Lisa Yee-Litzenberg started working at the Forbidden City, her father’s restaurant in what was once Detroit’s Chinatown, when she was just five years old.
She remembers the job: peeling peapods and shrimp, and washing the dishes. She remembers spending all her free time at the neighborhood pet store, fascinated by the guppies in their tanks. She remembers Uncle Henry, the neighborhood elder who would greet her siblings by pinching their cheeks. And she remembers the heaviness that clouded the streets when Vincent Chin, a Chinese-American man, was beaten to death by two autoworkers.
Yet throughout the 20th century, Detroit’s Chinatown, like many other parts of the city, saw its people and businesses slowly trickle away. Located on Second Avenue between Peterboro and Charlotte Streets, the restaurant and neighborhood Yee-Litzenberg remembers no longer exist.
Yee-Litzenberg is now at the forefront of a movement to revive Detroit’s Chinatown. The nonprofit she leads, the Chinatown Redevelopment Corporation, is working with community leaders, organizers and local officials to remake a space for the city’s Asian American community.
“We really want to create a new pan-Asian business and community center in Detroit that can be a place for Asian Americans to feel great pride in their culture and in our history,” Yee-Litzenberg said. “That’s very important to us, feeling like there’s a safe space, especially in these days of Asian hate.”
A long history
Detroit has had not one, but two distinct Chinatowns throughout its history.
The first Chinatown had its roots in the 1870s and spanned Third Avenue, Porter Street and Bagley Street near downtown. But in 1961, it was set to be razed to make way for the city’s urban renewal efforts.
“These people are bewildered. They have lived along Third many years,” Ben K. Yee, secretary of the On Leong Tong Association of Chinese Merchants, told Detroit News that year. “They are together here. Now they will have to move. The question is where?”
The entire Chinatown was condemned to make way for an interstate highway project — a story painfully familiar to many ethnic enclaves — according to a dispatch from the Associated Press in 1963. Property owners in the Skid Row area were collectively given $8.5 million to relocate.
“It’s similar to Black neighborhoods where they would [say], ‘it’s … a neighborhood full of blight, we need to get rid of this blight,’” Yee-Litzenberg said. “And they were then offered a much less desirable space.”
Yee-Litzenberg’s father, Henry Yee, was considered by residents and local media as the unofficial “mayor” of the original Chinatown, in which he had a restaurant called the Jade Palace. Yee-Litzenberg said the area was “hustling and bustling,” with thousands of Chinese American residents.
After the destruction of the first Chinatown, a new community popped up at Cass Avenue and Peterboro Street in Detroit’s Midtown. Some residents from the old Chinatown moved there along with newer arrivals. It is this Chinatown that Yee-Litzenberg and her peers remember, yet the smaller area forced some to leave the city — Yee-Litzenberg said many of the business owners decided not to move and instead dispersed to the suburbs.
Roland Hwang, a lawyer and professor of American culture at the University of Michigan, recalls that the second Chinatown never had the boom of the original.
“It’s hard to sustain an ethnic enclave with just a bunch of storefronts and a few restaurants, as opposed to the liveliness of having a residential population that will sustain the businesses there,” Hwang said.
The last restaurant in the neighborhood, Chung’s Cantonese Cuisine, closed in 2000.
But in the relatively short time that Detroit’s second Chinatown existed, a modern movement for equal rights was born.
On June 19, 1982, a pair of autoworkers beat Vincent Chin, a Chinese American resident of metro Detroit, to death. This marked the culmination of rising anti-Asian sentiment sweeping the country, with some blaming Japanese imports for the decline of the domestic auto industry.
The killing enraged the Asian American communities in Detroit and across the country, leading to widespread protests. Hwang founded the nonprofit American Citizens for Justice with other community members to advocate for a federal hate-crimes trial of the autoworkers who beat Chin, after an initial plea deal in state court.
The trial resulted in a guilty ruling, but was appealed to the 6th Circuit court in Cincinnati. An all-white, heavily blue-collar jury would eventually acquit both men.
Hwang said American Citizens for Justice held their first meeting at the Golden Star restaurant in Ferndale, where Chin worked as a waiter. It then moved its meetings to 3143 Cass Ave., also known as the On Leong Chinese Merchants Association Building, which would soon become a landmark feature of the Chinese American community in Detroit.
A new beginning
No one expected 3143 Cass Avenue to be gone so soon.
In 2004, the building was bought by Olympia Development of Michigan, a division of Ilitch Companies. It then sat vacant for about 15 years, according to Hwang. Eventually, the city’s Building Safety and Engineering Department ordered it to be demolished.
Following public outcry, the Detroit City Council passed a unanimous resolution for the demolition to be held off until the completion of a study to determine its historic significance. But it was too late to stop the demolition.
“Over the weekend, the people came in, snuck in and tore it down, even after the resolution was passed,” Yee-Litzenberg said. “So that was an example of our history just being erased in many ways. We’re trying to prevent that erasure by rebuilding.”
The 2023 demolition of the On Leong building was just one of many historic buildings torn down in Chinatown, which activists were trying to designate as a historic district, according to Hwang.
Following the demolition of the On Leong building, community leaders and members like Hwang and Michigan State Senator Stephanie Chang sprang into action.
“[All of us] were really eager to do what we could. The demolition really spurred a lot of conversation where we were meeting on a regular basis,” Chang said.
Chang, who represents parts of Detroit and is Michigan’s first female Asian American state senator, helped secure $1 million for the project. For her, the revitalization is more than just a facelift. It represents the history — and future — of Asian Americans in Southeast Michigan.
“I think that we’ve got so much rich local history too that deserves recognition,” Chang said. “The more we can learn each other’s history, the better.”
Chang helped bring people together for initial meetings of what would become the Detroit Chinatown Vision Committee under the Chinatown Redevelopment Corporation. They brought together the Association for Chinese Americans, American Citizens for Justice and other community members. Detroit Councilmember Gabriela Santiago-Romero and her team advocated for the groups in the city council.
Midtown Detroit Inc., the area’s economic development nonprofit, soon got involved, along with property owners, to support a streetscape improvement project. Chang secured state project funding after meeting with the groups.
“The hope is that the streetscape improvement project will really be a catalyst, hopefully for more work on that block,” Chang said. “Because of all of these things happening, the synergy is there where people are putting in the effort to revitalize that block. I think it’ll take everyone doing their piece to help to have a continuous process of improvement.”
Since that time, the area has already seen development. American Community Developers helped renovate the building that once housed the restaurant Chung’s, and are currently seeking tenants. A section of Peterboro Street has been renamed to Vincent Chin Street. Midtown Detroit Inc. also released renderings for the streetscape project.
Olympia Development, which owns several other buildings in the area, has continued demolitions. The Charlotte Lounge, also owned by the Ilitches, was demolished in 2024, after the demolition of the On Leong building.
Reaching the finish line
For Hwang and others, the revitalization project is the culmination of years of work and advocacy, and they believe that a new Chinatown in Detroit — and a pan-Asian one — would benefit the city as a whole.
“I think that it’s important for Detroit to recognize the importance of cultural awareness and preservation, to the extent that if there isn’t a concerted effort building neighborhoods, and culture, that it gets obliterated,” Hwang said.
Neighborhoods inevitably evolve, said Hwang. But he thinks Detroit could do more to preserve its history in its buildings and neighborhoods.
Leaders of the vision committee see the redevelopment as both a part of Detroit’s wider revitalization effort and an especially important part of historic preservation. The committee saw many community members saying they didn’t know Detroit ever had a Chinatown when the initiative was announced.
According to Chang, many people are not aware of the history of Asian Americans in the city.
“I think that learning our history is really important, recognizing that Asian Americans have been a part of the city for many, many years,” Chang said. “Detroit is such a beautiful city that has a lot of different community members, and it’s important that we are all recognizing that our past, our present and our future are all interwoven.”
It won’t be a quick process. But Yee-Litzenberg is hopeful about the future.
“This is a long-haul project, right? It’s definitely not going to happen overnight,” Yee-Litzenberg said. “The last Chinatown business left 26 years ago, so it’s going to take time to rebuild.”
A Chinatown block party will be held from 12-8 p.m. on July 25, 2026, at Cass and Peterboro. In 2025, the event drew over 4,000 attendees.
This story was updated on July 11, 2026, to accurately reflect the name and role of the Chinatown Redevelopment Corporation.
