Chinatown Mid-Autumn Festival brings a mix of cultural celebration and ire over Sixers arena

Homesickness led a group of teenagers to create a festival in a church parking lot.

On Saturday, 28 years later, Chinatown celebrated another edition of the Mid-Autumn Festival, and also with complicated feelings: the dismay, disappointment, and anger that greeted Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle L. Parker’s endorsement three days earlier of a Sixers arena in Center City.

For organizer Cinthya Hioe, this Chinese celebration is a moment to emphasize togetherness and community with nearly 7,000 people gathering along 10th Street to enjoy the dance of the Chinese lions, music performances, kung fu demonstrations, mooncake-eating contests, and the lantern parade.

But at a festival to celebrate the light of a full moon, the joy felt dimmed on Saturday, as residents of Chinatown, activists, and political allies once again turned to expressing outrage that the Sixers’ arena ambition has overshadowed their concerns about the future of their beloved community.

”They say our community needs revitalization. I say no,” Hioe told the crowd. “Look around you, does this look like it needs revitalization?”

Noes’ words echoed through the crowd sitting by the Chinatown Friendship Arch. As people continued to arrive, coming in and out of businesses and visiting the tents along the street, Hioe told the crowd, “This is our home, this is our community, this is our Chinatown! We are here to stay!”

The iconic Mid-Autumn Festival, a Chinese celebration of lanterns, mooncakes, and moon-gazing, where families traditionally gather to mark the end of the harvest, played out in Philadelphia with wounds still fresh from the significant setback dealt by Parker to the Chinatown community by endorsing the Sixers plan for a $1.55 billion arena in Center City.

The arena on Market East, on the edge of Chinatown, still must be approved by City Council. Chinatown opponents have pledged to carry their fight there, while labor leaders celebrated the mayor’s endorsement of a project they say will bring jobs and vitality.

At the festival, organized by Asian Americans United, which has been leading the protests against the arena plan, opponents continued the fight at their own joyous community festival, where feelings of anger and disappointment mixed in with the growing crowds, who cheered for the dance group H4T (Hope 4 Tomorrow).

Council members who showed up Saturday to express support for the festival and its community included Nicolas O’Rourke and Rue Landau, both at-large Council members, who brought a proclamation to the festival honoring Asian Americans United for “their unwavering commitment to safeguarding Philadelphia’s Chinatown.

Landau said she was a festival regular and was not skipping “due to any looming political development fight,” she said. She said she was waiting to see how the process moves before deciding whether to support the arena. O’Rourke, a second-time participant, said he supports an arena — “just not in Chinatown.”

”I would not flatten the rich heritage, story, and tradition of this traditional festival by minimizing it to one particular topic in the city,” O’Rourke said.

Councilmember Mark Squilla, who will be the point person for the legislation enabling the arena, was also at the festival, photographing with his phone but not among the speakers. The proposed arena is in his district.

State Sen. Nikil Saval, whose district also includes the arena site, sent a proclamation in support of Asian Americans United, wishing them a festival “filled with joy, connection, abundance, and resilience.”

“We are powerful,” Saval said in the statement, read by organizer Vivian Chang. “As we work to protect this vital cultural heritage and invest in future generations, we hold close to everything that we have built, and everything that we will build.”

In her video announcing her arena endorsement, Parker said the project would bring new tax revenues to the city and local schools and create hundreds of new jobs, describing the project as “the start of an unprecedented revival” of Market East.

» READ MORE: City releases long-awaited studies on impact of a downtown Sixers arena

But others disagree, most urgently Chinatown residents, who see the plan as an unnecessary intrusion on their neighborhood, with the likelihood of disruption from construction, traffic, parking problems, and a general threat to the sanctity of the unique and beloved community. The city’s own impact studies described harm to Chinatown, saying half the neighborhood’s small businesses will lose economically if the arena is built.

Eyes wide open in disbelief, Ms. Linda, as the community calls her, almost dropped her cane when her name was announced from the Mid-Autumn festival stage.

Barely a teenager, Linda Cheung and her eight siblings arrived from Hong Kong to Chinatown decades before the Friendship Arch was even in the works. Soon, the walls of their house extended to the neighborhood and its culture, creating a home Cheung is willing to protect, she said.

Over the years, she has protested projects she feared would harm Chinatown, including a proposal for a baseball stadium at 11th and Vine Streets, and a casino. At 69, she continues to protest, this time against the Sixers arena.

”It breaks my heart to know Chinatown may not be here for our youth,” Cheung said.

Arenas in downtown neighborhoods are designed to create more vital city streets, rather than the South Philadelphia model of sports stadiums and parking lots. The festival on Saturday brought thousands to those very streets, which organizers pointed to as a demonstration of vitality already present.

Even before Parker’s endorsement announcement, organizers were calling this year’s festival significant because Chinatown in Philadelphia was designated in 2023 as one of the most endangered historic places.

To Cheung, the arena will affect more than Chinatown’s environment and parking spaces.

“This is our home, our culture,” she said with a hand over her heart. “It means everything to us.”