Ethnic Animosities Buried as Groups Rebuild One-Time Haven for Drug Pushers : Wave of Indochina Refugees Transforms Once-Seedy Chicago Chinatown

Sammy Luk remembers the bad times on Argyle Street, when arsonists torched buildings, drug pushers and prostitutes openly plied their trades and many merchants gave up dreams of starting a New Chinatown.

“You have heard of sheeps among wolves,” says Luk, the owner of New Chinatown Hardware. “That was it. Exactly. You struggled. There were some murders on the street.

“That was a bad time. Oooh, that was a bad time.”

Housing Was Cheap

But then came the refugees fleeing from Southeast Asia; the boat people. Vietnamese, Cambodians, Laotians and ethnic Chinese settled in the Argyle Street area of Chicago’s rough Uptown neighborhood because housing was cheap.

Many opened restaurants and bakeries, grocery stores and gift shops on the same street of dreams as the Chinese merchants who stayed to fight the crime and urban decay.

They worked together to rebuild the neighborhood, putting aside ancient ethnic animosities while their native countries fought a border war on the other side of the globe.

Today, the prostitutes and drug dealers are gone. Argyle Street bustles with shoppers and diners, mostly Asians from throughout Chicago and other Midwestern cities in search of groceries and cuisine from their homelands.

Instead of the “New Chinatown” envisioned by Chicago’s Chinese merchants in the mid-1970s, Argyle Street has become more a “Little Indochina”--a thriving Southeast Asian neighborhood, not a tourist attraction.

Spirit of Cooperation

“I think there has been an ability of the Chinese and Vietnamese merchants to work together as in no other place,” said Marion Volini, who served as the ward’s alderman during Argyle Street’s transformation. “Certainly, the age-old prejudice and animosities are still there. But the progress and revitalization were due to the cooperation of the Vietnamese and the Chinese merchants.”

“Argyle now has distinction as an Asian-American street. It is now known nationally.”

Charlie Soo, director of the Asian-American Small Business Assn. and one of the original Chinese businessmen, says that Argyle’s success “shows when you’re in America, you learn to do things together.”

A panorama of Asian-American cultures plays along Argyle Street’s three-block business district. The Trung-Viet Grocery is across the street from Benny’s Grill, one of only two more traditional American food vendors. Next to Benny’s, the Nha-Trang Restaurant offers Vietnamese and Chinese food.

Sandwiched between Nha-Trang and Lin’s Trading Co. is J&M; Kosher Meat Market, the other non-Asian food store.

Variety of Foods

A block farther, tantalizing aromas waft from the New Hong Kong Bakery. Behind the glass display cases stand rows of spice cookies, lotus bean paste cakes, moon cakes and shu mai rolls, pastry filled with pork and vegetables.

On the other side of the elevated train tracks slicing the middle of the business district, the Video Express rents Chinese movies such as “The Iron-Fisted Monk” and a gift shop sells Chinese magazines and records.

One thing that sets Argyle Street apart from Chicago’s old Chinatown is that it doesn’t cater to non-Asian tourists, says Juju Lien, executive director of the Chinese Mutual Aid Assn.

“If you think of a Chinatown, it’s sort of like a showplace--it’s got a tourist mentality,” Lien says. “Outsiders will say to me why don’t the merchants clean up Argyle Street so it looks nicer. It’s like the yuppies want us to put in fern bars so it makes it nicer for them.

“This is not a show-biz place. This is a street where people live and come to buy groceries to survive.”

Signs in Four Languages

Lien’s agency was established in 1980 to help ethnic Chinese refugees adjust to life in the United States, teaching them how to find jobs and pay telephone bills, get their electricity turned on and enroll children in school. “If you look at the store signs, the majority of them are in four languages,” says Ngoan Le, executive director of the Vietnamese Assn. of Illinois.

Argyle Street’s diversity of Asian cultures wasn’t planned by the group of businessmen from the South Side Chinatown who bought property on Argyle Street in the early 1970s with dreams of creating a new Chinatown, Volini says.

“Argyle Street had been pretty deteriorated by that time,” she recalled. “It was one of the last strip joint areas where people went to see the girlie shows. There was open drug dealing at all times, prostitution.”

But the Chinese merchants opened shops and restaurants and struggled to overcome the urban decay, she says.

Luk, 44, an amiable man with a quick grin and hearty laugh, was one of those early pioneers.

Fled Communist Takeover

He was a refugee himself in the 1940s when his family fled their home in Canton and settled in Hong Kong after the Chinese Communist takeover. His parents moved to New York in 1965 and he joined them five years later.

In the mid-1970s, Luk was invited to Chicago by businessman Jimmy Wong, the driving force behind the new Chinatown idea, to help create the new community.

In 1975, Luk opened the New Chinatown Hardware store. Within a year, he had started the New Chinatown Development Corp. and began buying property.

But only a few years later, the dreams crumbled as crime escalated again and potential customers stayed away, afraid to shop on the street.

In 1978, Volini and other city government officials met with the Chinese entrepreneurs to see what could be done.

Formed to Revitalize Area

The Asian-American Small Business Assn. was formed and prepared a plan for revitalizing the area, says Soo, the group’s executive director.

In 1979, the neighborhood received a $250,000 community development block grant to pay for new lighting, sidewalks and other improvements.