Two Bridges, Manhattan

One of the first uses of the term to describe the area was employed by the naming of the Two Bridges Neighborhood Council in 1955.[6]

Brooklyn Bridge and housing projects in Two Bridges

In September 2003, the Two Bridges Historic District was listed in the National Register of Historic Places. The district is a nine-block area, roughly bounded by East Broadway, Market Street, Cherry Street, Catherine Street, Madison Street, and St. James Place.[7]

The district includes the following landmarks on state and federal historic registers:

• First Cemetery of Congregation Shearith Israel
• Knickerbocker Village housing development
• Mariners Temple
• The Sea and Land Church
• St. James Church
• William and Rosamond Clark House
• Alfred E. Smith House (in which New York Governor Al Smith was born)

For much of the 20th century, the area was mainly populated by European immigrants such as Jewish, Italian, Irish, and Greeks. Later on, an influx of Latin American immigrants also settled into the area especially from Puerto Rico.[8] Starting in the 1960s, an influx of Chinese immigrants mainly Cantonese speaking coming from Hong Kong and Guangdong province began flooding into the nearby Chinatown neighborhood, but eventually as it could not accommodate their continuing growing influx, many of them began settling and overlapping into the Two Bridges area. Significant numbers of Vietnamese people and Burmese Chinese also settled in the area. The neighborhood became more racially and culturally diverse. Some significant numbers of Fuzhou dialect speakers also settled into the neighborhood by the early 1980s, but eventually by the late 1980s and through 1990s, their growing population eventually grew to become the largest population of the area, creating their own Fuzhou Chinatown distinct from the original Cantonese Chinatown from The Bowery going west.

Despite the Fuzhou speaking residents becoming the largest population of Two Bridges, there are still significant pockets of long-time Cantonese, Jewish, and Puerto Rican residents remaining especially in certain housing developments with the Co-ops such as Cooperative Village still having a significant community of Jewish residents and NYCHA public housing developments such as Alfred E. Smith House, Rutgers Houses, LaGuardia Houses, and Vladeck Houses including other subsidized housing programs being primarily populated by Puerto Rican, Cantonese, and African Americans residents, though some Fuzhou residents have also moved into these developments as well; however, some tenement buildings in the area also still have some significant amounts of Puerto Rican and Cantonese residents.[9][10][11][12][13][14][15]

Little Fuzhou (小福州, 紐約華埠), or Fuzhou Town (福州埠), a prime destination for immigrants from the Fujian Province of China, is centered on the street of East Broadway in Two Bridges. During the 1980s an influx of Fuzhou immigrants flooded East Broadway, and a Little Fuzhou enclave evolved on the street. With a large Fuzhou population, East Broadway is often referred to as Little Fuzhou by Fuzhou immigrants.[16]

The Fuzhou immigrants often speak Mandarin along with their Fuzhou dialect. The Fuzhou immigrants were the only major non-Cantonese Chinese group to largely settle in Manhattan's Chinatown. This is due to the Mandarin-speaking enclaves being too expensive for Fuzhouese, and since many Fuzhou immigrants came without immigration paperwork and were forced into low paying jobs.[17][18][19][20][21]

A considerable number of Fujianese clan associations can be found in and around the street, many of which are even specified by clans from certain villages of Fuzhou region. For example, the members of "Fujian Fuqi Association" are from Fuqi Village, Changle County, Fuzhou, Fujian Province. The Fukien American Association is also located here. Restaurants, markets and intercity bus lines run by Foochowese concentrate in East Broadway.[16][22][23] A statue of Lin Zexu, who was also a Fuzhouese, was erected in Chatham Square in 1997.[24]

However, since the 2000s and especially since the 2010s, there has been rapid gentrification in the area, which is now causing the Fuzhou-speaking enclave to decline in favor of an increasing population of wealthier white professionals moving into the area. Meanwhile, another satellite Fuzhou community has emerged in Brooklyn's Sunset Park and is currently continuing to grow rapidly far surpassing the original Fuzhou-speaking enclave here in Two Bridges as well as overwhelmingly marginalizing the Fuzhou enclave in Two Bridges as the primary center of Fuzhou culture and settlement for the new incoming Fuzhou immigrants.

Since the 2000s, gentrification has hit the area with rising property values and rent prices, which have been slowly pushing out the working-class populations as well as communities of Chinese-speaking immigrants (including Fuzhou-speaking immigrants). Hispanic residents and other non-white populations are now undergoing rapid decline to an increasing population of wealthier white professionals.[25][26][27][28][29]