Murals With a Cause: to Save Local Businesses

Covid-19 has been devastating for restaurants and small shops across the country. But the loss of business hit New York City’s Chinatown even earlier as customers started to stay away — out of either fear or prejudice — when coronavirus was ravaging China but had yet to reach the city.

Community activist Karlin Chan is turning to art and the power of social media to try to bring people back to the neighborhood’s struggling stores and eateries. He’s teamed up with an artist, Peach Tao, to create colorful murals that spotlight Chinatown’s culture and history.

“I’m using Art for Recovery to create these Instagram spots, these selfie spots for people to come into the neighborhood and check out,” he says. “Hopefully when they’re crawling through the neighborhood looking for our murals, they’ll get hungry and buy something to eat.”

The murals are playful and, in some cases, harken back to the neighborhood’s past. The second of the four murals painted so far stars New York’s iconic pigefsoons — one wearing a Yankees cap — playing mahjong, a Chinese game played with tiles that was also popular with Jewish New Yorkers who lived in the area in the first half of the 20th century.

Business owners are on edge as coronavirus cases rise in the city, Chan says. They fear another lockdown and the added damage it could bring.

“We’ve lost many of the old-school restaurants here, and a lot of shops have closed,” he says. “When we come out of this pandemic, our landscape will have changed probably more than any other place in New York City.”

The mural project has been a bare-bones operation. A GoFundMe campaign has brought in several thousand dollars. In time, Chan hopes to turn the effort into a nonprofit that can help fight anti-Asian racism, which he says has been more overt the past several years.

“I want to use this project to introduce the Chinese culture and people to other ethnicities,” he says. “New York City is a melting pot.”