“Dreams of Oriental Romance”: Reinventing Chinatown in 1930s Los Angeles

Arriving at Union Station after its grand opening in 1939, out-of-town guests to Los Angeles would have encountered a monumental lobby rivaling those of the great train stations back East.¹ Passing under the vaulted timber ceiling hung with wrought-iron chandeliers and alongside rows of oversized leather chairs, visitors would have walked through a building that stood as the culmination of a series of radical transformations in the make-up of the Plaza district of Los Angeles (Figure 1). Just across the Plaza from the station, they would have encountered Mexican-themed Olvera Street, whose successful reinvention had been crucial to the eventual selection of the Plaza site, and the Mission Revival style, for the brand new station (Figure 2). At the end of Olvera Street, they would only have to cross one more boulevard to arrive at yet another themed district, this one called China City, which opened just a year before the station and hosted an array of Chinese-themed restaurants and shops (Figure 3). The transition from a Mexican pueblo to a Chinese neighborhood may have come as a surprise to visitors, or perhaps it seemed natural in a city already notorious for its elaborate fictions. Regardless, this juxtaposition indicated arrival in a city whose origin myths were still in the process of being written. If architectural revivals often fabricate direct access to a specific moment in the past, the revivals at the Plaza instead introduced different stages of the city’s development in small, contained packages. These revivals thus called attention to their own physical artifice even as they so diligently crafted it.

Figure 1.

Union Station Terminal, completed 1939. Photograph by author.

This compartmentalized urbanity manifested itself within ethnic groups as well as between them. China City had to distinguish itself not only from neighboring Olvera Street but also from two other Chinese districts in the downtown area. From 1938 to 1949, Los Angeles contained three distinct Chinatowns within its downtown area, each the compact size of a single city block (Figure 4). One was the only remaining fragment of the district that had been the central locus of the Chinese community since the 1880s, the majority of which was demolished in the 1930s to make way for the new Union Station. China City, which was conceived by the same developer as Olvera Street, was located across the Plaza from the single remaining block of what was by then known as “Old Chinatown.” And only two blocks northeast from China City, on North Broadway, stood New Chinatown, a Chinese-owned residential and commercial district with architecture that was by far the most stylized and spectacular of the three (Figure 5). Both China City and New Chinatown were advertised as replacements for the original neighborhood. Both were inaugurated in 1938, although the final streets of Old Chinatown were not demolished until 1949. Thus, for more than a decade, the fragment of the original Chinatown coexisted with its purported replacements and the replacements with one another. This was a delicate time for the new Chinatowns; without the ability to claim authenticity of place, the tactics of their builders faced close scrutiny. Even today, with only New Chinatown remaining, an expectation of material and historical authenticity often precludes successful evaluations of how the districts went about replacing and claiming a place for the Chinese community in downtown Los Angeles.²

Figure 2.

Olvera Street, “El Paseo de Los Angeles.” Courtesy of Werner Von Boltenstern Postcard Collection, Department of Archives and Special Collections, William H. Hannon Library, Loyola Marymount University.

Figure 3.

Court of the Four Seasons in China City. Courtesy of the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

Los Angeles’s population boom and reinvention in the first decades of the twentieth century makes it an easy target for critiques of capitalism’s corrupting influence on place. By 1920, Los Angeles had surpassed San Francisco in population. Between 1920 and 1940, its population grew from just over 500...