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It looks like the real Wall Street is on Canal Street. With nearly $6 billion in deposits spread across three-dozen retail banks, Canal Street has some of the wealthiest branches in New York City. "There is no doubt that we have become a bit of a retail banking center," the City Council member representing Lower Manhattan, Alan Gerson, said. Banks in Chinatown are some of the largest in the city. While many branches across New York have less than $100 million in deposits, and $500 million is considered colossal, Canal Street is royalty. Four bank branches on or near Canal Street have more than $500 million worth of deposits. Citibank, for example, has $842 million in deposits at its branch at 124 Canal St., and has $1.7 billion in its three branches in that ZIP code, or 30% of the entire retail banking in the area, according to the latest available data from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.
By comparison, the commercial district near City Hall at Church and Chambers streets has $2.4 billion in bank deposits, and Harlem and its 125th Street commercial district have just $652 million. There are about $3.5 billion in deposits in the Upper West Side. Brooklyn Heights has about $3 billion. The Upper East Side has $8 billion in deposits. "Chinatown is a great neighborhood and we have been there for a long time," a spokesman for Citibank, Robert Julavits, said. HSBC, which has $526 million in deposits at its 254 Canal Street branch, also said through a spokeswoman that Chinatown is a key strategic market. "Way before you saw seven-day banking in other parts of the city, the banks that rent from me on Canal Street were asking permission to operate seven days," a landlord of commercial properties in the area, Michael Salzhauer, said. Driving forces behind these deposits include a cultural history of saving large amounts of money within the community, and cash infusions from Chinese Americans and other Asians who live elsewhere but prefer to do their banking at this commercial hub where they have linguistic and cultural ties. "Culturally, Asians have much higher saving rates than the average American," the executive director of the Chinatown Partnership Local Development Corp., Wellington Chen, said. "And because of language issues, they feel more comfortable here." It isn't just Canal Street that is seeing a growing banking industry. While there are $5.8 billion worth of deposits in Manhattan's Chinatown, in Flushing, Queens—another area with a large population of Chinese immigrants—there is $3 billion in deposits, according to the FDIC. And while Manhattan's Chinatown boasts 32 branches of 19 different banks, Flushing is not far behind with 25 branches of 18 separate banking companies. When City Council member John Liu participated in the opening of yet another bank branch in Flushing in June, it was the latest in more than a dozen such events. "I've been cutting ribbons left and right," he said. "Many places see Flushing as just a place to eat — it's actually a financial center too." For example, Royal Asian Bank and Abacus Federal Savings Bank, both based in Chinatown, opened new branches in Flushing this year. Commerce Bank has already approached Mr. Liu to help find some space to open a new branch. "Many of these people have come here and work really hard, and they want to keep their savings safe," the chief financial officer of Global Bank, which opened this spring along Chinatown's East Broadway, Norman Jardine, said. "There is no better place than America to do that." |
