This is Chatham Square, which is less a square than a place where as many as eight streets crash into each other and hope for the best. Two hundred years ago it wasn't chaotic at all — it was an open-air market where the city came to buy and sell horses, one of the busiest crossroads in the young city. Then, as Five Points rotted outward, it slid downhill into tattoo parlors, saloons, and flophouses — the seedy frontier of the worst slum in America. Today it's a set of traffic islands holding two monuments that could not possibly disagree with each other more.
The first one is quiet, and we'll treat it that way. That granite gateway is the Kimlau War Memorial, and it honors Americans of Chinese ancestry who died fighting in this country's wars. It's named for a young lieutenant, Benjamin Ralph Kimlau, a bomber pilot shot down over the Pacific at twenty-six. The gateway itself is a paifang — a traditional Chinese ceremonial arch — designed by a Chinese American architect named Poy Gum
Lee, who had spent two decades designing buildings in Shanghai before coming home to Chinatown to build this one. A couple of things about it are worth knowing. The calligraphy carved into that stone was done by one of the most celebrated Chinese calligraphers of the entire twentieth century — a founding statesman of modern China, whose brushwork sits here on a traffic island in Lower Manhattan. A
