Look up at this thing. A stone triumphal arch, seventy feet of it, with two curved rows of columns sweeping out on either side like the entrance to an empire. This is the front door of the Manhattan Bridge, and it is trying very hard to be Europe.
The firm that built it, Carrère and Hastings, also built the main New York Public Library — the one with the lions. They finished this gateway around nineteen fifteen, and they borrowed the shape from the greatest hits of the old world. The arch is lifted from a monument in Paris. The colonnade, those sweeping arms, is a shrunken copy of the one wrapped around Saint Peter's Square at the Vatican. So the entrance to the busiest Chinese neighborhood in America is a Roman arch pretending to be a Parisian gate pretending to be the Vatican.
And then there's the decoration. Go look at the frieze running across the top. Carved into the stone, presiding over the doorway to Chinatown, is a buffalo hunt. Native Americans on horseback, chasing bison a
cross the Great Plains, with an actual buffalo head mounted at the very peak of the arch. Nobody involved seems to have paused and asked what the American frontier had to do with Canal Street. It's just up there. A stampede in stone, watching the dumpling shops.
Now turn your attention down Canal, toward the foot of the bridge, because there's a temple down there with a secret.
Inside sits the l
