The Dancing Chicken

Or, how about some tic-tac-toe?

Chinatown in New York City was one of my earliest full-on immersions into another culture. Much of the action took place off Canal Street, a heavily-trafficked thoroughfare that had retained much of its old industrial character. There actually was a canal in that low-lying area in the late 1700s, draining away polluted water from the sweatshops and factories.

Ambling down Canal Street on a Saturday morning constituted an outing, where you felt like you had accomplished something by simply walking around and looking at stuff. There was shop after shop piled high with odd lots of surplus electronics and machinery—switches, clock motors, stereo speakers, soldering irons, oscilloscopes, screwdrivers—overflowing into cardboard boxes along the sidewalks. You could buy sheets of metal, leather or Plexiglass, and there was Pearl Paint, which once sold house paint but became a go-to for art students.

Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York

In fact, an article in the Village Voice directed artists to trash barrels and dumpsters behind particular addresses, where they could find discarded metal chads from hole-punching machines, cutout Plexiglass circles and squares of all sizes, and fragments of plastic and Mylar in different colors, all of this dross constituting the building blocks for costumes, mobiles, confetti or wall art. I enjoyed going through a few barrels myself.

Canal Street also was the dividing line between Martin Scorsese’s Little Italy to the North and Chinatown to the South and East. Chinatown was a little more street lively, whether ankle-deep in firecracker debris after a New Year’s celebration, or crowded with open air stands of bug-eyed fish, softshell crabs and every kind of clam or sea urchin. I wandered into a corner shop where a customer was buying a huge, live frog hoisted out of a Styrofoam cooler. Just as I wondered how it would be packed for the trip home, the proprietor, holding it by the legs, raised it above his head and gave it a home run swing onto the stainless steel countertop, then casually skinned it. Mad Magazine’s Don Martin might have provided a sound effect: GALOONG!

There were crispy Peking ducks hanging side-by-side in windows, fresh lychee nuts and water chestnuts, bakeries that sold round melon cakes and almond cookies, and loads of downstairs restaurants where I descended into the cool darkness for my first bowl of hot and sour soup and cup of jasmine tea.

Michael Liu

At the end of Mott Street, a little off the beaten path, was the Chinatown Fair, an arcade that opened in 1944 and was home to the chicken that danced and played tic-tac-toe. You’d make your way through the noisy arcade, which at the time hosted carnival entertainments, pinball and rudimentary stand-up video games like Space Invaders and Pac-Man, to reach the glass-enclosed case in the back where the chicken was on duty. If you wanted a dance, you’d slide a couple of quarters into the machine, a light would come on, and music would play, rousing the little Manchurian candidate into action. She’d climb onto a round dance floor, tilted akimbo, and do chicken scratches around the circle. When the song ended and the light went out, she’d advance to a dispenser which issued a couple of corn kernels in return for her performance.

Michael Yamashita/ Corbis

The consummate chicken experience, however, included a game of  tic-tac-toe, played on a vertical screen with X’s and O’s lit from behind. The bird always went first— which, as any serious player knows, guaranteed its success—then you’d be invited to choose the next space. Although the chicken seemed to be putting some mental effort into deciding which space to claim, it actually was pecking at a hidden switch that illuminated a pre-programmed X or O. After beating you, it advanced again to a slot which dispensed food.

Apparently, on rare occasions, the chicken would be set up to lose and the player would be awarded a “large bag of fortune cookies.” I never saw this happen, and can only imagine how old those cookies were (possible fortune: “You will succeed in your moon landing.”) I hope she got her corn kernels anyway.

The chicken—with its carny edge and mysterious neighborhood vibe—was the perfect capper to a date or a visit from out-of-towners, proving ones’ New York bona fides.

Although its working conditions were less than ideal, I wondered if the completion of tasks arduously learned gave it a sense of accomplishment. I chose to imagine the back door swinging open at the end of the day, a pair of hands tenderly delivering the Leghorn to a nearby apartment where the corn was plentiful, and a well-deserved rest prepared her for another day of entertainment at the Chinatown Fair.

© 2022 David Potorti