It’s one of the most intricate sidewalk ballets ever choreographed. But after five annual seasons of the Chinatown Night Market in New York City, there are currently no plans to do it again.

It was not an easy decision for the event’s nonprofit organizer, Think!Chinatown, to call it quits after this year’s two Chinatown Night Markets — one in July and the other this August. This year’s night markets almost didn’t happen after corporate funders backed away. The $10,000 in hard costs per night market was covered at the last minute by local funding sources Send Chinatown Love (which itself shut down its operations in June) and Trinity Church.

It all takes place on a block of Forsyth Street just south of Canal Street that’s served many purposes over the years. There are no buildings on the west side of the street. There’s only a wide sidewalk along the Manhattan Bridge approach as it touches down in Chinatown, with a small elevated plaza tucked into the space between the sidewalk and the approach along the northern third of the block. In the late ‘90s and early aughts, the block served as the ideal terminal for Chinatown’s famous discount bus lines. These days it’s primarily home to a lively street market.

The street vendors set up in the early morning hours, seven days a week. As many as 40 vendors sell everything from shoes and secondhand clothing to used tools, electronics and the wide range of fruits, vegetables and seafood one can expect from a street market in Chinatown. Bok choy currently sells at $2 per two pounds. In Chinatown, restaurants and families alike rely on street vendors for quick re-ups on fresh supplies at affordable prices, because there isn’t always room for enough storage onsite or at home.

The transition into the Chinatown Night Market starts up at the elevated plaza, fading in slowly southward along the block over the course of several hours. It’s all been carefully coordinated between the street vendors and Think!Chinatown, whose gallery and studio space is a few blocks away. From the first incarnation of “Chinatown Nights” back in 2021, the night market has been very careful to work with the daytime street vendors to minimize any disruption to them.

“We understand that this vegetable and fruit market is such a hub and a keystone in our neighborhood,” says Alice Liu, community outreach and production lead at Think!Chinatown. “Even though our permit begins at one o’clock, we don’t close the road [to daytime vendors] at one o’clock, we close it at 5 p.m., and even after we close it we still let the daytime vendors keep vending there till around 7 p.m. or even a little bit later.”

Around 3 p.m. on a Friday afternoon in August, the vendors at the northern end of the block are already mostly gone for the day as the production crew starts to unload and set up equipment for the night market. Tables and chairs. Banners. Power generators to overcome the lack of city investment in electricity hookups along the block. The sound system. Lighting rigs designed and handbuilt by volunteers to be reminiscent of improvised street vendor lighting elsewhere in Chinatown.

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Every year during the event, Think!Chinatown’s director and co-founder Yin Kong has taken a moment to encourage attendees to call on public officials to make investments that would make things easier for the night market as well as everyone else who uses the space. Creating permanent power hookups, even if street vendors have to pay a fee for the right to plug in during the day or at night, and investing in ground crews to clean the space on a more regular basis would make a world of a difference.

“I hope the people who are upset that we don’t have the night market anymore will push for the plaza to be better,” says Kong. “There’s not that many places we can program in Chinatown. Forsyth Plaza really is one of the larger spaces we could get, though maybe in the future…that’ll change. It’s not just about us. The night market is not every night, right? So it should be really focusing on the day vendors and how the plaza could be better for them.”

It isn’t until after 5 p.m. that the rest of the daytime street vendors start packing up, very slowly, as there are still lines of customers waiting to check out at a handful of popular vegetable purveyors. Volunteers have begun setting up night market vendor tables at the northern end of the street, along the eastern side opposite the plaza. By 6:15 p.m. the first night market vendor pulls up to the block, but their space isn’t ready yet. Up on the elevated plaza, the crew is running a sound check with the evening’s headliner, queer Taiwanese American musician Treya Lam — who also headlined at the first Chinatown Night market in 2021.

At 7:02 p.m., the last street vendor truck pulls out, and a mad dash of volunteers begins moving dining tables and chairs into position where they once were along the sidewalk. Night market food vendors have started laying out their books, tea, gifts, artwork, photography and other wares, as a growing crowd waits.

By 8 p.m., when the market officially opens, long lines have already formed at many vendors, especially those selling all kinds of cuisine from Cantonese to Szechuan, Taishanese, Vietnamese, Malaysian, Himalayan and Filipino. The lines will stay long for the next two-plus hours. In between sets from Treya Lam, the crowd enjoys Think!Chinatown’s resident DJ YiuYiu spinning Cantonese and Mandarin language covers of American pop classics like Madonna’s Material Girl.

At 8:15 p.m., the first customer sits down for Ming Liang Lu, a local Chinatown artist known for cutting out miniature paper portraits right on the spot in just a few minutes using only a pair of scissors. Once he gets a customer, a crowd forms quickly around his kiosk, and they hover around his table for the rest of the night, applauding each time he holds up a newly-finished, perfect likeness of his subject. His last customer won’t sit down until 11:25 p.m., five minutes before the Chinatown Night Market closes for the last time. For now, at least.

Capacity is the main issue. Think!Chinatown wasn’t created just to run seasonal night markets, but it ends up becoming an all-consuming venture for a significant part of the year. Aside from fundraising to cover the hard costs for the event — permits, equipment rentals, crews to unload and load a rented truck, and other per-night costs — the nonprofit has never really fundraised to cover the countless hours of staff time behind the scenes to run the night market as Think!Chinatown originally envisioned it five years ago.

“I think in the beginning, we thought maybe we could hand it over to a for-profit entity to see if they could run it,” says Kong. “We did talk to some and realized they do things so differently, and we wouldn’t want it to be that way here. So we haven’t invited anybody to take it over. We have not identified any entity that could do it in the way we think it needs to be done.”

Read more: A Night Market Has Popped Up in NYC’s Chinatown

For-profit entities meanwhile are also scaling back on night market activity — MASC Hospitality Group runs the popular Uptown Night Market in Harlem and the Bronx Night Market, both of which are also sunsetting after this year. Kong says the city isn’t making things any easier for night markets, despite the fact that these events have proven to be very popular. An estimated 8,562 people attended this final Chinatown Night Market, close to the record of 9,000.

Back in 2021, one of the main goals for the Chinatown Night Market was to help long-standing, legacy businesses in Chinatown to recover from the pandemic. COVID-19 hit Chinatown first, with dramatic drop offs in tourism from East Asia and domestically, including many regular Chinatown visitors from around the region who grew up in Chinatown or have ties to the neighborhood.

Liu felt that pain acutely herself, helping her parents run their family business in Chinatown, Grand Tea & Imports. Since then, Liu has been at the center of the maelstrom that is the Chinatown Night Market planning process. It started with reaching out to the day time street vendors to secure their cooperation. Liu grew up buying from those street vendors, and still does sometimes. She’s offered to let the daytime vendors stay and join the night market, but many are already tired after being out there all day.

Over the course of five years, Liu and the rest of the Think!Chinatown team recruited at least 36 existing businesses and local artists as Chinatown Night Market participants. Most of these legacy business owners and artists had never participated in formal festivals or street markets before, and only with Liu’s urging came to see it as an opportunity to help keep their business afloat during the pandemic.

But it’s never been as simple as setting up a few tables along the side of the street and signing up vendors. Some needed help writing bios and taking product photos to help with promoting themselves and the night market overall. Some needed help adjusting their menus for appropriate portioning and pricing for a festival crowd eating mostly on the go. Many need help navigating the processes for obtaining the necessary licenses and temporary permits for vending at an outdoor street market.

“It’s taken a lot of convincing, a lot of hand-holding, teaching them about the right permits they need to get, teaching them about what menus would work, navigating the health codes and everything and how to keep things warm, how to keep things hot, how to work when there’s no running water,” Liu says. “It wasn’t a disadvantage that a lot of people started out like, ‘oh I know your dad!’”

There were also some newer Chinatown businesses that were a natural fit for the night market and didn’t need all that much support, like Yu & Me Books, the first Asian-American woman owned bookstore in New York. But the Chinatown Night Market also largely ended up serving as a kind of business accelerator helping legacy brick and mortar Chinatown businesses and artists break into the street festival scene. And Think!Chinatown provided all that support in four languages — English, Cantonese, Mandarin and Taishanese.

Some have gone on to use those skills and marketing collateral to become regulars at other night markets and regular street food festivals around the city.

“We’re trying to modernize ourselves to keep up with the market,” says Hilda Ng, part of the third generation of her family that has owned and operated New Kam Man Market on Canal Street since 1973. “I love the atmosphere, I love the people and I can share the history of Kam Man to the younger generation. If I have any questions I always text Alice and she always helps, she’s been a really wonderful host. I hope they can find another way or sponsor to do it again. We’ve learned a lot but we’re still new to participating in these kinds of markets.”

Listen: Chinatown Night Market Is Cultural Power And Preservation

In some ways, the Chinatown Night Market has fulfilled some of its original purpose. The legacy businesses that Think!Chinatown wanted to help recover have survived, some to the point of being able to participate in other street festivals and night markets on their own, some to the point of no longer needing the additional revenue outside of their brick and mortar space.

And from a longer-run perspective, Think!Chinatown’s broader mission has always been about helping Chinatown residents and businesses expand their own collective imaginations of what’s possible in their neighborhood. As heartbreaking as it has been for them to say goodbye (for now) to the Chinatown Night Market, perhaps it has also already contributed much to that broader goal.

“My childhood home is right behind the night market, where the back of our building faces the night market, and I see my aunties and uncles sitting outside on the stairs of the plaza,” Liu says. “I think that helps them imagine what it’s like to have that space be safe, to be well-lit, to be programmed, to have music that they can enjoy too. I think that means a lot to them.”

This post was originally published on Next City.