A ground-level view of several buildings on a narrow street in a virtual model, whose facades have been pulled out of old, grainy, halftoned black and white newspaper imagery.

Seeing Providence Chinatown update: Empire Street

3 min readApr 13, 2022

The 13 new images I found in 100 year old issues of the Providence Journal have finally meant that I have photos of each of the buildings along both sides of Empire St from before Providence Chinatown was destroyed. (Read background on this project here.)

While I am excited to have learned that original 8x10” photos may still exist in the Providence Journal archives, I haven’t yet been able to get access to them. Though I took high resolution pics of the old newspapers, they are halftoned and grainy; still, they’re just barely enough to match facades to old maps of the street from 1908.

Two ribbons of newsprint imagery of building facades, flattened onto an old map of building footprints in yellow and pink, with photos of buildings roughly aligned with addresses.

The fidelity of images drops the further into Chinatown we go — a literal, visible sign of the erasure of this community. Still, we can see what was a grocery or pharmacy at 54–6 Empire and a fruit shop at 62–4. If I get the originals later, I’ll swap them in.

A gif of using SketchUp to apply a facade from an old photograph onto a rough, grey 3D model of a building on the corner of Chinatown.

I also have enough photos now that I felt I could take on the Lyman building, right on the corner. I stitched several images together into a facade, cloning the fire escape to complete it. The billboard changed over time but I chose one with a clear view of the whole thing.

A screenshot of reconstructing a billboard from an old photo by flattening the image and applying it to a rectangular frame above a 3D model of a building.

The Lyman building came together pretty well. It’s important because it’s in so many photos of the intersection where I just wished I could take a few more steps around the corner. Now I can.

Upcoming: the west side of the street, where I’ll try to reconstruct the main building at 57–63 Empire, the headquarters of the Chinese societies and the heart of Providence’s Chinatown.

I’ve also compiled up some background on the project and links to other updates on my website; you can now see it collected at https://unterbahn.com/chinatown

Thanks to the RI Council for the Humanities, Movement Education Outdoors, and AS220 for supporting this work, as well as John Eng-Wong and all the folks I’ve spoken with who’ve worked to document and retell these stories.

Seeing Providence Chinatown update: Empire Street

Written by Jeffrey Yoo Warren

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