Since June of 2024, the streets of Boston’s Chinatown neighborhood have sported a subtle but important addition. Four wall-mounted markers created using lenticular photographic prints form the first phase of the interactive Immigrant History Trail, produced by the nonprofit Chinatown Community Land Trust (Chinatown CLT). Funded partly by a National Trust grant, the trail emphasizes both individual and collective histories, including the lives of the many immigrants from all over the world who inhabited the area at different times. We spoke with Chinatown CLT Executive Director Lydia Lowe, who says the next round of markers will go up by May.

Why was the trail needed?

First of all, the very rich history of the Chinatown neighborhood is invisible in a lot of ways. But so much has happened there, and it’s such an interesting history. So that needs to be visible and known. Chinatown has been overlooked as compared to other [historic] neighborhoods, but it’s just as significant, and [Chinese people have] been there since the 1870s.

Also, Chinatown has been going through a lot of displacement [of longtime residents] in the last 20 years, particularly since [around] 2010. That displacement crisis made us feel we need a community stabilization strategy. The Chinatown Stabilization Committee, which is affiliated with us and the Chinese Progressive Association, was launched to support those stabilization efforts. A lot of that strategy is about developing new affordable housing and preserving existing housing as affordable, but it’s also about helping tenants organize against eviction. There are a lot of different components to it.

How has historic preservation been a part of that?

Even though our knee-jerk reaction to historic preservation is often like, “We don’t want to … tell everybody what color to paint your door,” we do want it to be difficult to demolish these buildings. Because once you demolish a building, tenants are never coming back. So we started exploring that relationship between historic preservation, celebrating our history, and anti-displacement and community preservation. And we decided, let’s take the historic and cultural preservation idea and interpret it in the way that we need.

That’s been a lot of the focus of our work in recent years. And we think that part of that is celebrating the history of the neighborhood as always being an anchor community for immigrant, working-class families. Whether it was the Irish, the Europeans, the Syrian and Lebanese communities, or the Chinese. And that’s why we called it the Immigrant History Trail [instead of] exclusively celebrating Chinese American history. Because it’s all part of that history of being that anchor neighborhood, and that’s what we’re trying to preserve. That’s all part of the history that we share.

Who are some of the key people involved?

Tunney Lee passed during the pandemic. He was a leading urban planner and [a professor] at MIT [who mentored] many generations of planners and people interested in urban planning, and a lot of community activists in Chinatown. He grew up in Chinatown. Tunney was part of the initial brainstorming and continues to be part of the inspiration for this trail.

Daphne Xu is the lead artist [for the trail] and a consultant to Chinatown CLT. She designed the look of the markers and worked with our fabricator to [produce them], and also worked with the web designer on the look of the website. Vivian Wu Wong is the chair of the trail’s volunteer committee and a retired history teacher.