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The latest issue of Change Over Time, the Department of Historic Preservation’s journal, focuses on conserving Asian American heritage. In an excerpt from his article, preservationist and historian Calvin Tran Nguyen (MSHP’23) looks for lessons in the closure of Philadelphia’s Hoa Binh Plaza, a mini-mall that played an important role in the city’s Vietnamese community.
A bright yellow awning runs the entirety of a nearly two-hundred-foot-long facade on the corner of 16th Street and Washington Avenue in South Philadelphia. Bold, blue letters spell out HOA BINH PLAZA BIG 8 SUPERMARKET, followed by Chinese and Vietnamese translations. The remaining space is filled with signs advertising the building’s occupants: Nam Son Bakery, Huong Tram Restaurant, Saigon Travel Services, and more. This mosaic of different fonts, colors, and languages decorate the tri-state area’s first Asian-focused mini-mall—a one-story, concrete building that would have otherwise been lost in the sea of other industrial-type buildings in the area.1 Weekend traffic in its surface parking lot was once busy with food and grocery pickups, encounters between friends and family, and money being sent overseas to loved ones. As of April 2023, Hoa Binh Plaza sits behind a chain-link fence perimeter, now missing its characteristic awning, businesses, and patrons.2
The plaza first opened in 1990 on the site of a former lumber warehouse, boasting 32,000 square feet of commercial space complete with an Asian restaurant, supermarket, and eleven additional stores.3 The $1.1 million project was developed in response to a burgeoning Asian community—particularly Vietnamese—in South Philadelphia. At Hoa Binh Plaza, Vietnamese refugees and migrants encountered a space that was distinctly Vietnamese for the first time since coming to the United States.4 Almost thirty years later, in 2019, a real estate development company revealed plans to demolish the plaza and erect a forty-four-unit luxury condo building in its place.5 In 2020, the mini-mall’s eight commercial tenants were evicted.6 Although the community protested to preserve Hoa Binh Plaza, the building stands as an empty marker of a once-vibrant community fixture.
Wing Phat Plaza, facing west. The marquee outlines the different businesses and institutions in the mini-mall, which include an assortment of Vietnamese, Chinese, and Indonesian restaurants, shops, and services. (Photo: Calvin Nguyen, 2022)
Despite Hoa Binh Plaza’s closure, the eastern portion of Washington Avenue continues to thrive as a commercial and cultural center for roughly 26,000 Vietnamese Americans who reside in the Philadelphia metropolitan area.7 Over eighty Vietnamese and Asian businesses operate between 5th and 16th Streets along Washington Avenue, earning a Google Maps designation as Philadelphia’s “Little Saigon.”8 Since the first Vietnamese restaurant opened on Washington Avenue in fall 1975, Vietnamese Americans have continually created, altered, and experienced the built environment of this neighborhood as a form of community place-making and heritage conservation.9
If the National Park Service’s “fifty-year rule” can effectively distinguish “old” from “historic,” Washington Avenue, in relation to its Vietnamese American history, would be crossing that threshold in 2024. However, rather than achieving historic significance through material integrity, this neighborhood draws significance from operating as a living landscape—from how people continue to occupy, use, and make meaning from the built environment. Preserving Philadelphia’s “Little Saigon” must go beyond architectural and physical conservation and use a set of tools that meaningfully affect social, economic, and cultural processes and outcomes. This article focuses on the importance of Washington Avenue’s built and cultural landscape to Vietnamese American heritage and community conservation—from mini-mall parking lots to grocery aisles of fish sauce—and how heritage conservation practice can best support it.
Philadelphia’s Vietnamese American neighborhood presents one example among numerous Vietnamese American enclaves across the United States that offer economic, culinary, religious, social, and cultural value to its community. Philadelphia in particular provides (1) a mix of built forms—namely, adapted rowhouses and newer mini-malls—that cover a broad range of Vietnamese American architectural and spatial expression evident across the United States, and (2) a community and built landscape at risk of losing its historic, cultural, and social significance to increasing development pressures. By looking at Philadelphia, we may better understand how Vietnamese Americans create place while also highlighting the various struggles, ongoing efforts, and possible solutions to keep place. Finally, by looking at South Philadelphia’s Vietnamese American neighborhood, this article contributes to scholarship on the importance of inherited and built spaces to migrant and refugee heritage and identity, particularly in post-1965 migrant communities, whose built environment have received relatively little historical consideration.
Read the full essay on Project Muse.
1) Murray Dubin, “Asian Mini-Mall Bursts on S. Phila Scene,” Philadelphia Inquirer, June 28, 1990, 1.
2) Dubin, “Asian Mini-Mall,” 1.
3) Dubin, “Asian Mini-Mall,” 1.
4) Taking Root, dir. Oanh-Nhi Nguyen (2023), unpublished digital media.
5) Jenny Chen and Nancy Nguyen, “Philadelphia Made it Possible for Community Shopping Centers like Hoa Binh Plaza to Be Erased,” Plan Philly, March 23, 2022, https://whyy.org/articles/opinion-philly-gentrification-led-to-hoa-binh….
6) Chen and Nguyen, “Philadelphia Made it Possible.”
7) “U.S. Immigration Population by Metropolitan Area,” Migration Policy Institute, https://www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub/charts/us-immigrant-p… (accessed April 4, 2023).
8) I could not find a definitive origin to the neighborhood title, but the first published reference to Washington Avenue as “Little Saigon” was in 1991, when a Philadelphia Inquirer article dubbed the newly built Hoa Binh Plaza as “Little Saigon” on the weekends. Other media have referred to the area as Little Saigon since then, including a dedicated Wikipedia page and a seemingly inactive organization with that name (littlesaigonphilly.com); Mark de la Viña, “Scenes from an (Ethnic) Mall,” Philadelphia Inquirer, August 26, 1991, 38.
9) Anonymous interviewee, interview by author, March 18, 2023
