Damage to Chinatown sculptures shows 'so much disrespect,' says BIA

Colourful statues bought to help revitalize Chinatown have been vandalized and even stolen since they were installed this winter, and the local business improvement area wants answers.

Yukang Li, executive director of the Chinatown BIA, said there were eight groups of statues put up on Somerset Street West between Bronson Avenue and Preston Street.

Not one of them has been spared. 

"Every single group of the statues has either been stolen, or there's at least one structure got damaged," Li said. 

There were pandas, colourful dinosaur chairs for kids to sit on, and all sorts of characters from popular Chinese cartoons. They had to be shipped to Ottawa from China, Li said, adding he's not sure the BIA has the money to replace them.

"For now, unless we get external funding to replace these statues [we'll] take the remains away," he said, referring to a group of damaged pink musician sculptures, one of which had been severed above its knees.

"And we'll have two instead of four or five statues in this group."

Culturally important

Li said the statues were installed in February and March through a revitalization effort funded by the federal government's Tourism Relief Fund. 

The community was hard hit by the COVID-19 pandemic, Li said, and the idea was to try and bring foot traffic back to the area and help local businesses. 

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"We installed these statues to beautify our street and to create multiple focus points along Somerset Street where tourists and our community members' families could have somewhere nice to spend time with friends and families and to take selfies," he said. 

But more than that, the statues are culturally significant for Chinese and other Asian communities, he said. 

"This is so much disrespect to our work, to our culture and to our community's well-being," he said. "I just don't understand why people have done this. It's very discouraging for us."

Chinatown 'in pieces'

Micheline Mathon lives in the area and said she was excited to see the statues when they first appeared. 

"It was great to see. It was beautiful," she said. 

Mathon said it was awful that someone felt the need to destroy an initiative that was put in to make the area more interesting. 

"It's just sad. It's not fun for, you know, the tourists coming to town and seeing our city, our Chinatown, just in pieces," she said.

Li said some security camera footage that may have captured the vandals has been handed over to police.

CBC News reached out to the Ottawa Police Service on Sunday for more details but none were forthcoming.