Quote:
Originally Posted by sopas ej
Here's a map of LA's original Chinatown, which was mostly located east of Alameda, where Union Station is now:
From lapl.org
And here's a map of El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historical Monument, which includes Olvera Street and the Plaza where LA began as a little pueblo. But see, so much was destroyed to build the freeway ramps, and create landscaping (and a surface parking lot).
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Many surface parking lots. If you look at the Plaza neighborhood in Google Earth, you'll see that the dark asphalt of Lots 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 covers most of the area. When I first became interested in this topic around 1978, there were still several turn-of-the-last-century structures in the block where the old Plaza Church is, unlike today when nearly all that space is a huge parking lot except for the Church itself, and the Brunswig Drug building.
Most people don't seem to know that a considerable remnant of Old Chinatown persisted until about 1950, wedged between Alameda and the Plaza. There was a villain in this piece and her name was Christine Sterling. Because of her "success" in transforming Olvera Street into a faux "Mexico-Land", with the backing of the L.A. Times she became a sort of dictator of the Plaza preservation efforts. In effect she decreed that the Lugo House and everything else in those blocks--the old buildings and the businesses and lodgings they contained--were eyesores and had to go. Moreover, she specifically wanted the Plaza area to preserve--as it were--the Hispanic heritage of the neighborhood only, and allowing Old Chinatown to remain adjacent to the Plaza itself would have detracted from that. As we all know, "China Land" had already been prepared for the Chinese.* This is why today, instead of several blocks of historic buildings east of the Plaza, we now have the aforesaid parking lot, plus a bit of landscaping that serves only to emphasize the rush of auto traffic on Alameda and the row upon row of parked cars on either side of Alameda.
ETA: I don't mean to be critical of the desire to preserve and celebrate the city's Latino/a heritage, which is how my statement above might have come off. In and of itself that's a worthy goal. However, before the neighborhood was wrecked, the Plaza was where several ethnic neighborhoods converged, and it was actively used by all of them--Japanese in Little Tokyo, Chinese on the eastern edge, and Hispanics (mostly Mexicans) to the west and north. There was even an Italian section to the north, about whose only traces now are the remains of Little Joe's Restaurant and St. Peter's Church, which is still active and still offers Mass in Italian, last I checked.
*See for eample: William D. Estrada. The Los Angeles Plaza:
Sacred And Contested Space.. University of Texas Press, 2008. p242ff