Some 60 years after Chinatown’s Boston Public Library branch was demolished for a highway, officials Wednesday broke ground on a project that will finally bring back a library and help fill one of the neighborhood’s greatest needs: affordable housing.
The new branch of the Boston Public Library at 55 Hudson St. will occupy the bottom two floors of a 12-story mixed-use development project, and affordable rental and subsidized condominium units will fill the rest of the building.
“Seventy years ago, Hudson Street was a vibrant and tight knit immigrant community,” said Angie Liou, executive director of the Asian Community Development Corporation, the nonprofit developer leading the project. “If it were not for the organizing of long time activists… we would not have reclaimed these parcels for community uses.”
The Chinatown project marks the third BPL site set to add housing in the coming years, a concept that has gained popularity in cities such as New York and Chicago as they seek to replicate other mixed-use models such as building housing at shopping malls. A pair of developers are planning to transform the low-slung library branch in Boston’s West End into a 14-story building with a library on the ground floors and 111 affordable apartments. And the planned development of a new branch in Dorchester’s Uphams Corner neighborhood also includes housing.
“Chinatown has always deserved a permanent library branch, and today, after all these decades, we are finally taking the steps to make that real,” said Mayor Michelle Wu, speaking at a sloping park across the street from the development site. “We are using every resource possible to make sure that Boston rises to the challenge of this moment, returning the long overdue library branch to Chinatown, while also tackling the region’s housing crisis.”
The project has officially been in the works since 2021, when the Boston Planning Department issued a request for proposals for the site, but community leaders say residents have been waiting for a new library project for more than 60 years. The old Chinatown library, a block over on Tyler Street, was demolished in the 1950s to make room for the old Central Artery carrying Interstate 93 over the city. (The city opened a temporary library branch for the neighborhood at the China Trade Center on Boylston Street in 2018, and the Central Artery was demolished in the 2000s as part of the Big Dig.)
In a sense, said Liou, the new development will bring the library saga full circle for some longtime residents. The new library’s location, currently an empty parking lot, was once part of a stretch of brick rowhouses occupied mostly by immigrants. Some of those rowhouses, were demolished as part of an urban renewal project in the 1960s.
Those teardowns marked the beginning of a tumultuous period for Chinatown, during which rents have soared, new luxury high-rises have sprouted, and families have been forced to move to more affordable pockets of the region like Quincy.
The development, Liou said, “will fill in the final piece of the puzzle of rebuilding historic Chinatown.”
The expense and complicated financing formula of such projects has made it difficult to build more of them. The Chinatown project is relying on funding from more than 20 different sources, including the city, state, and federal governments.
“Families who live here will not only have affordable homes, they will also have a library just steps away, a place for children to learn, for elders to connect, for workers and students to find opportunity and to do so in community together,” said BPL President David Leonard.
Andrew Brinker can be reached at andrew.brinker@globe.com. Follow him @andrewnbrinker.
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