When people ask why I decided to move to Pittsburgh, here’s the honest truth: I don’t really know.
It was the COVID-19 pandemic and I had recently graduated from college in upstate New York. My boyfriend and I had visited Pittsburgh twice prior, and in our brilliant, possibly naive, shockingly plucky early-20s minds, we set our sights on the Steel City.
In the six years since then, I’ve fallen in love with this wacky, sports-obsessed, unhinged, historical town. We’ve lived in our fair share of neighborhoods (the South Side, Lawrenceville, Highland Park), adopted dogs, bought a house and gotten engaged. It wasn’t until I later learned about the city’s lost Chinatown that I began to feel deeply connected to Pittsburgh.
The once-bustling immigrant community effectively closed after the construction of the Boulevard of the Allies began in 1913, and expanded through Downtown and into Chinatown. Initially, just learning that there had once been a small community of Chinese immigrants made my heart ache, but my connection only continued to strengthen. Most of its occupants, I learned, were first-generation Chinese immigrants from Hoiping (Kaiping) and Toisan, two small cities in southern China. It just so happens that my grandparents, also first-generation Chinese immigrants, were born in Toisan.
Tracing this connection drew me into the city far more than any Steelers win ever could. While Pittsburgh’s Chinese immigrants primarily stopped here on the way to Gold Rush California and stayed, my grandfather traveled from Toisan to Manhattan, stopping through Ellis Island, as a young child. In New York he joined his father — my great-grandfather, a trickster of sorts who managed to fake his immigration status in the States. My father then worked, saved some money, and secured an appropriate living situation before retrieving my grandmother, whom he’d been arranged to marry at birth.
Pittsburgh’s Chinatown wasn’t New York’s
At its height, Pittsburgh’s Chinatown had around 500 residents (a stark contrast from my grandparents’ Manhattan Chinatown, which housed somewhere around 4,000 people in the late 1920s). Despite population differences, the work ethic was the same: First-generation Chinese-Americans opened up storefronts to share their culture via food, spices or medicines, or businesses like dry cleaners or laundromats. In fact, during the latter 1800s, the Business Directory of Pittsburgh listed at least 59 laundromats in Chinatown.
My grandparents must have gotten the message, too, because they opened their own laundromat in Manhattan in the early 1950s. My great-grandfather owned it, and my grandmother, who passed away in 2021 and spoke little English, spent her days laundering other people’s clothes to make enough money to feed her family while my grandfather was away in the Korean War.
In 1965, my grandparents eventually sold that laundromat to move and open another one. (Sometime between my grandparents settling in the U.S. and my grandfather getting drafted into the Korean War, they managed to have four kids, each spaced a perfect two years apart.) If you ask my dad, his siblings or my grandfather, they’ll look back on the laundromat with fond enough memories — some child getting up to no good or everyone pitching in to fold garments. Tiny chunks of everyday life that somehow made it possible for me to be here.
While my grandparents focused on their goal of building a family legacy in New York, the construction of the Boulevard of the Allies had already squeezed the life out of Pittsburgh’s Chinatown, forcing occupants to evacuate their homes in the community they’d lovingly built. By 1959, it’s reported that nearly all Chinatown occupants had relocated. At the same time, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the now-defunct Pittsburgh Press reported on the “Tong Wars,” an exaggerated rivalry between Asian gangs to paint a new picture of Chinatown as being violent and dangerous. Both publications used anti-Asian slurs, racist depictions and stereotypes in their coverage.
Waves of discrimination followed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which banned the immigration of Chinese laborers for 10 years. By the time the Boulevard of the Allies opened in 1922, most Chinese families had been forced out and moved to other neighborhoods or states. The small Chinese population in downtown Pittsburgh dwindled from around 500 to just 30.
Headstones and reincarnation
For the first few years that I lived in Pittsburgh, I didn’t think there was much of an Asian population whatsoever. I’ve since learned far more about the city and sought out more cultural diversity — though, per 2025 Census data, only around 6.2% of city occupants are Asian. But there was something about learning that many of Pittsburgh’s first-ever Chinese occupants were from the same tiny city my family came from that made me feel incredibly connected to its roots.
Growing up in a larger city, where I lived near Manhattan’s lively Chinatown and even closer to my Chinese relatives, Pittsburgh’s traditionally rich background in Polish and German ethnicities was a stark contrast for me. While there are tons of delicious Chinese food spots and Asian markets scattered throughout the city, I found a big gap here: Not only do I not see as many people who look like me on a regular basis, but Lunar New Year typically goes with little fanfare. When I learned that the roots of Toisan people are embedded in Pittsburgh’s very history, it felt much more concrete, almost as if I now have a right to exist here, even if I didn’t need that permission to begin with.
Today, I watched a video about the Chinese cemetery section at The Homewood Cemetery, the place that inspired me to do this research. I learned that it was originally supposed to be a temporary resting place for the bones of the Chinese immigrants who lived in Pittsburgh before they were shipped back to China, but for many it ultimately became a final destination. It made me think about how I keep my Chinese culture close to me through cooking, shopping at Asian markets, and honoring my ancestors and grandparents often; how it’s a deep, important part of my identity, especially because I no longer live in a city with a bustling Chinatown.
But many Chinese believe in reincarnation — I, at least, believe that when you die, you return as something beautiful. Your soul nurtures the earth through much-needed rainstorms, you’re the helpful bumblebees pollinating spring flowers, you’re the lush green grass sprouting up after a cold winter. While I know Pittsburgh’s current Chinatown consists solely of Chinatown Inn (a delicious Chinese food restaurant), I also believe that the first-generation immigrants of Toisan and Hoiping are forever interwoven into the city’s robust history.
We can continue to honor them by saying “they were here,” but know that they’re still here, too — in the architecture, in the buildings, in the streets, in the landmark sign for historic Chinatown and now in me.
Melissa Lee is a writer and editor based in Pittsburgh, PA. You can reach her at melissalee406@gmail.com.
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