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Ad Walls are Chinatown's Classifieds

04042010adwall.jpg

In Chinatown “If you have something to say you write it up and you just post it up,” according to councilwoman Margaret Chin. Not on Craigslist or Yelp, on ad walls peeling with little white leaflets, or on any sign post or street lamp. Written out in Mandarin and Cantonese characters, the fliers' subjects range from rooms for rent (price negotiable) to complaints about particular lawyers, the Times reports in a profile of the vibrant communication spaces. Lincoln Cushing, co-author of “Chinese Revolutionary Posters,” says the posting practice dates back to after the 1949 revolution, when walls like the ones on Forsyth Street Manhattan and inside A & N Food Market in Flushing were rural towns’ conversation hubs, with posts constantly being read and responded to.

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Comments [rss]

  • ... in bed.

  • matty

    Help! I'm a prisoner in a Chinese fortune cooking factory...

  • Wow, this makes so much sense. Part of my jobs is tracking the number of rental transactions in NYC and Chinatown is always deceptively low. But when I ride my bike through there, it is super-dense in residential traffic.

  • FranklinBluth

    There are no such thing as Mandarin and Cantonese characters. They are spoken languages/dialects.

  • Jason B

    In fact there are Cantonese characters, for example 冇 which isn't a valid character in standard Chinese. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Written_Cantonese

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