The new Commerce Bank building opened July 8 at 155 Canal Street in Chinatown in its prominent corner location in New York Chinatown, at Bowery Street, will have trilingual cash machines in Chinese, English and Spanish. And its 30 employees will converse in Cantonese and Mandarin, as well as in English. The new bank has 7,500 safe deposit boxes, instead of 500 in the average Commerce branch.
Chinatown, in fact, is safe deposit box country, one aspect of the highly competitive, and escalating, bank war in the neighborhood. Across the street from the new banking interloper, the domed HSBC branch at 58 Bowery has 21,000 safe deposit boxes. And the HSBC branch at 11 East Broadway has 12,000.
Manhattan has only 24 percent of the city's Chinese-Americans, or 90,158, according to the 2000 census ; 71 percent live in Brooklyn and Queens. Those of Chinese descent make up the largest Asian-American group in New York City, nearly half of the Asian-Americans in the city. Three-fourths of them are immigrants.(Source: Lenn Collins, The New York Times, July 8, 2005 ).
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