For more than five decades, the Chinatown Fair arcade attracted a steady stream of visitors, some drawn to its dim, dank and narrow battlefield of wall-to-wall Japanese street-fighter games, and others lured by a more peculiar attraction: a succession of chickens that took on all comers at tick-tack-toe, a few quarters at a time.

The chickens always went first. They seldom, if ever, lost.

About a decade ago, the arcade’s last such chicken, known as Lillie, left, and the tick-tack-toe machine was retired. But the arcade, a vestige of a more mysterious New York, would endure until last year, when a bitter rent dispute suddenly shuttered its doors.

First the chicken; then the arcade. What had become of the city?

This year, word got around that the arcade was to reopen under new management. The old sign outside on Mott Street was repaired, its missing letters replaced: “Video Games. Video Games. World Famous Dancing & Tic-Tac-Toe Chickens.” And last month, the Chinatown Fair reopened, but amid the new family-friendly arcade games, something was not right. The chicken was missing.

“I tell them it’s on vacation, in the Bahamas,” said Florence Lau, a clerk behind a counter where plastic green soldiers, Groucho Marx glasses, Tootsie Rolls and other prizes tease from behind the glass.