Violence, Bias Mark Chinatown’s Evolution

With its ever-growing ethnic communities, Los Angeles is often called the nation’s modern Ellis Island. And since its founding in 1781, Los Angeles has always been a global village. Perhaps no neighborhood reflects this better than the city’s original Chinatown.

Two Chinese immigrants were first recorded there in the census of 1850, but it wasn’t until the first Chinese woman arrived, on Oct. 22, 1859, that the city’s only newspaper, the Los Angeles Star, acknowledged the existence of a Chinese community.

Two years later, when merchant Chung Chick opened the city’s first Chinese store, on Spring Street, the population had grown to 21 men and eight women, all working as servants or laundrymen. Within a few years, more Chinese came, most winding up as railroad workers, shopkeepers or farmers.

The heart of the first Chinatown developed in an area known as Sonoratown, where the notorious street Calle de los Negros was located; it had been named for the dark, illicit deeds done there and for the lowlifes who committed them. About 200 Chinese, along with gamblers and lawless, trigger-happy Yankee and Mexican drifters, inhabited the block-long alley near the plaza in El Pueblo.

In this “sinkhole of depravity” occurred an event that left no memorials, only an enduring civic disgrace.

The year was 1871, and the “Chinese Massacre” that left 18 Chinese dead prompted newspapers throughout the nation to condemn Los Angeles as a “bloodstained Eden.” On the night of Oct. 24, a Yankee was killed and another was wounded in cross-fire between feuding Chinese groups. Within hours, a hysterical mob of 500 Angelenos besieged the Chinese, killing 18 men and boys. The convictions of seven men were later overturned because of a legal flaw in their indictment.

A decade later, as hard times hit, the state passed the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which halted Chinese immigration and prohibited Chinese already here from becoming naturalized citizens.

Eight years after that, Los Angeles’ Chinese population of about 2,000 was concentrated on 48 acres near the old plaza. Within its confines were about 200 buildings, including an opera house, a school, three temples, the Wah Mei Sun Po newspaper and Chinatown’s telephone company.

For the next 50 years, Chinatown’s busy “town square” was a brick wall on Alameda Street, where ads, notices and the newspaper were posted.

Chinatown also drew non-Chinese to its nightspots and restaurants. Sometimes, downtown businessmen availed themselves of its less savory attractions--gambling, brothels and opium dens. At $1.50 a day, opium was a rich man’s pastime.

At the turn of the century, the Empress Dowager Tz’u-hsi, “the dragon lady,” held power in China, and revolution was still in the air among Chinese on both sides of the Pacific. With the help of a band of trade-minded and pro-revolutionary Angelenos, the “Red Dragon” caper--one of Chinatown’s best-kept secrets--was plotted.

Its leader, Homer Lea, would help catapult China’s revolutionary leader Sun Yat-sen to power as the George Washington of China. Lea was neither Chinese nor a trained military man. Rising to become Sun’s chief military advisor, Lea opened the Western Military Academy in Chinatown and ultimately trained a militia of 2,100 soldiers who were smuggled into China to help overthrow the Manchu dynasty in 1911.

The revolution did not much alter Los Angeles’ Chinatown, where residents lived behind stores or in flimsy boardinghouses. Most paid rent to the family of rancher Juan Apablasa, who owned much of Old Chinatown. By 1913, the family was taking in $4,000 a month from Chinese tenants. Like Old Chinatown itself, the Apablasas’ name on a local street and its land holdings would soon be obliterated.

In 1915, the city proposed building Union Station on Chinatown land. After more than two decades of legal battles, 3,000 Chinese residents were ultimately evicted. Some old-timers held out even after their water and electricity were cut off.

About 28 Chinese pooled their money to create another enclave nearby, the present-day Chinatown.

To get around laws barring non-natives from owning land, the group, later known as “the founders,” formed a corporation through their U.S.-born children and bought railroad land for 75 cents a square foot, with the covert help of a sympathetic railway agent named Herbert Lapham.

On June 25, 1938, they opened New Chinatown, with 18 stores and a bean-cake factory. A bronze plaque in Chinatown’s main square listing the founders’ names also carries a small portrait of Lapham, the only Caucasian so honored.

But the city had its own plans. The same month, a tourist attraction called China City opened at Ord and Spring streets. Like Olvera Street, it was the brainchild of civic activist Christine Sterling. A Paramount Studios set designer collaborated in its design, and director Cecil B. DeMille donated props and costumes from the 1937 film “The Good Earth.”

The founders of New Chinatown thought artifices like vendors’ booths and rickshaws were absurd and inauthentic. They were right. The “Celestial Empire” of China City burned down 11 years later and was never rebuilt. The last vestige of Old Chinatown, a block of buildings between Sunset Boulevard and Los Angeles, Alameda and Aliso streets, was demolished in 1949 to make way for the Hollywood Freeway and a park.

Included in that cluster of 22 razed buildings was the home of Vicente Lugo, the first two-story residence on the plaza. He donated the house to the parish priest in the 1850s. The house became the first home of St. Vincent’s College (now Loyola Marymount University) in 1865, named for Lugo’s patron saint, Vincent de Paul, a 17th century French priest who founded the Vincentian Fathers.

Also, Jerry’s Joynt, a fabled restaurant-bar with an ornately carved bar painted in gold, black and red, fell to the wrecking ball.

Chinatown has since grown in size and scope. The 1965 repeal of the Alien Quota Act brought to the homogeneous Cantonese enclave many Mandarin-speaking immigrants from Hong Kong and Taiwan. After the Vietnam War, Southeast Asian refugees moved to Los Angeles, and Chinatown continued as a thriving symbol of diversity and durability.

The new Chinese American Museum is scheduled to open in 2003 in the Garnier Building, a two-story 1872 edifice on the northwest corner of Los Angeles and Arcadia streets.

The museum will offer exhibits about the untold tales of early Chinese settlers.