88 Palace of Chinatown is closing for good, no more clubbing 怡东酒楼关门与怡东商场近况 (2020/9/27)
Uploader: Tech Explores NYC
Original upload date: Mon, 28 Sep 2020 00:00:00 GMT
Archive date: Sun, 28 Nov 2021 03:07:48 GMT
So it has come to my attention that the long standing 88 Palace dimsum restaurant has closed permanently. I visited the place and pushed the door that I haven't pushed for the past decade and explore
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the East Broadway Mall, and discovered that Halloween came early here.
Filmed with Osmo pocket
88 palace moonlight as a nightclub https://www.thrillist.com/lifestyle/new-york/nyc-after-hour-clubs-dim-sum-restaurants
I blured some of the areas using Youtube's editor and the result is quite funny, gonna reupload next time.
wikipedia page on East Boardway Mall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Broadway_(Manhattan)
East Broadway Mall
Under the Manhattan Bridge (B, D, N, and Q trains) lies the "East Broadway Mall" across the street from the previous location of Sun Sing Theater. This mall is the main gathering commercial section for the Fuzhou immigrants in the United States including the 88 Palace Restaurant serving Hong Kong style dim sum meals upstairs of the Mall.
The mall is the center of contributing to the growth of Chinese restaurant businesses all over the United States. Many of the employment agencies are located at this mall sending many of the Fuzhou workers to all-you-can-eat buffets.
Chinese buses are also stationed at this mall to accommodate the Fuzhou restaurant workers to locations where they have been arranged by the employment agencies.
In the past, there have been issues with the restaurant managers of 88 Palace taking advantage of the Fuzhou workers by taking their tips, making nasty insults and giving them responsibilities that they were not supposed to be assigned to, which then led to lawsuits. Since the managers knew many of them were undocumented, they used their advantage to terminate of their employment of the ones who threatened legal actions against them.
There has also been issues where the mall owners have been accused of illegally increasing the rents at very high rates on tenants who have been longtime small businesses as an attempt to gentrify the mall. This resulted in protests against the mall owners. There have been accusations that the mall owners were prejudice against Fuzhou immigrant shopkeepers and threatened to clean them out of the mall. One example was a female tenant named Mei Rong Song, originally paying rent less than $3,000 a month, it increased dramatically to $12,000 in 2008. Mei Rong Song went into disagreement with her new rent rate and began fighting the eviction proceedings in court. In retaliation, the mall's managers closed Mei Rong Song's heat and water services to her 280-square-foot (26 m2) space.
It was originally owned by the Cantonese, the restaurant upstairs was originally named "Triple Eight Palace" and the shops were primarily Cantonese. However, when East Broadway became the main gathering place for newly arrived Fuzhou immigrants, Fuzhou owned storefronts slowly grew at this mall and over time completely occupying the mall. Eventually the ownership of the mall was entirely sold to Fuzhou owners.
However, since the 2010s, gentrification has been rapidly increasing in the area, which also has affected the rent prices of the storefront spaces resulting in many of the businesses to move out causing a large influx of them to now be empty and often the new businesses that would take over the spaces would stay only a short period and then close. These malls that were once very vibrant during the 1990s to 2000s with many Fuzhou customers have now become quieter as there are not as many businesses and the Fuzhou residents in the area are now slowly declining.