Long Sing Supermarket, on Walker Street between Chartres and St. Emanuel streets, was one of the last working businesses of Houston's Old Chinatown. Mimi and Cho Woo bought the former Bo Bo Lang Theater in 1989, a hall where the couple had watched Chinese films and where Mimi Woo had worked, and turned it into a grocery and meat market known for the roast ducks and pork hanging in its display case. The building kept the theater's pagoda roof. The Woos closed the store in 2017, and in 2022 the Houston Chronicle reported that it sat directly in the footprint of the rebuilt Interstate 45. Mimi Woo told the paper that few young people knew there had ever been a Chinatown downtown. The enclave took shape after 1951, when the On Leong Merchants Association, a mutual aid society for Chinese men, moved into a building the community bought at 801 Chartres Street, which also housed the Sun Deluxe Cafe. The Chinese Baptist Church already stood across the street on Lamar, and the Chinese American Citizens Alliance followed. Stores, bakeries and a noodle factory filled the blocks for about thirty years.
The George R. Brown Convention Center, built across Chartres Street and the elevated Eastex Freeway in the 1980s, pushed land prices beyond the community's reach, and its 2001 expansion closed the McKinney Street entrance to the district. New Chinese shopping centers on Bellaire Boulevard drew businesses southwest from 1983. Writing in Houston History Magazine in 2025, Daniel Killian noted that Old Chinatown had no historical markers and no walking tours.
Getting there
29.7524, -95.3550
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