is a neighborhood in Downtown Los Angeles, California that became a commercial center for Chinese and other Asian businesses in Central Los Angeles in 1938. The area includes restaurants, shops and art galleries but also has a residential neighborhood with a low-income, aging population of about 10,000 residents.
The original Chinatown developed in the late 19th century, but it was demolished to make room for Union Station, the city's major ground-transportation center. A separate commercial center, known as "New Chinatown," opened for business in 1938.
There are two schools and a branch library in Chinatown, as well as a city and a state park and a medical center/hospital. Many motion pictures have been filmed in the area.
In the early 1860s, thousands of Chinese men, most of them originating from Guangdong province in southern China, were hired by Central Pacific Railroad Co. to work on the western portion of the first transcontinental railroad. Many of them settled in Los Angeles.
In 1871, nineteen Chinese men and boys were killed by a mob of about five hundred white men in one of the most serious incidents of racial violence that has ever occurred in America's West. This incident became known as "Massacre of 1871".
The first Chinatown, centered on Alameda and Macy Streets, was established in 1880. Reaching its heyday from 1890 to 1910, Chinatown grew to approximately fifteen streets and alleys containing some two hundred buildings. It boasted a Chinese Opera theater, three temples, a newspaper and a telephone exchange. But laws prohibiting most Chinese from citizenship and property ownership, as well as legislation curtailing immigration, inhibited future growth.
From the early 1910s Chinatown began to decline. Symptoms of a corrupt Los Angeles discolored the public's view of Chinatown; gambling houses, opium dens and a fierce tong warfare severely reduced business in the area. As tenants and lessees rather than outright owners, the residents of Old Chinatown were threatened with impending redevelopment, and as a result the owners neglected upkeep of their buildings.[2] Eventually, the entire area was sold and then resold, as entrepreneurs and developers fought the area. After thirty years of decay, a Supreme Court ruling approved condemnation of the area to allow for construction of a major rail terminal, Union Station. Residents were evicted to make room for Union Station, causing the formation of the New Chinatown.
Seven years passed before an acceptable relocation proposal was put into place, situating a new Chinatown in its present location. Old Chinatown was gradually demolished, leaving many businesses without a place to do business and forcing some to close. Nonetheless, a remnant of Old Chinatown persisted into the early 1950s, situated between Union Station and the Old Plaza. Several businesses and a Buddhist temple lined Ferguson Alley, a narrow one-block street running between the Plaza and Alameda.
As late as 1951, structures remained on the east side of the Plaza, including the Lugo House, built in 1838 by the Lugos, a prominent Californio family. In later years it was used by St. Vincent's College, which became Loyola Marymount University. Later still, the Lugo House was rented to Chinese-American tenants who operated shops on the ground floor and a lodging house upstairs. Christine Sterling, the woman behind the Olvera Street and China City projects (described below), argued that remaining buildings of Old Chinatown were an eyesore and advocated the razing of all the remaining structures between the Plaza and Union Station.[7]:244
"The original Chinatown's only remaining edifice is the two-story Garnier Building, once a residence and meeting place for immigrant Chinese," according to Angels Walk – Union Station/El Pueblo/Little Tokyo/Civic Center guide book. The Chinese American Museum is now situated in Garnier Building.
In the late 1950s the covenants on the use and ownership of property were removed, allowing Chinese Americans to live in other neighborhoods and gain access to new types of employment.
"GANGLAND"
In modern times, competing Asian street gangs and organized crime, such as the tongs and the Hong Kong-based triads, continue to plague the metropolitan Chinatowns worldwide where Triads have their operations, Tongs are Chinese secret societies, which were prominent in the 19th and 20th centuries. There have been 'Tong wars' or Chinatown in-fighting, between the Tong groups in the older Chinatowns. A tong war occurred in a Chinatown could be spread to other Chinatown communities. Initially, many Chinatown gangs were formed to defend the community from the lo fahn but later turned on members of their own ethnic community. This had a huge impact on the gang.[
The Chinatowns of the 1960s experiences a rapid influx of working-class immigrants from Hong Kong. Since their inception in the late 1960s, the Hong Kong-born immigrant and mostly unemployed gang members began a campaign of harassment and assault of white tourists in Los Angelas, which ultimately proved to be a predicament for the tourism-minded conservative Chinatown elite of the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association (the biggest problem is that the CCBA simply advocated tougher policing against the gangs rather than resolve Chinatown social inequalities at the core). In North America, Chinese American street gangs often have connections with the tongs and triads. Examples of such street gangs include the Joe Boys and Jackson Street Boys, which are named after the major street of San Francisco's Chinatown.
Turf wars have been common in the older CChinatown Gang rivalry among Chinatown gangs has sometimes have a high profile. As Chinatown tend to be tourist attractions, tourists in Chinatown have sometimes been victims of these gang warfare crimes. In 1977, a shoot-out occurred in a San Francisco Chinatown restaurant (where the rival gang were normally based), in which two tourists and three waiters were murdered by stray gunfire in a botched assassination attempt on a Wah Ching gang member. Eleven other people were injured. This incident is notoriously known as the Golden Dragon massacre and it mobilized the LAPD to create an Asian crime unit. The five suspects involved in the attack were sentenced and convicted. On June 30, 1995 involved two factions of the Jackson Street Boys. One faction opened fire on the other on a busy Chinatown street, Stockton Street, during the daytime. Seven innocent bystanders were struck, including a pregnant woman. Three males, ages 18, 16, and 14, were arrested in connection with the shooting.
RULES
- Just your basic location
- The events of this thread, should mostly remain restricted to China Town, and should not spill out into LA
Log in to comment