According to another source, the Burrill Street Chinatown was burned to the ground in 1901 by a "mysterious fire" caused by a kerosene stove.

The extension of Empire Street, proposed in 1914 (according to the Providence Sunday Journal) and completed around 1951 doomed the Chinatown, and all of the buildings were demolished including the former headquarters of local Chinese societies.

[2] Providence's Chinatown was built in the late 1800s, and disappeared sometime after 1951 according to a historical record of Patrolman Robert Chin, who is notable for being the country's first Chinese-American police officer.

said that Chinatown began as a community of Chinese grocery stores, restaurants, boarding houses, and laundries around the early 1890s along Burrill Street where the Blue Cross/Blue Shield building stands today.

A February 16, 1913 article showed hostility towards the Chinese as it stated that the community "... young white girls [were] hanging out at the Chop Suey houses, there subject to the supposedly 'unhealthy' attentions of womanless Chinese men, as well as the discovery of opium and gambling in the neighborhood...." Then on December 13, 1914, the newspaper article "... spoke of the need to extend Empire Street (rather than Snow Street, as had originally been planned) through to Weybosset Street, with the attendant widening that mysteriously required demolition of every building in Chinatown at that time, and which left that block of Empire Street conspicuously wider than its other two blocks...."[4] Another historical record indicated that Chinese-white couples were prevalent, during an era when interracial couples were generally shunned.