One of the first things I learned after moving to Chinatown was to avoid walking down Broadway on the weekends. This was well over a decade ago- before the high rent apartments and perennial line at Howlin’ Ray’s were a thing- and the sidewalk scene on the neighborhood’s main drag was poppin’ throughout the weekends. Back then, trying to get from Point A to Point B was like maneuvering your way through a house party where your goal is to squeeze through a tightly packed crowd of people and stuff without knocking over a vase or getting stabbed by a pointy plant. Then the pandemic happened and, perhaps like most of downtown save for Little Tokyo, the crowds didn’t come back in the same numbers.
On the Saturday after Lunar New Year, though, Chinatown felt like it did before lockdown. I walked along Broadway- after the past six years, I forgot my old rule- and quickly backed up against a wall, near a row of plants, to let large group of teenagers pass. I got caught in wave after wave of gridlock and teetered along the curb trying to bypass the nearly impenetrable crowd in front of Yang Chow and the oversized stroller parked between a store and a rack of tchotchkes. At Scoops, which was my destination, my first two ice cream choices were sold out and the third nearly so. It had been busy all day, I heard, and, even as dinner time approached, people were still hanging around.
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