Chinatown Plaza
Located on Spring Mountain Road between Valley View Boulevard and Arville Street, Chinatown Plaza (中國城, Mandarin: zhong guo cheng) comprises 85,000 sq ft (7,900 m2) of bustling immigrant commerce, with restaurants offering regional Chinese and Hong Kong cuisine as well as other Asian cuisine (Filipino, Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese). The assortment of businesses also includes a book store (selling Chinese language publications), a ginseng shop, a travel agent, a VCD store, a bakery, and an optometrist.
The entrance of the parking lot of Chinatown Plaza is marked by an ornamental traditional Chinese arch (called in Mandarin Chinese paifang), providing an opportunity for photo-taking. There are also statues in front of the mall depicting Xuan Zang and the Monkey King, characters from the epic Journey to the West, a Ming Dynasty-era classic from Chinese literature.
The Chinatown of Las Vegas is a series of large strip malls with ethnic Chinese and other pan-Asian businesses on Spring Mountain Road, with the original called Chinatown Plaza. The strip mall was conceived by Taiwanese American developer James Chih-Cheng Chen, and opened in 1995. Nevada Governor Kenny Guinn officially designated the area as Chinatown in October 1999 and it continues to grow as the Asian population in Las Vegas expands rapidly. The Chinatown area has gained much popularity, receiving national attention in a 2004 article by The Wall Street Journal. Although called "Chinatown", the many Asian influences other than Chinese might make that name a misnomer, with the commercial area having a character perhaps better described as an Asian District.
Spring Mountain Road was once a run-down corridor with strip clubs, but Chinatown Plaza and other adjacent power centers have emerged as an archetypal example of immigrants taking an old neighborhood given up for dead by the previous residents and reviving it with major investments as a bustling center of ethnic minority commerce.
Chinatown Plaza | eTips Inc.
