According to UMSL's Virtual City Project, Hop Alley (the downtown Chinatown we destroyed to build Busch Stadium) had about 300 Chinese Americans.

How many people does it take to constitute an ethnic enclave? Do certain kinds of businesses cement it? If there's more than one business catering primarily to one ethnicity, perhaps.

I think it's really sad that St. Louis doesn't have a Chinatown. Asia Street on Olive is pretty interesting, and I heard Lulu's expanded recently. The weird thing is that Olive isn't just Chinese. My wife and I have been talking off and on about opening a Korean restaurant in St. Louis. The Korean grocery stores and churches are generally concentrated on Olive as well. In bigger American cities Koreatown and Chinatown are usually pretty far apart. In St. Louis they're loosely sprawled from U-City to Chesterfield with plant science and butterflies in between.

I sort of feel like I'm not supposed to live in the Hill, the Ville, or any other ethnic community unless I belong to it for fear of undermining them. I guess virtually nobody in Soulard is actually French, but living there they make certain concessions to French history. Is something like a Korean restaurant appropriate to any neighborhood, or are there places where it really wouldn't belong?

If Olive is our Chinatown or our Asia street, can we really designate it that without consideration for the non-Asian stakeholders on there. The Olive-Link is a terrible name, and their membership seems too diverse to be just labelled Asian.

Thoughts?

Olive does have some pretty good Asian groceries and restaurants, but it's so unwalkable and miserable to look at that it doesn't qualify as a proper Asia-row or Chinatown. If all these businesses relocated in a dense city neighborhood, it would be a destination place.

Olive should be the next Great Streets Initiative effort in the St. Louis region. Some have suggested putting up Chinese gates on Olive and non-Chinese business owners objected. That's too bad, but surely they can all agree to a more walkable streetscape, right?

Alex Ihnen wrote:Olive should be the next Great Streets Initiative effort in the St. Louis region. Some have suggested putting up Chinese gates on Olive and non-Chinese business owners objected. That's too bad, but surely they can all agree to a more walkable streetscape, right?

Right, you can't put up gates if you're trapping Koreans and Vietnamese in the same category along with the other minorities that just happen to be there. Olive could be a major street for us. I agree, if we're retrofitting the suburbs, Olive would be a major route to address. The Green Center, the Butterfly House, and the plant science cluster are helpful anchors.

The first thing we should do is make sure Skinker from the Wash U circle to Olive is part of the loop. Wash U would be the obvious leader there. Going down Olive from there, the Olive-Link business association would have to step up.

campbv wrote:What happened to CS? You make it sound like he's dead!

Slightly OT but yeah, I'd like to know that as well.