Painting the Town -- Museum of the City of New York

The buildings lining this narrow, curved roadway -probably Doyers or Mott Street -look very much the same today as they did in the 1930s, when Selma Gubin painted this artfully composed study of Chinatown thinned of its typically dense pedestrian traffic. According to local history, the district that became New York City's Chinatown in the 1930s, a district bound by Bayard and Baxter Streets, Park Row, and New Bowery, was established with the arrival of one Chinese individual in Doyers Street in 1855. By 1859 the number of Chinese in the area had increased to 150 residents. By the 1870s the number of Chinese residents had grown to more than 2,000.

These nineteenth-century arrivals found themselves packed as densely into dingy tenement buildings as other immigrant groups establishing themselves in New York. However, the buildings in what came to be known as Chinatown benefited from the practice of decorating building exteriors with adaptations of traditional Chinese architecture -pagodas and tile roofs -lending the area an exotic flavor that identifies Chinatown to this day.¹ In addition to such architectural flourishes, the many restaurants, curio shops, and grocery stores dealing in Chinese goods, and the well-publicized threat of rival tongs, or gangs, created a district that was both tantalizing and fearsome to outsiders as late as the 1940s.² The tong wars in the early decades of the twentieth century led to the city's highest murder rate within a limited geographic area. By the 1930s, however, these gang-like societies had restructured themselves into organizations dedicated to helping immigrants.³

Selma Gubin was born in Kiev, Ukraine, and settled with her family in New York in 1908. Even though few women were successful in the city's contemporary art world, her father encouraged her pursuit of formal art training. After studying art at Hunter College, Gubin joined the Art Students League in 1924, where faculty members Raphael Soyer, Philip Evergood, and Chaim Gross influenced her developing style. Although obliged to work at a variety of office jobs in order to support herself, Gubin remained an active member of the New York Artists Equity Association and the National Association of Women Artists and exhibited widely during her lifetime. In this painting, the faceless figures and pockets of shadow in the street combine with the distorted perspective of street and buildings to give the scene an almost ominous air, an aspect emphasized by the strong but jarring coloration.

Notes:

1 Herbert Asbury, "Exotic Chinatown," in The Empire City: A Treasury of New York, ed. Alexander Klein (New York: Rinehart and Company, 1955), p. 61.

2 Although the tongs were originally benevolent societies, in the early twentieth century they degenerated into American-style gangs struggling for control of Chinese gambling and opium trades. See Margarette De Andrade, Water under the Bridge (Rutland, Vt: Charles E. Tuttle, 1988), p. 43. In How the Other Half Lives (New York: Dover Publications, 1971), Jacob Riis describes the horrors associated with Chinatown -the white slave trade, the corrupt gambling, and the opium trade.

3 At the end of the twentieth century, Chinatown remains both a bulwark of Chinese life in New York City and a place to which the younger generations of Chinese who have migrated to the suburbs return regularly, either to visit those who remain or to shop for goods less available to them out of town.


Chinatown Scene c. 1935 Selma Gubin (1903 -1974) Oil on paper, 14 3/4 X 20 Gift of Joan Gubin Tolchin, 92.76
The buildings lining this narrow, curved roadway -probably Doyers or Mott Street -look very much the same today as they did in the 1930s, when Selma Gubin painted this artfully composed study of Chinatown thinned of its typically dense pedestrian traffic. According to local history, the district that became New York City's Chinatown in the 1930s, a district bound by Bayard and Baxter Streets, Park Row, and New Bowery, was established with the arrival of one Chinese individual in Doyers Street in 1855. By 1859 the number of Chinese in the area had increased to 150 residents. By the 1870s the number of Chinese residents had grown to more than 2,000. These nineteenth-century arrivals found themselves packed as densely into dingy tenement buildings as other immigrant groups establishing themselves in New York. However, the buildings in what came to be known as Chinatown benefited from the practice of decorating building exteriors with adaptations of traditional Chinese architecture -pagodas and tile roofs -lending the area an exotic flavor that identifies Chinatown to this day.¹ In addition to such architectural flourishes, the many restaurants, curio shops, and grocery stores dealing in Chinese goods, and the well-publicized threat of rival tongs, or gangs, created a district that was both tantalizing and fearsome to outsiders as late as the 1940s.² The tong wars in the early decades of the twentieth century led to the city's highest murder rate within a limited geographic area. By the 1930s, however, these gang-like societies had restructured themselves into organizations dedicated to helping immigrants.³ Selma Gubin was born in Kiev, Ukraine, and settled with her family in New York in 1908. Even though few women were successful in the city's contemporary art world, her father encouraged her pursuit of formal art training. After studying art at Hunter College, Gubin joined the Art Students League in 1924, where faculty members Raphael Soyer, Philip Evergood, and Chaim Gross influenced her developing style. Although obliged to work at a variety of office jobs in order to support herself, Gubin remained an active member of the New York Artists Equity Association and the National Association of Women Artists and exhibited widely during her lifetime. In this painting, the faceless figures and pockets of shadow in the street combine with the distorted perspective of street and buildings to give the scene an almost ominous air, an aspect emphasized by the strong but jarring coloration. Notes: 1 Herbert Asbury, "Exotic Chinatown," in The Empire City: A Treasury of New York, ed. Alexander Klein (New York: Rinehart and Company, 1955), p. 61. 2 Although the tongs were originally benevolent societies, in the early twentieth century they degenerated into American-style gangs struggling for control of Chinese gambling and opium trades. See Margarette De Andrade, Water under the Bridge (Rutland, Vt: Charles E. Tuttle, 1988), p. 43. In How the Other Half Lives (New York: Dover Publications, 1971), Jacob Riis describes the horrors associated with Chinatown -the white slave trade, the corrupt gambling, and the opium trade. 3 At the end of the twentieth century, Chinatown remains both a bulwark of Chinese life in New York City and a place to which the younger generations of Chinese who have migrated to the suburbs return regularly, either to visit those who remain or to shop for goods less available to them out of town.