http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/16/37404 ... ement-only
In 2005, there were about 25 arcades in New York City, down from hundreds just a decade before. By 2011, there were fewer than ten (you need to be liberal and count places like Dave & Buster’s to even get to that figure), and one of them was the aforementioned Chinatown Fair. A tiny, ratty space on busy Mott Street, Chinatown Fair wasn’t flourishing so much as it was just continuing to exist, with mostly classics like Street Fighter II, Mortal Kombat, and newer Japanese hits like Dance Dance Revolution. "You can get there from any one of the five boroughs, it's within a couple blocks from a number of trains," Kurt Vincent, a filmmaker who is currently making a documentary about Chinatown Fair told me. The urban lifestyle, he says, was more conducive to arcades than the suburbs. Vincent was drawn to Chinatown Fair for just those reasons, and had only been going there a short time when he started seeing rumors on the internet that it would close. Vincent decided to begin making a short film about the closure of this "institution" of New York City. When Chinatown Fair did close its doors on a cold night in February of 2011, many of its hardcore customers declared it the "end of an era."
Well worth the read IMO.
