Each year, hundreds of people fill the streets of Chicago’s Chinatown and Uptown neighborhoods to celebrate the Lunar New Year with parades featuring vibrant colors, festive floats and dancing.
The Lunar New Year, also called the Spring Festival, is one of the most important holidays in Asian communities around the world. Following the lunar calendar, the festival begins with the first new moon of the year and celebrates the turning of winter toward the coming spring. This year it falls on Jan. 29, 2025, and begins the year of the snake.
The Chinatown festival is said to date back to Chicago’s first Chinese immigrants, who settled first in the Loop and then farther south to the area around Cermak Road and Wentworth Avenue.
“At Hip Sing’s store, No. 323 South Clark street, the counters were covered with candied fruits, ginger, melon seeds, and nuts, while a wick in a glass of nut oil blazed in front,” the Tribune wrote in 1896. “In front of Sam Moy’s store, particularly, and before others in a less degree, were great heaps of exploded crackers and burnt paper, eloquent testimonials to Sunday night’s celebration.”
Up north on Argyle Street, the annual festival goes back to when well-known restauranteur Jimmy Wong envisioned a “New Chinatown” there in the 1970s.
“Along Argyle Street, in an area promoted as “New Chinatown” by business leaders of the Uptown Asian community, lion dancers draped in curly orange fur and guided by a giant head with bulging eyes and snarling fangs danced from business to business,” the Tribune wrote of the scene on Feb. 2, 1987.
Each neighborhood will hold a parade this year, the Uptown Lunar New Year Parade on Feb. 8 and the Chinatown Lunar New Year Parade the next day, Feb. 9. The celebration will include family, friends, feasting and fireworks, just as it has over the last hundred or so years.
Last year Tommy Cheung attended the Chinatown parade. He waved his family flag, adorned with gold tassels and emblazoned with a Chinese character, as the parade passed by. Cheung’s family originally came from Hong Kong.
“This means too much to me,” Cheung said, gesturing to the crowd. “It’s about my culture, and getting to share it, and people come from all over the city to celebrate it.”
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