The Vine Street Expressway in Philadelphia’s Chinatown neighborhood (City of Philadelphia)
Cecilia Moy Yep, a resident of Philadelphia’s Chinatown neighborhood, became something of a local legend for her fight against redevelopment projects that displaced residents and threatened some of the neighborhood’s best known structures.
On Tuesday, Yep will be featured in a “virtual event” with President Joe Biden, one of several such events the White House has planned to highlight the impacts of the administration’s Investing in America infrastructure funding.
“The event will kick off a series of conversations the President will have over the coming weeks and months, where he will call and speak directly with ordinary Americans and local leaders across the country,” a White House official said in a statement.
In the 1980s and 1990s, homes were demolished along with portions of the Chinatown neighborhood to make way for the Vine Street Expressway, part of Interstate 676. It runs directly through Chinatown.
Yep, a founding member of the nonprofit Philadelphia Chinatown Development Corporation, has pushed for a cap on the expressway for years, and in March the Biden administration announced the-so called Chinatown Stitch project will receive $159 million to build such a cap over the expressway.
Philadelphia city officials said last year they wanted to move forward with the project to reconnect the two sides of Chinatown divided by the expressway, with $4 million in grant funding to study and design it.
The Chinatown Stitch project will cover about two and a half blocks of the expressway, creating new public green space, improving neighborhood connections, and creating equitable mixed-use development opportunities and inclusive mobility options, the White House said in March.
The project is part of $3.3 billion in grant funding to 42 states under the Reconnecting Communities and Neighborhood Grant program, which focused on places “that were divided by transportation infrastructure decades ago and have long been overlooked,” according to a White House fact sheet.