The narrowest parade in New York: a lion at every doorway, a dragon the length of half a block, confetti coming down like weather and not stopping, drums off the brick, lanterns strung overhead, and the whole street shoulder to shoulder in red. The New Yorkers hang on the shutters and the gates, at eye level, where the crowd is.
Better Chinatown USA held the first Chinatown Lunar New Year Parade and Festival in 1996, and added the New Year Firecracker Ceremony in 1998 at Mott and Bayard Streets. The crowds grew so large that the ceremony moved, first to Chatham Square and then to Sara D. Roosevelt Park. The parade still forms on Mott Street at Hester and works east and north through the oldest streets of the neighbourhood.
Source · Better Chinatown USA ↗
The Mott Street canyon of five storey tenements with fire escapes, bilingual vertical signs, roll down shutters, red lanterns strung across the roadway, lion dance teams working doorway to doorway, a dragon on poles, drums and cymbals, and confetti ankle deep by afternoon. Mood: confetti, drums, first day. Everything is procedural geometry with painted surfaces; nothing is a scan or a photograph. The room is an interpretation, and it hangs the New Yorkers the census recorded at this place first.