Review: SubUrbanisms: Casino Urbanization, Chinatowns, and the Contested American Landscape and Chinese Style: Rediscovering the Architecture of Poy Gum Lee, 1923–1968

Abstract

SubUrbanisms: Casino Urbanization, Chinatowns, and the Contested American Landscape Museum of Chinese in America, New York 24 September 2015–27 March 2016 Chinese Style: Rediscovering the Architecture of Poy Gum Lee, 1923–1968 Museum of Chinese in America, New York 24 September 2015–27 March 2016 If the United States, sprawling and diverse, can be difficult to see, the milieu of new immigrants, especially poor ones, is even less visible. A pair of exhibitions at the Museum of Chinese in America helped bring that world into focus: SubUrbanisms , which explored the lives of Chinese immigrants in twenty-first-century Norwich, Connecticut; and Chinese Style , which documented the mid-twentieth-century career of Chinatown-born architect Poy Gum Lee. SubUrbanisms , curated by Stephen Fan, a young Chinese American architect who grew up, in part, in Norwich, told the fascinating story of Chinese workers lured from New York City beginning around 2001 to work at Mohegan Sun, the massive casino complex developed by the Mohegan Tribe in the late 1990s on the site of a shuttered plant that made components for nuclear reactors. Norwich, like much of southeastern New England, industrialized early. A century ago, its bustling mills attracted thousands of new immigrants from the Lower East Side, mostly Italians and Jews (including several of my great-grandparents). As industry waned, however, downtown faded, and those who remained, like Americans coast to coast, spread out to a new ring of tract houses and commercial strips. It is here, rather than …