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Volume 20 Issue 19 | September 21 - 27, 2007

Downtown Express photo by Elisabeth Robert

Historic shots of Lonnies Coffee Shoppe on Mott St., top, owned by Lon (Lonnie) Ying Lee, left. Her daughter, PatKuramoto, top right, was working the counter in 1958. Above (L-R): Ivan Chan, co-owner of U-Choose noodle shop; JuneLee, Lonnies sister in law; Jan Lee, Lonnies nephew; and Peter Wong, co-owner of U-Choose, which has restored theLonnies sign and is about to open at the same 21 Mott St. location.

Preserving Chinatowns doo-wop era

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swiveling counter-side stools. The local teenagers met up there after school and the boys sang

doo-wop in the hall. In the back, one of the owners kept a workbench, where he tinkered with a

wood lathe and old copies of Popular Mechanics magazine.

The scene at Lonnies Coffee Shoppe in the late 1950s could have taken

place in any small American town except that Lonnie was Lon Ying

Lee, and her customers were the Chinese and Italian kids from one of New

York Citys oldest immigrant neighborhoods.

For more than two decades, Lonnie and her brother Shung ran

Chinatowns only all-American burger joint, but by the summer of 2007,

the shop had faded to a fond but distant neighborhood memory. But when

the new storeowners at 21 Mott St. went to attach their name above thedoor this August, the past came rushing back. There, preserved beneath

the marquee for a Chinese tea parlor, was the long-hidden sign for

Lonnies.

Jan Lee, the youngest of Shung Lees five children, has long held a

passion for preserving Chinatowns past. For Christmas last year, he used

an old photograph of the Lonnies sign to create retro t-shirts and hats for

his family. So when he saw that the original sign was intact, he knew it

had to be preserved. He was prepared to donate it to a museum, along with

old photographs and other artifacts that his family had collected

throughout the years. But the new merchants at 21 Mott had an even better

idea to preserve the sign and photos right inside the new store.

Its good [luck] to keep it in the original space, said Ivan Chan, one of

the operators of the U-Choose Express noodle shop, which is set to open

at 21 Mott St. by the end of the month. The family can come by any time

to see it.

The honoring of the old sign was particularly touching to the Lee familysince the U-Choose owners are new Chinese, from Hong Kong, part of

the large, diverse group of newcomers to enter the U.S. after the loosening of immigration

restrictions in 1965. They therefore do not share the Lees historic and ethnic connection to old

Chinatown (the majority of pre-1965 Chinese families, including the Lees, trace their roots to the

same deep-south area of China, called Toi Sahn or Taishan).

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back, said family friend Henry Chang of Lonnies early days. A lot of kids grew up in this place.

Chang recalls pestering the older kids, including a local teenage gang called The Continentals. Some

of those memories informed his crime novel, Chinatown Beat, which was published last winter.

Eventually Chang and Geoff Lee, friends since the second grade, became teenagers themselves.

Geoff joined the long list of Lee family members who worked behind the counter at Lonnies. When

his friends drove upstate for the Woodstock concert in 1969, a 17-year-old Geoff was forced to stay

home to work his shifts at the coffee shop.

Thats how it survived, said June. The whole family worked.

Missing out on Woodstock aside, Geoffs memories of Lonnies are overwhelmingly happy ones.

And he is not alone. Jan Lee started up two blogs this summer, one about Lonnies and one abouthistoric Chinatown, so that folks from the neighborhood could share their photographs and

memories.

U-Chooses sign.

Even though Lonnies closed in 1977 or 78 (no one in the family can quite remember), the Lonnies

blog has already attracted 15 commenters. The visitors have shared memories ranging from first

hamburgers and cube-shaped ice cream cones the result, June said, of a good pricing deal with the

company that sold the pre-wrapped ice cream cubes to dating and music.

Wow, what a site, love it, wrote Tony Chin on Aug. 30. I often wondered why there couldnt have

been another Lonnies in or around Ctown, but things change, and so have I. I remember hanging

outside with my mohair sweater on and just being there to watch the parade on the weekends [of]

all the new faces and the girls. Everyone knew to meet at Lonnies.