Chris Satullo: This time, Chinatown might well negotiate

Forget it, Mike; it's Chinatown.

That was the message the crowd at Holy Redeemer Church sent Thursday night to an absent Mayor Nutter, chanting "No casinos, no slots" throughout a long "informational" meeting that was much longer on emotion than data.

Nutter knows that the casinos-on-the-river plan he inherited this year is a turkey. But the proposed switch of the Foxwoods gaming hall from the south waterfront to Market East won't go down easily.

The Gallery site isn't in Chinatown, but it's close enough to violate the community's zone of indignation. Its residents see Center City's modern history as a series of brute-force encroachments on their turf: the Vine Street Expressway, the Convention Center, the federal detention center, the Phillies ballpark (blocked), now this.

Eight years ago, as a newly minted editorial page editor, I ran afoul of Chinatown's honed sense of grievance. I was in favor of Mayor John F. Street's wispy plan to plop the Phils at 12th and Vine. That earned me an in-your-face lesson on Chinatown's view of history from folks such as Helen Gym of Asian Americans United. In opposing my notion that folks living in a vibrant downtown should expect some development now and then, they were fierce, eloquent and relentless.

To them, Chinatown is a residential community - not just a place for tourists to munch duck - and thus deserves as much deference from Philly's cult of the neighborhood as a Fishtown or an East Falls.

Back then, I found Chinatown's NIMBY rhetoric over the top. Ballpark foes carried on about baseball - which often shares a sentence with Mom and apple pie - as though it were the devil's work, as though it were, uh . . . a casino.

Well, the fire this time is a casino. Having watched Harrisburg fail to deal with education funding for 30 years, I understand why Ed Rendell resorted to the risky gimmick. Still, casinos are just bad public policy.

Thursday night, the candor and emotion with which Asian American citizens spoke of gambling as a particularly grievous, family-destroying addiction in their community was hard to ignore.

So, this time, I really sympathize with Helen Gym's sense of siege.

"It's like a smack in the face," she told me before the meeting. "It's like they're relying on stereotypes: Those Asians are such quiet, polite, obedient people. We're actually sick and tired of this, the way they always dump their stuff here."

Chinatown folks recall that the mostly white residents of the riverfront blocks threatened with casinos got some powerful help: The William Penn Foundation spent millions on the riverfront-visioning process led by PennPraxis.

That effort was separate from the casinos, but became intertwined. The vision it produced - for a green, vibrant, connected riverfront - offered a more powerful critique of the casinos' boxy sleaze than any clichéd protest sign could. It pushed Nutter to seek a Foxwoods move.

As important, PennPraxis enabled citizens to move beyond their usual Philly role: shouting No! at a done deal. Citizens got to engage early, to think clearly, to ask "what if?", to transcend the zero-sum fight between "done deal" or "no way."

Chinatown, and the other neighborhoods adjacent to Market East, deserve the same opportunity.

Time isn't on the side of good process. State lawmakers are impatient for city casinos to give their constituents tax breaks. Nutter, for all his acrobatics on the casino issue, needs the dough, too. Casino revenues are built into his five-year plan, into which Wall Street has blown a huge hole.

On Thursday, dogged Councilman Frank DiCicco (how sick he must be of the word casino) repeatedly promised the crowd "process" and "transparency." So did administration officials.

They were met mostly by rude, raucous emotion. The protesters claim to want process, but they just want to yell no and get their way. They want to waive the unhappy reality that the state is intent on putting two casinos in town no matter what.

Chinatown, like Fishtown and Pennsport before it, has to decide. Either go for the long shot - utter resistance to casinos - or engage cautiously with the devil to limit damage and extract benefits while praying for a late-arriving angel.