26. CHINATOWN: VANISHED, NOT VANQUISHED

Although most of the Chinatown buildings have disappeared from Erie Avenue and Park Street, we who experienced life in Chinatown carry its essence forward.

Erie Avenue

2007: 568 to 584 Erie Avenue - Photo Courtesy of Loy Chong

2014: Across the street from 568 Erie Avenue, once the Sun Sui Restaurant, a group has assembled to mark an event.

Much of what remained of Chinatown on Erie Avenue - the east-side stretching from Bridge to Park Street - is being, or has been, torn down.

In the background, 568, most recently known as the Sun Sui Restaurant, is to be included.

Its usefulness outlasted storefronts already boarded up in the 2007 photo.



Out of the faces,  I see Loy Chong. I have also come to know other faces and names now.

Moon and Fung Chong as the owners/operators of Charlie Hing Laundry (Post #5), and James Lau as a long-ago Park Street resident, and his wife, Patty (Post #22).

Michael Wan, I knew as a Niagara Falls Ching Ming Festival volunteer (Post #15: Chinese Groceries) and have been told his business is bringing Chinese groceries from Toronto to Chinese restaurants in Niagara Falls.

NORMAN YE, once worked at Jade Garden (Post #23: Lew Family) and has since moved to Toronto.

SUNNY KUONG, still resides in Niagara Falls. He immigrated about the time Loy Chong did. Sunny also worked at the Jade Garden at one time and later opened his own restaurant in Fort Erie.


The set of 3 three-story buildings along with the white building on the corner of Erie & Park are gone yet the building that sits on the corner of Erie & Bridge Streets - 274 Bridge - one time as the Trennick Hotel, then the Metropole, Mohawk, Lord Nelson and finally, Hotel Europa continues to operate.

As the Trennick Hotel, it had provided jobs for a number of early Niagara Falls Chinese (Post #10: Cooks ).

It's strange what remains and what vanishes.



Park Street

Meanwhile rounding the southeast corner of Erie onto Park Street, other buildings have found new uses or likewise been levelled.

When we visited in June 2017, 257 Park St. - where my mother and her friends once gathered to play dominoes and swap stories - was in the process of getting an exterior paint job.

The squat office building of Fred Eastland Fuels at 249 Park (left in photo below) - boarded up with entrance to the weigh scales weed-grown in 2005 – had since been demolished.

Park Street Exchange, 2005
Courtesy of Niagara Falls (Ontario) Public Library

However, the row of buildings next to Fred Eastland Fuels office have survived and been re-purposed.

Courtesy of R. Bobak, 2017

In my childhood, 243 (left storefront) had been Charlie Hing Laundry (Post #5); 239 (middle store front) – Lococo Brothers Grocery; and 235 (right store front) had been the Farmers Meat Market.

I had no experience with the latter or the people who lived through the far right doorway and upstairs.

At the same time, I don’t know if past the parking lot, towards Clifton (Zimmerman) Avenue really counted as Chinatown. Although in the '20s to '40s, the area housed many Chinese residents, there were no Chinese beyond that point as I was growing up.

Rather, the buildings and their goings-on were part of my neighbourhood. Sometimes, I might go there or watch what was happening.

My home – 226 Park St. – was on the south side. From a front window, I could only glimpse my mother walking westerly up to 257 Park St. where she would visit with her women friends but I could not see her enter. However, the easterly direction right down to the Police Station (NE corner of Park & Clifton) was clear.

The building more directly across the street, had a cotswold-style exterior (something I remembered learning with Miss Edwards at NFCVI) and displayed the Lions Club logo.

A gas station with a coffee shop stood on the NW corner of Park & Clifton with its main entry off Clifton Ave. Sometimes, after my brother and/or I had endured one of my mother’s trying haircuts, she rewarded us with a Coke or ice cream from there.

Once when my mother was not feeling well, she sent me to buy her a cup of coffee to bring home. Typically, she did not drink coffee but something about her illness made her crave it. Hesitantly, she told me to ask for 3 lumps of sugar in it. Being in the restaurant business, she recognized how the extra sugar could cut into the profit margin but nonetheless, she wanted 3 lumps.


The still-standing buildings on Park Street and even vacant spaces are touchstones with my childhood.

On my side of the street, the Niagara Paper Box Company stood on the SW corner of Park & Clifton. Employees parked in the lot between the box factory and our building during the day but on weekends and evenings, it became a play area for my brother and I.

We shared a space but seldom the play.

A small paved pad of the parking lot was right next to our building. The rest was packed dirt and gravel.

After factory hours,  I’d bounce my red, white, and blue rubber ball against the huge expanse of wall near the paved pad and perfect my technique for “Sevens”, “Donkey”, and “Oliver Twist.”

Side View of 226 Park Street - The Wall

One winter, the conditions were just right: it had rained lots or snow melted and froze quickly making most of the parking lot a sheet of ice.

On my recently-acquired used figure skates, I stumbled over the exposed gravel but where the surface was smooth, I flew.

My brother didn’t actually play in the lot. He explored and scavenged the garbage piled in it.

The paper box company must have manufactured the fancy kind of boxes that we saw in jewelry store windows. My brother collected scraps of white satin, patches of black and blue velvet from the paper box company refuse.

Once I overhead him tell a policeman who questioned what he was doing. My brother replied he was collecting rags to polish his shoes. The policeman accepted that.

Thinking back, I wonder if he had leather shoes then. Mostly, we wore 99 cent runners.

On the other side of our building, 232 Park St. was more vacant (according to my memory) than ever occupied. Although in the photo below, on the right, there is a Chinese laundry sign hanging from 232 Park St.

Parts of Park St. were excavated in 1956. I would have been 4 years old at the time.

Next to 232 Park St. was Eastland’s coal shed (238 Park St.) and mountains of coal that hemmed in our backyard. One towered so close, coal bulged through and occasionally over the boards of our back fence.

More than Neighbours

Within the borders of my Chinatown or my neighbourhood, Chinese and non-Chinese lived and worked. Typically non-Chinese people were in the neighbourhood because of their businesses. Only as I grew older did I recognize their influence on development.

Lococo Brothers Grocery

My family did not shop regularly at Lococo Brothers. Big stores like Dominion, part of a chain of groceries, offered better prices. Purchasing something at Lococo’s was a matter of convenience.

Yet, I am grateful for those infrequent visits. Not because the store was across the street and saved me the chore of running blocks down Queen Street to purchase a needed or forgotten item, but because the Lococo's store held more than just goods.

It was a window into an era before grocery chains and provided experiences that otherwise I would only know through books, TV, or teachers.

For instance, there was a huge cheese wheel that rested on a wooden block. Charlie Lococo would cut off a wedge, weigh it on a scale that took up much of the counter, and then wrap the cheese slab in brown paper.

I don’t think we ever bought cheese there. Cheese was not part of our diet and the cheese my brother and I knew were Kraft slices that were used in our restaurant.

Yet, I have a memory of the taste of cheese from the cheese wheel. I think Charlie Lococo must have provided us with a sample: giving us a sharper taste than our palettes were familiar with.

If not for Charlie Lococo and his wheel of cheese, though, I would not have had a context when Mr. Potter, my science teacher at NFCVI, was telling us about cheese skippers. Not that I ever saw larvae on Lococo’s cheese; it would just have been difficult to imagine a wheel made of cheese.

My second memory may not be directly linked to Charlie Lococo (and perhaps may be more accurately attributable to the Farmers Meat Market) but I do associate it with the Lococo store.

For several days, a whole deer carcass was strung from a strut outside the store.

I was not naive about the source of meat. I knew about killing and food. My mother bought home all kinds of live fowl and slaughtered them for our dinner. I had seen barbequed pork – as a gutted, headless torso – hanging in Toronto Chinatown windows.

But never had I ever seen a deer: one with antlers, glassy eyes, leathery black nose, and brown sugar-coloured fur.

I’d go to our front window many times during the day, peek out, and make sure it was still there.

One day, I looked and the carcass was gone.

Fred Eastland Fuels

As children, the Fred Eastland Fuels mounds of coal seemed enormous. When no one was around, my brother and I tried to scale them. Scrambling to the top was near impossible as the fist-sized lumps slipped beneath our feet. We’d be covered in coal dust and unable to escape our mother’s detection.

If one of the coal conveyors – “stackers” – was parked closed to a pile, it was easier, and slightly cleaner, to climb up the striated belt and leap off near the top. While some kids in my class at school had swing sets and slides nearby, my brother and I had “coal dragons” that spewed huge, black nuggets: hauled away by the dump truck load.

We both knew better than to tell kids at school that we lived beside a coal yard. At the same time, I don’t think we played there often.

I am confident that we were told not to play there: being dirty, as well as dangerous.

I don’t know if there actually was a Fred Eastland. A woman worked in the office and a man drove the dump truck and ran the yard. But in my mind, he was Fred Eastland.

When my brother started driving, he parked the car in our backyard. The only access was across the Eastland coal yard. I don’t think there was much, if any, discussion about the arrangements.

I do know that when it snowed, Fred Eastland would be out on his tractor early and clear a path from our backyard, across the coal yard, over the railway tracks, down the dirt laneway beside Wing On Co. (254 Park – Post #16: Chinese Groceries) and out to the street.

Fred Eastland was very good to us.

Likewise, Robert Wong told me during his high school years, when he was living at 226 Park Street, Fred Eastland offered up a space in one of the sheds as a kind of clubhouse for some of the younger Chinese.

At the time, such acts were taken for granted. Only now, do I recognize the generous kindness in them.

Courtesy of Loy Chong, 2007

The above photo from 2007 still shows the Fred Eastland sheds. My building is gone, though.

Some time after my parents sold the building, 226 became St. Jude’s, a shelter for homeless men.

Roman Bobak’s blog, "Right in Niagara," has photos of the front and rear of the building during its shelter days.

Street View of 226 (l) & 232 Park Street (r)

Rear of 232 (l) & 226 Park Street (r)

According to Bobak, 226 was torn down in 1976.

By 1976, I had finished a B.Sc at the University of Toronto, worked for year at minimum wage jobs, and moved to Thunder Bay to begin a B.Ed at Lakehead University.

I was finding my place in the Chinese diaspora.