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• 1 media/out(282).jpg 2021-04-27T00:33:14-07:00 Depictions & Demolition of Old Chinatown 36 image_header 2023-01-18T12:01:26-08:00 Old Chinatown was a neighborhood of working people and their families-- a place with a cultural identity in its Chinese merchandise stores, laundries, and herbal shops, as well as playgrounds, churches/temples, and schools. Despite this, the media and white society characterized Old Chinatown as a crime-ridden neighborhood with opium dens, prostitute rings, and gang wars. In doing so, they devalued the neighborhood, marking it as a place to stay away from and marking its people as less-than.
  
  The Los Angeles Times, which held sway over much of the public in Los Angeles in the 20th century, was the main source of these racist depictions of Chinatown and its residents. There are countless LA Times articles about Chinatown opium raids, gang wars, and killings-- far too many to include, stretching from the 1890s into the 1930s.
  
  One such article, more towards the latter end of that timeframe, is below.
  
  
  
  This article, like many others, promotes an image of Chinatown as crime-ridden. The drawing at the top shows men scrambling, one holding a gun and another on the ground, supposedly hit. It is not a photo, but its placement next to real photos of the neighborhood and its residents make the scene out to be real. The article includes faces of Tong leaders and writes about them like characters in a fiction. White readers could be in awe of Chinatown and fear it at the same time.
  
  Occasional white visitors to the neighborhood engaged in voyeurism or "slumming," posed as a dangerous, exotic night out in a foreign territory. Even the word "slum" speaks to the devaluation of this working class neighborhood, the marginalization of its residents and their lack of access to capital.
  
  Chinatown Nights, a 1929 film produced by Paramount Studios, promoted this kind of slumming and voyeurism. In the film a white man leads a Chinese tong, and his love story with a woman dictates the sequence of events in Chinatown. While set in New York, audiences could interpret the film as taking place in any Chinatown, including Los Angeles's. Paramount Studios was the monolith of Hollywood, so it makes sense that content of the film would reflect and promote local attitudes towards Los Angeles's Old Chinatown as a place for consumption and daring adventures.
  
  
  
  In the image above, there is a crowd of men -- mostly white men -- gathered around the alley, where a supposed "gang shooting" occurred, according to the LA Times. This could be a display of white voyeurism, where people come to the neighborhood for entertainment and spectacle around this incident and its supposed relation to "gangs." 
  
  The media's role in conjuring up Chinatown as a place of crime had physical consequences, in that it justified policing of people in Old Chinatown. In City of Inmates, Kelly Lytle Hernandez writes about criminalization and incarceration of Chinese people during this time in Los Angeles. The following article shows a real photograph of policemen raiding Chinatown with a supposed "key," which signifies their effort to control and contain Chinese residents.
  
  

   

  Police activity, including surveillance, raids, and arrests of Chinese residents, set the stage for demolition of the neighborhood. Whether an intentional part of the demolition process or not, policing of Old Chinatown led up to and coincided with the neighborhood's demolition and removal of its residents. Policing often results in locking people up and shutting them out of their community, as well as stirring up a notion of crime and doom in a neighborhood. These notions of crime and doom then serve as justification for neighborhood destruction and removal of residents, not only through arrests and incarceration, but also evictions, notices to vacate (pictured), and demolitions. These processes form what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls "organized abandonment" of a neighborhood.

  
  Old Chinatown's Demolition

  Devaluation of the Old Chinatown neighborhood turned into physical reality with its demolition. Real estate businessmen and government treated this neighborhood as disposable and doomed for demolition, as it stood "in the way of progress." To them, progress meant building Union Station as a grand entrance to a white city, perhaps with select ethnic enclaves as tourist attractions. The peopled neighborhood of Old Chinatown would exist no longer.
  
  
  Though the article describes these construction works as "salvaging doors and windows," the photograph give evidence to the process of tearing down a building in Old Chinatown. This along with pictures of vacant buildings show the emptying of Old Chinatown.
  
  
  
  As early as 1920, the city was thinking about how to replace Old Chinatown in a way that would still satisfy white thirst for parading in Chinese neighborhoods. Whether this article's introduction is satirical or not, it outlines the very type of white voyeurism and appropriation of an "authentic Chinese neighborhood" that Christine Sterling created and capitalized on with China City.