Written by Annie Luong
In 1870, a group of approximately 200 Chinese were situated on Calle de los Negros between El Pueblo Plaza and Old Arcadia Street. Initially, Old Chinatown was composed of mostly men, many of whom were employed as laundrymen, market gardeners, road builders and ranch workers. As Old Chinatown flourished, it expanded eastward from the Plaza across Alameda Street and grew to a population of three thousand. However, as a result of the 1913 Alien Land Law, Chinese, who were already prohibited from naturalized citizenship, consequently were also prohibited from land ownership. Many settled and became tenants on Juan Apablasa’s widow’s grazing grounds and vineyards. Between the 1890s and the 1910s, Old Chinatown continued to grow, eventually taking up fifteen streets and alleys and included one hundred building units. A Chinese opera theater was opened along with three temples, a newspaper, and a telephone exchange.
As the number of women gradually increased, more families and children became residents of the community. Church missions, community organizations, and Chinese district associations formed, and Old Chinatown became an attraction for American tourists. By 1910, the population began to decrease as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 prevented more people from migrating to the US. The creation of the City Market led other Chinese away from the old neighborhood. Business declined as stereotypical media images of opium dens, gambling houses, and tong warfare discouraged respectable visitors from Old Chinatown. Rumors of relocation and redevelopment led many landlords to fail to maintain or improve their properties. Housing conditions worsened, but many residents remained.
Peter SooHoo Jr. describes Old Chinatown as having “very few street lights…the streets did not seem to be asphalt-covered, but bumpy with potholes. Despite this, people seemed to be very upbeat. They were a tight knit group even though living under tenement conditions.” 1 David Lee recalls, “the streets were paved in 1929, 1930, I think. Before, it was still dirt and rock.” 2 On the 12th of December 1913, the Apablasa family sold the Old Chinatown property for $310,000 to Southern Pacific Railroad. The leases on the property had expired. On the 7th of November 1914, all of Old Chinatown lying east of Alameda Street was sold for over two million dollars to L. F. Hanchett. The San Francisco capitalist initially planned to convert the area into an industrial warehouse district while a new Chinatown was being developed. But as his plan lost credibility, he instead began to plan for a railroad terminal. By the late 1930s, most of the area that was known as Old Chinatown would become Los Angeles’ Union Terminal, or Union Station.
1 Peter SooHoo interview with William Gow, Chinatown Remembered, CHSSC, April 9, 2007
2 David Lee interview with David Lee, Chinatown Remembered, CHSSC, April 14, 2007.
Esther Lee Johnson on Old Chinatown
Esther Lee Johnson on Living In Old Chinatown
Interviewed by William Gow
Chinatown Remembered Project
March 9th, 2008
William Gow: So all together, how many people, I mean how many brothers and sisters?
Esther Lee Johnson: We have four sisters, four girls in the family.
William Gow: And no brothers?
Esther Lee Johnson: No brothers.
William Gow: And what type of a place did you live in?
Esther Lee Johnson: It’s upstairs from a gift shop and it’s actually one big room and a kitchen, and a bathroom, no bathtub. We had the pull chain toilet, the square– the pull chain toilet, and my mother had a carpenter come in and partition two bedrooms and that big living room. So my mother and father and younger sister slept in one room which is partitioned and the other room is the three of us girls.
William Gow: Did you have to go to another bathhouse or something?
Esther Lee Johnson: No, haha, that’s the funny part, we took sponge baths. We didn’t have hot water. My parents we have to boil hot water to do sponge back, but on Sundays, we used to sneak over to Union Station, crawl underneath, and got in there to the bathroom, and we took our showers there, so I know, I shouldn’t [laughs] you can edit that out if you want!
William Gow: it’s okay…haha
Esther Lee Johnson: We remember things, but we didn’t… we weren’t mad at our parents. We weren’t upset, but that was life for us because we didn’t know any better. We never went to ball games like when we were going to junior high school, high school. There was a game, everybody went to the game. We didn’t. We had to come straight home, or my father will be waiting for us because we had to help support the family.
Shaken As if By an Earthquake: Chinese Americans, Segregation and Displacement in Los Angeles, 1870-1938
by Isabella Seong-Leong Quintana [Gum Saan Journal, Volume 32, No 1, 2010]