It helped create the modern Philly Chinatown. Now, it’s at risk of disappearing

Today it’s shuttered and in danger of demolition, but at one time the Chinese Cultural Center stood near the heart of a battle over the fate and future of Chinatown.

Would it be a place driven by tourism, luring out-of-town visitors by promising a peek inside a cloaked Chinese community? Or would it be a neighborhood centered on families, where immigrants and wage workers could find decent jobs and safe, affordable housing?

That 1970s debate pitted the competing visions of center founder and building owner T.T. Chang, the well-connected “mayor of Chinatown,” against the radical activist group Yellow Seeds, which championed workers and youths.

“We were fighting the stereotypical image of Chinatown as restaurants and gift stores,” said Mary Yee, then a Yellow Seeds leader. “We saw it as a holistic community that had residents, churches, schools, civic institutions.”

Chang preached tourism and investment to help promote a positive view of the neighborhood. In 1955 he founded the Chinatown YMCA as a tenant at the 125 N. 10th St. property, and in 1966 he bought the building as the permanent home of his Chinese Cultural and Community Center.

“Can you imagine,” Chang told the Philadelphia Bulletin that year, “how curious tourists would become if they were driving across the Benjamin Franklin Bridge and saw a red tile Chinese roof rising above the trees somewhere west of Franklin Square?”

He wanted the cultural center to be authentic in appearance. Some elements were imported from Taiwan, and the ornate front façade was designed by noted Chinese architect C.C. Yang. Two huge stone reliefs of a phoenix and a dragon, among the most powerful symbols of good fortune, guarded the front door.

By the early 1970s, Chang had created one of Chinatown’s most Chinese-looking buildings, defined by its striking jade-color glazed-tile roof.

The effect was like entering a temple, wrote Georgia State University professor Kathryn Wilson, author of the definitive Ethnic Renewal in Philadelphia’s Chinatown: Space, Place and Struggle, for which she drew on voluminous records including interviews, government reports, oral histories, and newspaper archives.

The center became a neighborhood landmark.

Chang emphasized an image of Chinatown as secret and mysterious, and his cultural center as able to shed light on the shadows, Wilson wrote. He portrayed himself, and was seen outside the community, as a Chinese-American go-getter and change agent, “seeking to leverage public interest in Chinese culture into investment in Chinatown,” she wrote.

The cultural center offered banquet meals, neighborhood tours, calligraphy, and Tai Chi classes, to which it drew mostly non-Asian visitors. Its 10-course New Year’s banquets generated a torrent of customers — and complaints from Chinatown restaurant owners who saw Chang’s eatery taking their business.

“A restaurant in a place which gets government money in one hand to serve the community,” Yellow Seeds sneered in its newspaper, “and in the other hand money that actually takes business from existing restaurants in the very community it is supposed to serve,”

In its January 1975 edition, Yellow Seeds published a cartoon that depicted Chang as an Octopus, clutching cash in each arm.

At that point, Chinatown was in a fight for its life, the construction of the Vine Expressway threatening to claim homes, property, and, not least, the Holy Redeemer Chinese Catholic Church.

Yellow Seeds and the Philadelphia Chinatown Development Corp. fought back. Some people literally laid in front of the construction machinery to block the way.

Ultimately they saved Holy Redeemer and kept Chinatown from being turned into a Disneyesque version of itself, even as the Gallery mall, Market East Station, and Convention Center took chunks of land. Groups like Asian Americans United kept up the fight for an authentic, living Chinatown.

Chang died in 1996. After that the center struggled, and around 2004, it closed for good. People in Chinatown always expected that at some point the building would come back into use. It was too important a property — midblock, just north of the majestic Friendship Gate — to be idle forever.

It was placed on the Philadelphia Register of Historic Places in 2013.

Last year, PA Zhangs Associate LLC bought the property for $1.8 million, records show.

Chinatown residents learned last month that the company had filed an application with the city Historical Commission, planning to demolish almost all of the building except for the front façade. A new addition at the rear of the property would support six residential housing units, and a restaurant would go at the front.

Multiple efforts to reach executives of PA Zhangs Associate for comment were unsuccessful.

The Historical Commission staff concluded that the demolition would destroy the form and integrity of the property, and recommended that the proposal be denied. The developer chose to withdraw the plan, according to the commission, but could refile at any time, perhaps as soon as this month.

PCDC has formally opposed the demolition, posting an online petition that sought 2,500 signatures but has garnered more than 5,200, noted agency community planner Yue Wu.

Today, sheets of plywood hide the center’s striking front entrance: two big red doors, each with a bronze lion-head doorknocker.

“It wasn’t a building that was generally accessible to people for community use,” Yee said, adding that she hoped that could change now. “Real estate is really precious in Chinatown. It would be great if it could be used for the benefit of the community.”