The Very Last Dumpling Restaurant in the East Broadway Mall | Eater
"This beige, block-spanning indoor mall beneath the Manhattan Bridge at 88 East Broadway was once a bustling Chinatown center—home to a top-floor banquet hall called 88 Palace, packed dim sum service, and a wide variety of shops from stationery and antiques to lingerie and stamp sellers—but now reads as a maze of shuttered storefronts, peeling posters, and long corridors. Its decline has been driven by rising rents, COVID-related closures, and unresolved disputes between the city and the landlord, and efforts to secure state revitalization funding did not result in a direct award for the site. Still, the space has taken on an improvised community life: occasional indoor activities that mimic park gatherings, card games and tea sessions in dark corridors, children playing in the hallways, and a few resilient businesses and street-level shops that remain open. Tenants express frustration over management and security issues and worry that lengthy renovations could force further closures, even as the neighborhood’s shifting demographics and nearby art and fashion activity bring new, sometimes transient, foot traffic." - Wei Tchou
