English-language press.11

The community packed a three-hour BRA hearing to debate approval of the project. Nonetheless, despite residents’ “impassioned plea,” the agency’s board voted unanimously to approve the garage. David Moy, who attended the meeting, editorialized in the Sampan that the BRA board had “ignored a petition with over 2500 signatures, the testimonies of community residents and organizations, and the knowledge of a community demonstration which drew over 300 or more community people.” He concluded that the board “had already made up its mind to support the NEMC proposal even prior to the hearing.”12 The pressure also forced the CNC to spend its subsequent meeting explaining its vote and responding to criticisms.

Because the garage needed state environmental approval, the Parcel C Coalition began to organize around the regulatory process. In late August 1993, it lobbied the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection (MDEP) to require the fullest environmental impact review (EIR). T-NEMC argued that a full review was unnecessary, but the coalition’s legal support team coordinated a vigorous action. Fifty people attended the hearing and presented twenty oral testimonies and written comments. The neighborhood had prepared by conducting its own traffic studies. Local youth, advised by Doug Brugge, a community health specialist, had stood on street corners for hours counting cars. Their traffic numbers were two to three times higher than those submitted in T-NEMC’s preliminary EIR. The Parcel C Coalition legal team also provided testimony from abutters and the health center staff.

These efforts persuaded MDEP to rule in the neighborhood’s favor: in September, the agency required T-NEMC to conduct a new and complete EIR.13 For T-NEMC, MDEP’s rejection was a crucial setback. It took the medical center another six months to resubmit a draft EIR. That delay gave Chinatown an invaluable chance to mobilize.

Meanwhile, in July 1993, Menino had stepped in as interim mayor (replacing Flynn), and the election campaign for the next mayoral term began almost immediately after he took office. The Parcel C Coalition took advantage, prodding candidates to take a stand on the garage issue. This approach effectively elevated Chinatown’s grievances within Boston’s politics. Most of the six candidates for mayor leaned toward opposing the garage, but Menino, the eventual victor, was noncommittal. He said that he would meet with both sides before deciding.14 Unfortunately, he failed to live up to that promise.

Given T-NEMC’s and the city’s unwillingness to budge on the garage issue, the Parcel C Coalition introduced novel methods for mobilizing the neighborhood. For instance, it proposed a neighborhood referendum to allow residents to vote directly on the plan. It wanted to put the concept of democracy to the test. When the city refused, the coalition itself funded and organized the referendum. Even though the vote would lack formal recognition, the coalition felt that it was important to allow the community to express its voice as both the city and the CNC had denied it any representation. The American Friends Service Committee agreed to serve as a neutral third party to oversee the voting.15

As an attempt at a compromise, the BRA offered Chinatown a city-owned parcel on Tyler Street, part of which was the site of the Chinatown Y, as the location of a new community center. The coalition considered and unanimously rejected the offer. For these activists, the Parcel C garage was no longer open to negotiation. Organizations were bound by their commitment to Chinatown’s residents. Suzanne Lee, the coalition’s co-chair, declared that “expecting people in that area to put up with a garage” was a threat to their health and safety.16

Moving forward with the community referendum, volunteers passed out leaflets door to door and on street corners. They sent sound trucks rolling through the streets to inform residents about the referendum. They produced fact sheets and posters encouraging people to vote. The result was significant voter turnout, with people waiting by the dozens outside voting sites. In the end, the community rejected the garage proposal by a decisive vote of 1,692 to 42.17

The referendum’s success strengthened organizational calls to elevate the community’s voice in local decision making, but the city declared the referendum irrelevant. Lowe told the Boston Herald, “This is a basic issue of democracy. The people in this community should be allowed to decide.” The BRA’s Paul Barrett retorted, “We’re not going to run this city and this agency by referendum.”18 David Moy wryly noted that the nonbinding referendum’s “results [were] every bit as binding as the past promises of the BRA and New England Medical [were] true.”19 It was clear that the relationship between Chinatown and the BRA had changed since the more cooperative boom years of the 1980s. In the face of conflicting organizational voices, the vote gave the garage opponents a legitimacy that would shape the community response to Parcel C.

Post-Referendum Mobilization

The Parcel C Coalition tested additional avenues of protest. In December 1993, it tried to elect a more responsive neighborhood council. After a fierce campaign with competing slates, the CNC held the election in a few polling sites under a driving rain. Restaurant vans and their owners delivered scores of workers to the polls. The incumbent slate of candidates prevailed, preserving the council’s status quo.20

With the help of Chia-Ming Sze, a prominent local architect, the Parcel C Coalition put forward alternative plans for the site. The plan packet, prepared with architectural renderings and cost estimates, called for developing a community center using the existing buildings and creating open space that could be realized with modest funding. This proposal directly challenged the BRA’s and the CNC’s initial justification for the parcel sale—that the economic environment had so deteriorated that resources to develop a center were unavailable.21

The coalition’s legal committee researched the possibility of replacing T-NEMC on the prevailing lease for Parcel C. The coalition asked the BRA to extend to the Chinatown community the same terms for Parcel C that it was currently giving to T-NEMC: $1 a year. At a July 1994 news conference, the coalition offered a stack of ninety-nine dollar bills to the agency for a neighborhood lease of the site for ninety-nine years. The BRA declined to respond.22

Facing the city’s indifference, the coalition considered occupying Parcel C for a weekend, turning it into a tent city as Black activists led by Mel King had done on a South End parking lot in 1968. While some Chinatown activists were excited about the idea, others were concerned about asking community members to put themselves in harm’s way. For those who were not U.S. citizens, an arrest could endanger naturalization prospects or lead to deportation. The coalition opted instead for a Family Fun Day to dramatize the possibilities of Parcel C as a recreational space for Chinatown’s residential community.

In August, volunteers arranged games, activities, and performances for youth, adults, and the elderly on the Oak Street lot. Across the Oak Street buildings they strung banners that read “No Garage on Oak Street” and “Community Center on Parcel C” in English and Chinese. Performers staged a mock dedication ceremony for the imagined community center and recreation area, complete with a ribbon cutting and firecrackers. As coalition member Terri Oshiro said, “We wanted the community to see what a recreational and community center would be used for if we win the struggle. We want the city to know if they won’t help us, the community will take ownership of the issue.”23

The campaign also developed new sources of support. The Conservation Law Foundation, Boston University’s School of Public Health, and the Environmental Diversity Forum helped guide the neighborhood’s environmental regulatory strategy. With the Conservation Law Foundation, the coalition explored the possibility of filing a legal suit against the city for violating an EPA-ordered parking construction freeze in the downtown area that had been in effect for several years. The Sierra Club and the American Lung Association lent their names in support. Health Care for All helped publicize and lobby around the responsibilities of health care institutions and organized independent protest activities.24 The coalition also secured Boston Foundation support to help organize the campaign.

Most importantly, Chinatown developed relations with other neighborhoods that had become involved in redevelopment controversies with the BRA. There had been neighborhood battles in Allston-Brighton, which was facing expansion of the Boston College football stadium. West Roxbury was fighting a proposed Home Depot facility, and a central city cross-neighborhood alliance was working against a proposed asphalt plant in Roxbury. Because Chinatown’s campaign was the most sustained, intense, and active of these clashes, it mobilized a broader movement among Boston neighborhoods that demanded greater accountability in the city development process. This citywide network building put substantial pressure on the BRA to reform its practices and policies.25 The visibility of the Parcel C campaign was critical in changing perceptions of the Chinatown neighborhood from passive and unknown to active and engaged. It also transformed a neighborhood-specific campaign into a citywide call for change.

Environmental Review Victory and Diverse Tactics

Meanwhile, the Parcel C Coalition’s legal committee stayed involved in the state’s environmental review process. On the last day of February 1994, T-NEMC submitted the draft EIR that the state had demanded. In response, coalition lawyers produced a lengthy list of the draft’s omissions and deficiencies. Their comments, which were supported by those of other experts, moved MDEP to reject T-NEMC’s draft EIR in April. MDEP required T-NEMC to file a supplementary EIR to remedy those problems and also supported a coalition request that the EIR be translated into Chinese.26

In the interim, the Parcel C Coalition worked to establish lines of communication with city hall. The architect Chia-Ming Sze offered to intervene with Mayor Menino to try to set up a dialogue on community concerns. But like other communication attempts, this, too, failed.27 Despite Menino’s campaign promise to meet with both sides of the garage issue, his administration did not acknowledge the coalition. Their increasing alienation was a consequence of several factors, including the CNC’s dominance, the activists’ break with the Chin group (Menino’s close allies), and the mayor’s tendency to hold grudges against those who disagreed with him. As a local columnist later observed, “personal petulance rules the day in Menino’s Boston.”28

Though the city and T-NEMC were unaware of it, the community coalition was becoming weary. The campaign had lasted for more than a year, diverting energy and resources from the already challenging work of sustaining small community organizations. Despite the activists’ intensity and inventiveness, the city and the BRA remained intransigent. Increasingly impatient, coalition members made plans for a demonstration at City Hall Plaza, announcing them in Sampan. Zenobia Lai of GBLS spearheaded an effort among coalition lawyers to prepare associated civil rights charges against the city for discriminatory urban policies against the neighborhood. The legal team based its complaint on perceived civil rights violations under Title 8 and equal protection statutes. On October 21, 1994, the coalition communicated its intentions to the Menino administration.29

Three days before the planned rally at city hall, Mayor Menino made a surprising announcement: T-NEMC had withdrawn its proposal for the garage. The administration designated the parcel for neighborhood housing and turned the land over to the CCBA. Despite the victory, many in the community were still upset with how the city had managed the issue. Lydia Lowe recalled, “We had been sending a letter or making a phone call every week to the mayor’s office. A few months in, that was what we decided—‘Let’s just send in a letter every week,’ and there was never a single response to all those letters. And at the end, even when they decided not to build a garage, they wouldn’t even notify us. So we were angry at the city.”30

Larry Smith, T-NEMC’s interim chief operating officer, who had dismissed the community’s opposition a year earlier, blamed the Parcel C Coalition’s “skillfully orchestrated media campaign and a series of high profile events” for the withdrawal of the garage proposal.31 T-NEMC’s retreat never acknowledged the neighborhood’s expressed opposition and legitimate concerns, nor did the elites engage in any serious dialogue about them. The coalition concluded the campaign by organizing a victory march and later a community banquet.

The First Effects of the Parcel C Campaign

Following the campaign, the Parcel C Coalition transformed itself into the Campaign to Protect Chinatown (CPC) to deal with land issues in the neighborhood. It was now comprised of a smaller core of activists who engaged in urban environmental and neighborhood research and resident organizing.32 Yet a gulf remained between Chinatown’s residents and the community’s social structure. In 1994, T-NEMC developed a twenty-year plan for development that challenged the boundaries drawn by the Chinatown master plan. It included expansion into the east side of Tyler Street and new research facilities on the remainder of the east side of Harrison Avenue down to Tai Tung Village. The plan also proposed building a shell for the South Cove YMCA, which for twenty years had conducted programs in a pressurized fabric structure. The BRA and the CNC approved.

The new plan, revealed just as the Parcel C controversy was being resolved, did not provoke the same response as the garage had. Many of the Parcel C campaign’s leaders were exhausted and reluctant to engage themselves so soon in yet another battle. They also recognized the needs of the Chinatown Y. Nonetheless, the medical center expansion plan was potentially divisive.33 Neil Chin, who lived close to Oak Street, pointed out to the CNC that it was a violation of the Chinatown master plan. Elena Choy, who lived on Harvard Street with her mother, had been unaware of the plan before the council approved it and expressed anger at how the decision had been made.34 Henry Yee of the Tai Tung Tenants Association unsuccessfully approached organizations to try to stop the plan. Clearly, there were few mechanisms in place to ensure accountability to resident voices within organizational structures. To date, T-NEMC has realized only the Harrison Street construction described in its plan. The east side of Tyler, where the Y bubble once stood, remains vacant and is used as a parking area.

After three years, CCBA failed to advance the development of the Parcel C site. With BRA support, other community leaders initiated an open dialogue about the parcel. In February 1998, ACDC and CPC collaborated to create a community process for decision making around the site.35 Eventually, Parcel C became the proposed Metropolitan development, and ACDC and Edward Fish Associates became the developers.

ACDC and Fish Associates designed the Metropolitan to be a twenty-three-story mixed-use project, 46 percent of which would be affordable residential units. The remainder were market-rate and luxury units. The scale and composition became a source of tension between the developers and the activists who had fought for Parcel C. ACDC had adopted a “new urbanist” vision of Chinatown that embraced a multi-class, mixed-use community in contrast to Chinatown’s traditional role as a haven for working people.36 The Metropolitan far exceeded the Chinatown master plan’s height regulations, and most occupants would be higher-income residents. ACDC, moreover, was a junior partner to the private developers, whom it needed to fund and complete projects. The project nevertheless increased the units available for working people. It was completed in 2004, and both ACDC and CPA were to claim organizational space within the development.37

In 1996, the community applied the mobilization lessons from Parcel C in a successful campaign against a proposed Interstate 93 exit ramp called ramp DD, part of a large-scale project to move the city’s central artery underground. The state’s Department of Transportation had designed the ramp to exit onto Marginal Road, which bordered the Quincy School.38 A coalition called the Chinatown Central Artery/Tunnel Task Force formed to fight the ramp, modeling its tactics on those of the Parcel C Coalition. Unlike the Parcel C controversy, the community was unanimous in its opposition to ramp DD. The coalition organized marches, lobbying, a media strategy, negotiations, and public protests, including a parade of two hundred community members to the state house. Residents vowed to lie down in front of the bulldozers. With the help of the city, planners rerouted the ramp.39

The Community Finds a Voice in the City

Chinatown grew in intangible ways through the Parcel C organizing process. The mobilization was vital in developing social capital, capabilities, leadership, and relationships in the community. Historically, it was the neighborhood’s broadest mobilization in response to its many land issues. In Zenobia Lai’s eyes, it established the progressive organizations as “key players in community politics” and incorporated residents into civic activism in an unprecedented manner, “every step of the way.”40 The Chinatown community realized its strengths in building widespread and sustained mobilization using a wide variety of methods, and its efforts established new relationships among different community groups.

Chinatown’s new identity demonstrated that the neighborhood, despite its divisions, had evolved into a community that could claim and assert its perceived rights. It had centers of leadership other than the traditional associations of the pre–World War II community and the postwar ward bosses. It was a neighborhood that could reflect on and articulate a distinct vision for its future. Those who would have been most affected by the garage—the residents—were now at the center of decision making.

The Parcel C campaign renegotiated Chinatown’s relationships with the rest of the city. The community drew a line regarding T-NEMC expansion: it would end at Nassau and Oak streets. As Tom O’Malley, Barrett’s successor at the BRA, said, “The community and their response to the garage sent a very decisive message, even if it was not only contentious but divisive at the time, that it had to be a holistic community process. . . . The institutions are no longer going to expand in that direction. The housing is going to be permanently affordable.”41 T-NEMC learned a lesson and became more cautious in how it worked with the community. Since then, it has not directly confronted Chinatown around a development project. It has also paid more attention to its relations to the neighborhood and has hired local Chinese Americans as community liaisons.

The campaign also altered Chinatown’s relationship with city authorities. Lydia Lowe observed that the referendum made politicians take notice of groups beyond the Chin allies and start to work with them. It signaled to the city that public bodies had to communicate more broadly and engage a more diverse set of stakeholders beyond the CNC. The city began to engage in more public processes around development; it translated documents and provided interpreters at hearings. This was a sea change—a recognition that residents had a legitimate voice.42

Chinatown’s relations with other mobilized neighborhoods changed as well. Now perceived as one of the most active communities, it became a meaningful participant in citywide neighborhood issues. Other neighborhoods began to call on Chinatown to join cross-neighborhood initiatives.

But there were negative effects as well. Among the harmful results of the Parcel C campaign was the opening of old wounds. The campaign had exposed the attitudes and weaknesses of the CNC and provoked very public divisions in neighborhood attitudes toward growth. These divisions would allow the growth coalition to nominally comply with a policy of neighborhood oversight while violating it in practice. Development forces could always point to a partner in the community that favored a proposed project.

Another effect of the Parcel C and ramp DD mobilizations was the strain the campaign imposed on the neighborhood’s organizing resources. The active organizations were all small groups, most with a staff that numbered in single digits. They had to reallocate resources away from their established campaigns and programs to organize around development issues. Their investment provided the day-to-day coordination structure for the campaign, and much of the energy came from community volunteers outside the neighborhood. Law students, activists, and other bodies supplemented the young, elderly, and abutting residents. While residents came to invest themselves in neighborhood development, organizations continued to play the leading role in mobilization efforts. This tension between the residents and organizations was evident in the responses to T-NEMC’s new plan, with residents wanting to fight and organizations feeling that they lacked the capacity.

The scholar Manuel Castells has defined urban movements as a fight for residents’ use values rather than the city’s exchange values, the maintenance of autonomous local culture, and the search for increasing power in local government. Chinatown’s mobilization had transcended protest and deepened in all three of these aspects. It had also begun to overcome the limitations that Castells saw in many urban movements by coupling its issues with those of other groups in the city.43 The neighborhood’s Parcel C and ramp DD actions demonstrated that it was capable of conducting very sophisticated campaigns. The community refined its use of existing mobilization methods, making the Parcel C issue the dominant development story in the city for eighteen months. It was, as Suzanne Lee observed, “the accumulation of many years of organizing work.”44

The strengths of Chinatown’s evolving organizing efforts were most effective in counteracting the harmful effects of growth but not generating positive growth. It could preserve some of the housing units and community spaces but did not often contribute to creating additional housing. Community development entities such as ACDC, on the other hand, were making incremental additions to sustaining Chinatown’s working-class heart while simultaneously diluting it. Projects such as the Metropolitan provided some affordable housing but also brought newer and wealthier people into the neighborhood.

Chinatown thus remained divided. Within the neighborhood, many residents began to question growth and to look at the details of growth plans. A number of them, particularly those who had opposed the Parcel C garage, concluded that alternatives to growth strategies were necessary. Others, who saw no such options, pined for the return of optimal growth conditions, a supportive policy, and a dynamic development environment. In difficult times they felt the neighborhood must sacrifice more to support development projects. Another sector in the community occupied the middle ground and sought to combine support for growth with planning for the neighborhood.

Chinatown, while learning to value collaboration, had not yet found an arrangement for sustaining working unity within the community. Sharp divisions still divided those who had fought the garage, those who had stayed neutral on the issue, and those who had supported it. Whether the neighborhood could resolve these issues and elevate its work in a transformative direction to meet its needs within a growth machine environment is a question that would have to unfold.