Photo: News_SavePhillyCT_4: The Save Chinatown Coalition’s organized rally and march on Sept. 7 by Joe Piette via flickr.
Through rain and shine, an estimated 3,000 to 4,000 demonstrators marched throughout Philadelphia’s City Hall and Chinatown on Saturday, Sept. 7. The rally and march were dedicated to stopping the building of a Philadelphia 76ers stadium in the middle of their Chinatown neighborhood, or the “heart of our city,” as written on their flier via Save Chinatown Philly’s Instagram.
The Save Chinatown Coalition organized the rally and march to bring more attention to representatives and leaders to disrupt the build. The Save Chinatown Coalition is a nonprofit organization led by the Asian Pacific Islander Political Alliance (APIPA) and Asian Americans United (AAU). The rally was held a week after the city revealed impact studies that included a community impact assessment, an economic impact analysis, a design consulting, and a traffic transportation and parking analysis that was paid for by the 76ers management, reported by whyy.org.
On July 22, 2022, the 76ers revealed plans to move their home court from the Wells Fargo Center in South Philadelphia Sports Complex to Center City, in a building adjacent to Philadelphia’s Chinatown, after their lease at Wells Fargo ends in 2030. The proposal claims that the arena will benefit the Chinatown neighborhood’s economy, according to The Daily Pennsylvania. 76ers team owners Josh Harris and David Blitzer created the billion-dollar proposal in hopes of creating their own personal arena with around 18,000 seats called 76 Place, according to WagingNonviolence.org. The owners claim that this arena will create new jobs and revitalize the Chinatown community.
On the other hand, many Chinatown advocates are against the arena, as they believe it will contribute to gentrification and displacement of residents. The Quad had the opportunity to speak with Mohan Seshadri, the executive director of APIPA. He expressed the community’s concern for family businesses and medical emergency services. “A majority of the city is against this thing, but specifically, 80% of the city is concerned about the impact on Jefferson and emergency medical services, because any sort of delay, any sort of street closure, anything that you know costs an ambulance minutes of response time, that’s life and death for patients,” stated Seshadri.
Many Philadelphia residents are skeptical of the arena as worries for Chinatown’s community grow. Seshadri stated that “the economics of Chinatown, you know, a lot of folks outside our community very much see Chinatown as [] a restaurant spot, right? Or like a tourist spot, but Chinatown is a living, breathing economy that is actually sustained by regulars. It’s sustained by members of the Asian American community and our neighbors coming there day after day and week after week, in order to worship, in order to go to school, in order to [] play mahjong with the elders, things like that. And what we found consistently is that whenever there is, for example, a large event at the convention center, which used to be Chinatown and displaced 200 Chinese elders in order to build the convention center, [whenever there is some kind of big event that] makes it harder to get in and out of Chinatown because of the lack of parking, because of all of the traffic, because of all just the people in the streets and things like that. You know, overall business actually drops because those regulars decide, oh, there’s a big event, there’s the flower show, [], something like that. I’m going to stay home. And so all of this talk about bringing business to Chinatown at the end of the day, it’s going to bring business to the concession stands and vendors inside the arena.”
When asked about whether or not the 76ers organization has been in conversation with the Chinatown community, Seshadri stated that the organization claimed they had “secret, private closed-door meetings with people in Chinatown, but we’ve never seen them around and they certainly have not had any public meetings with the Chinatown community.” He went into further detail, stating that “the Sixers’ lawyers tried to basically sneak legislation through an unrelated bill. It was [] a tiny paragraph attached to a parking bill that would have started the process of building the arena in terms of shutting down the streets that needed to be shut down for construction to start. And we caught it. We mobilized 50 people over 24 hours to give testimony against it, and we shut the bill down, or specifically got this offending legislation pulled.”
“But they had never actually met openly and publicly, with full language access, with our community. They had met behind closed doors in more private meetings where attendees were encouraged to not ask tough questions as a way to show respect to the guests in the community. You know, and those meetings also lacked critical language access that would have made it more accessible to many of our elders. So the last time the Sixers and/or their employees came to Chinatown to meet with us publicly and directly was December 2022, and of course, they left early because they couldn’t take the heat from all the questions we were asking. And since then, you know, they’ve spent somewhere between $5 and $6 million on PR, on dark money expenditures in the elections, on lobbying, things like that,” stated Seshadri.
On Wednesday, Sept. 11, Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker called for a town meeting to discuss the arena with community members. A member of The Quad was in attendance at the meeting and reports that Mayor Parker insisted that the meeting was “intended to be a listening session.” She furthered the meeting by stating, “I will communicate and I will listen to any stakeholders impacted by my decision.” According to whyy.org, after Mayor Parker listened to the residents and business owners in Chinatown, she promised to consider all viewpoints that were to be taken into account for the 76ers arena. She is considered a crucial component of this arena as the 76ers require her support for the $1.5 billion development.
The Quad received a statement from an attendee of the town meeting who is a previous member of the Philadelphia Suns Organization, which has been prevalent in Chinatown since 1972. As a member of Chinatown, he stated “It doesn’t matter where they build the arena, like FDR or that old oil refinery next to I-76 — the revenue and jobs will still be there. But if they build the arena next to Chinatown, four years from now those jobs will go away, but the arena will be there for life, and the Chinatown people continue to suffer with traffic and lack of parking spaces.”
Mayor Parker reassured the attendees that “whatever decision we ultimately make, I need you to hear me. Chinatown, Washington Square West, Market East — you all matter to me. And all of Philadelphia matters to me,” said Parker, reported by whyy.org.
Philadelphia’s Chinatown community continues their fight against the 76ers arena by protesting, calling their council members and sharing petitions to defend their home.
“Chinatown is, if not home, then it’s been a lifeline for them or their parents or their grandparents, and that’s why we’ve seen such a dramatic amount of support from our community, as well as other Philadelphians all across the city, and so we’re going to keep doing what [] our communities built us to do, which is fight, to defend our people’s home. And we’re going to do that in the streets. We’re going to do that in City Hall. We’re going to do that in the media, and we’re going to do that in the courts, if need be, in order to make sure that Chinatown is protected for another 150 years,” stated Seshadri.
Elijah Fischer contributed to this article.
Brianna Chau is a fourth-year Political Science and Philosophy major. BC976136@wcupa.edu.