That big curved red-brick tower is Confucius Plaza, and the bronze figure out front is Confucius himself. When it went up in nineteen seventy-six, it was the tallest thing in Chinatown and the first major publicly funded housing built specifically for this community. And it nearly didn't get built by anyone from this community at all.
Because when construction started, the contractor wasn't hiring Chinese workers. A housing project, in the middle of Chinatown, for Chinese families — and the crews building it were being brought in from everywhere except the neighborhood standing around it. So in the spring of nineteen seventy-four, the neighborhood stopped standing around. Hundreds of people marched onto the site and physically shut the work down. Police made more than fifty arrests. And the signs they carried are the thing I want you to remember. One of them read: the Asians built the railroad — why not Confucius Plaza?
That line is doing a hundred years of work. The transcontinental
railroad, the one that stitched the country together, was built in enormous part by Chinese laborers who then got thanked with a law banning them from the country. And here were their grandchildren, holding that history up on a stick, in front of a bulldozer. It worked. The contractor started hiring. Historians now mark this scruffy little construction-site protest as one of the founding moments
