Sorry, I'm kinda realizing that you were saying your chapter is too long and you're trying to solve that. When you said that you want people to see what's happening and that it was introducing characters I thought "this could be an introductory prologue". Also, you can always break up your chapter into parts. I've done that like a million times in my novel. So you can have "Chapter 1 - Part 1" and then create a new chapter as "Chapter 1 - Part 2" if you're able to find a good split (midway) in the chapter to break them up. That will help you keep the word limit down if you're aiming to only have a certain amount of words in each of your chapters. (I actually post nearly the limit of words for all of my chapters and I haven't had issues with people running away because they're long).
You can look at one of my split chapters to see what I mean (you don't have to read the whole chapters, just kinda the end and the beginning of the next for reference on how I end it but continue it: https://tapas.io/series/Vows-of-the-Sentinel
And my prologue is basically a back story that helps the rest of the story make sense, without having to find ways to reveal a big part of the main character's past throughout the novel - I just went ahead and got it out there. So I'm not sure if your first chapter is more introductory and doesn't flow with the rest, but maybe a prologue could work for that.
(btw my story is really dark - I just wanted to warn you if you're going to look as a reference).
