LOS ANGELES: OLD CHINATOWN
Posted December 19, 2024
LA’s original Chinatown, before-and-after it was entirely demolished for the construction of Union Station, the Hollywood Freeway, and the creation of “Civic Center” between the 1930s-1950s.
The neighborhood was located to the south and east of Los Angeles Plaza on the north end of Downtown, in the oldest part of the city. It had grown in the 1860s when the railroad companies began recruiting thousands of Chinese immigrants to build the transcontinental railroad. During this period, many Chinese people were fleeing China due to devastation from the ongoing Opium Wars, especially hard-hit Guangdong (formerly Canton)(1). Arriving in California with little to nothing, the railroads took advantage of these immigrants’ desperation and paid them at significantly lower rates than their white counterparts (2).
Unable to access housing in other parts of the city (due both to the same restrictions placed on Black, Latino, and all other people considered non-white, in the form of restrictive covenants and redlining; as well additional restrictions placed specifically on Asian populations such as the Alien Land Laws), Chinese residents were only permitted to rent in this small area located adjacent to the plaza, in close proximity to several railyards and junctions. “Despite these obstacles,” writes Kelly Wallace for the LAPL, “from 1850 to 1900, the Chinese population grew to approximately 3,000 residents and Chinatown became a full-fledged community spread over 15 streets with general stores, Chinese organizations, schools, temples, and an opera theater.” (3).
In the 1910s, when municipal plans emerged to clear the area for the construction of a consolidated passenger train terminal, Chinatown property owners (largely non-Chinese landlords living elsewhere in the city) began neglecting maintenance in the area, leading to the neighborhood’s physical decay (4). The Union Station project was ultimately delayed nearly two decades, but its eventual construction in the 1930s wiped out the majority of the neighborhood. The small portion west of Alameda that had survived was later demolished in the 1950s for construction of the 101.
The delay in construction of Union Station was the result of a political battle between the railroads and the City of LA that eventually led to the matter being put to a public vote in 1926. The railroads were opposed to the city's plan to consolidate their privately-owned stations into a single, city-owned “union” station, which would give the city significant leverage over their operations. The railroad companies instead proposed a series of elevated rail lines through Downtown to connect their existing stations and eliminate dangerous grade crossings, to also be shared with Pacific Electric interurbans (5).
In the campaign against the Union Station ballot measure in 1926, the railroad companies enlisted their media ally William Randolph Hearst, who played up racial fears that Chinatown would be an inappropriate location. “If there is to be a union station,” one Hearst editorial ran, “let it at least not be located between Chinatown and Little Mexico. Would the public prefer a depot in the Chinese district, or no more grade crossings?” Erik Zuniga notes for the California Historical Society that the railroads “were playing to racial anxieties among white citizens by alluding to the area as blighted and full of ethnic minorities—surely a culture shock for out-of-towners arriving to their fair city.” (6)
City Hall allies were no less racist in their support of a union station. An LA Times editorial countered the station would not be in Chinatown, but would rather be the “End of Chinatown,” which was the title of the essay. It continues:
“The Union Depot plans spell the passing of Chinatown and its rookeries into the dim history of early Los Angeles...Just as the old buildings are being torn down on Main and Spring streets near Temple street to make way for the new City Hall, so under the union depot plans the character of the entire district will be changed as more and more buildings are torn down to make way for new and widened streets, parkways and sites for the State, Federal and other city and county buildings. Chinatown is doomed by the march of the greater Los Angeles Civic Center and the union depot.” (7)
Ultimately, voters sided with the city, resulting in Chinatown’s destruction (8). In P9 below, you can see Union Station’s clock tower rising behind Chinatown shortly before demolition. Union Station opened in 1939. While the station is undoubtedly an architectural masterpiece, an exemplary public space, and a critical node on LA’s current transit network, like so many of America’s finest institutional monuments, its construction came yet again at the direct social and economic expense of a racialized and persecuted community.
The buildings seen in the P1-P5 were among those that survived demolition for Union Station, standing another decade until the remainder of the neighborhood was leveled for the 101 and the Civic Center urban renewal project, along with the nearby neighborhoods of Sonoratown (the aforementioned “Little Mexico” in the Hearst editorial) and Bunker Hill.
The Garnier Block, seen in the P3 and P7, was one of the most important buildings in Old Chinatown, regarded as the Chinese community’s “City Hall.” While nearly half of it was demolished for the 101, it survives today as the Chinese-American Museum (9).
The Lugo Adobe (seen in P5), just east of Los Angeles Plaza, was one of the oldest structures in Los Angeles, constructed during the Spanish colonial period. By the start of the 20th century it had become a fixture of Old Chinatown, earning California Historic Landmark status in 1939. Despite this status, and despite significant efforts to save it, the Lugo Adobe was demolished to make way for an onramp to the 101.
While the communities surrounding Los Angeles Plaza—Old Chinatown and Sonoratown—were ultimately destroyed during redevelopment, because of the nearly mythic status these neighborhoods had attained in popular culture, small sections were preserved in romanticized, commercialized forms. Sonoratown in the form of Olvera Street, and Old Chinatown in the form of New Chinatown, centered around the Chinatown Central Plaza shopping mall, which had been built with the help of Hollywood set designers to create an “authentic” feeling neighborhood (10).
In his classic history of Los Angeles, “City of Quartz,” Mike Davis describes the remaking of Downtown that began in the late 1930s: “When Downtown redevelopment is viewed en bloc from the standpoint of its interactions with other social areas and landscapes in the central city, the ‘fortress effect’ emerges, not as an inadvertent failure of design, but as a deliberate socio-spatial strategy,” Davis writes. “The goals of this strategy may be summarized as a double repression: to raze all association with Downtown’s past and to prevent any articulation with the non-Anglo urbanity of its future. Everywhere on the perimeter of redevelopment this strategy takes the form of a brutal architectural edge or glacis that defines the new Downtown as a citadel vis-a-vis the rest of the central city.” (11).
This “fortress effect” is visible in this case in the replacement of the mid-rise residential and commercial density of Chinatown and Sonoratown with a series of impassable freeway rights of way, onramps, and monolithic government buildings that meet the ground with garages (P12).
Just as a note for cross referencing between the perspective images and the aerials below: in P1 on the left hand side you can see railroad cross the street diagonally. This was a spur track off the Alameda mainline that served the LA Warehouse Company’s facilities a few blocks south. This spur can be seen in the aerial image, cutting diagonally southwest just in front of the green arrow marked “P1.” This took me a while to figure out, but helped confirm the location of the P1
Endnotes
“Timeline: Chinese in America.” Chinese Historical Society of Southern California. https://chssc.org/timeline/ (accessed 12/18/24).
Wallace, Kelly. “Remembering Old Chinatown.” Los Angeles Public Library Blog, 2019. https://www.lapl.org/collections-resources/blogs/lapl/remembering-old-chinatown (accessed 12/18/24). (@lapubliclibrary).
Wallace, Kelly.
“History of Chinatown LA.” Chinatown Business Improvement District. https://chinatownla.com/history/ (accessed 12/18/24). (@lachinatown).
Sachse, Richard. “Report on Railroad Grade Crossing Elimination and Passenger and Freight Terminals in Los Angeles.” California Railroad Commission Engineering Department, 1920. https://archive.org/details/railroadgradecro00cali/page/n7/mode/1up?view=theater (accessed 12/18/24).
Zuniga, Erik. “Old Chinatown and the Present Union Station: Transportation, Land Use, Race, and Class in Pre-WWII Los Angeles.” California Historical Society Blog, 2022. https://californiahistoricalsociety.org/blog/old-chinatown-and-the-present-union-station-transportation-land-use-race-and-class-in-pre-wwii-los-angeles/ (accessed 12/18/24).
Zuniga, Erik.
Scott, Bottles. “Los Angeles and the Automobile: The Making of the Modern City.” University of California Press, 1987. https://archive.org/details/losangelesautom00bott/page/156/mode/2up (accessed 12/18/24).
“The Building.” Chinese American Museum. https://camla.org/the-building/ (accessed 12/18/24).
Mars, Roman. “It’s Chinatown.” 99 Percent Invisible, 2018. https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/its-chinatown/ (accessed 12/18/24). (99percentinvisible).
Davis, Mike. “City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles.” Verso, 1990.