“One of the Strangest of our Experiences”: Read All About It with a Visit to Chinatown, Los Angeles Herald, 6 August 1874

by Paul R. Spitzzeri

While the Homestead has a goodly selection of newspapers from the Los Angeles area from the period, it doesn’t have the 6 August 1874 edition of the Los Angeles Herald, but what drew attention to it before was a remarkable article that was located when searching for material on adobe buildings for a recent multi-part post on this blog.

The feature in question concerned a Herald representative’s tour through Calle de los Negros, a thoroughfare to the southeast of the Plaza, where Los Angeles Street now runs and part of which area is now bisected by U.S. 101 as it moves through downtown. The road, named for a dark-skinned Latino in the pre-American period, was rendered by Anglos into Negro Alley, or N—-r Alley, which names it retained until it was mostly removed by the northerly extension of Los Angeles Street in the mid-1880s.

The main title for the article is “Ah Sin,” which a regular blog reader tells us reflects common a terminology and naming in Chinese not, as might be thought, some negative reflection using the English word “sin,” though part of the subheading was “A Midnight to the Classic Shades of Negro Alley.” The area became the Angel City’s first Chinatown as a couple hundred of Chinese residents settled there from the late 1860s onward.

The presence of the new settlers was the result of open bias and discrimination from the outset and anti-Chinese sentiment was such that, on the evening of 24 October 1871, an inter-ethnic conflict among the Chinese which involved the killing of an Anglo man and the wounding of a Latino police officer culminated in hundreds of Anglos and Latino descending on the Calle in an indiscriminate orgy of violence that led to the lynching of seventeen men and a teenage boy (three by shooting and the rest by hanging) in a matter of a few hours and in a town that probably numbered some 7,000-8,000 residents.

The Chinese Massacre was, by far, the worst example of mass violence in a community that experienced a great deal of ethnic turmoil and conflict over almost a quarter-century since the American invasion and seizure of Mexican Los Angeles. Some historical accounts suggest that the bloodletting was largely stanched by the horror of the Massacre and efforts to quell to ameliorate the conditions that fostered such violence.

This in no way suggests that conditions for the Chinese materially improved after fall 1871; in fact, anti-Chinese attitudes, even if less overt, were hardened through the remainder of the decade, during which a crippling national depression fostered, in California, the Workingmen movement. This involved a call to ban further importation of Chinese to the Golden State and to drive out or greatly limit what existing Chinese residents could do, in terms of labor, as well as the social realm.

In 1882, Congress passed what is generally known as the Chinese Exclusion Act, which essentially ended immigration from China, and, in resulting years, those Chinese that remained in Los Angeles were increasingly treated with more derision than threats of violence and Chinatown, which moved east across Alameda Street where Union Station was later built (this leading to the relocation of that community to its current location to the northwest) became an object of fascination for tourists, while locals decried accounts of crime, prostitution and drugs that represented a fraction of what actually went on there.

Before we get to the “Ah Sin” article, it is worth briefly noting other contents of the issue. For example, Prudent Beaudry, who was elected the Angel City’s mayor at the end of 1874, was completing a water system to his lands on the hills west of downtown, including Bunker Hill and Bellevue Terrace and the paper noted the cast-iron pipe replacing sheet-iron used previously but proving to be unable to handle the water pressure, though the latter, with coats of asphaltum (from the nearby La Brea tar pits, presumably) were to be reused in areas with lower pressure. Within a few weeks, it was expected that “there will be an abundance of water on the higher hills.”

Speaking of water, the Herald observed, in its editorial section, that “between the people of this city and those [the private Los Angeles Water Company, which had the franchise for 30 years until 1898 when the city took over distribution] who furnish them with water there has grown up a slight misunderstanding.” This concerned the fact that, in two years, despite no more consumption by users, rates were about twice as high and a petition to the Common [City] Council for an investigation was made, but “the matter has hung fire,” or stalled.

Also briefly mentioned was George B. Davis’ project, the Alden Fruit Drying Works, financially supported by F.P.F. Temple with the latter’s son Thomas later having an ownership stake in the enterprise, which was located in East Los Angeles, now Lincoln Heights. The Herald reported that Davis soon intended to have a building finished and the patented Alden equipment installed in time to being drying by the next fruit harvest, while it was added that fruit-drying facilities were expected to dot the county within a year and local vineyards supplying fine grapes for the processing of raisins. In late October, the paper covered in detail the plant that Davis erected and this was discussed in another post on this blog.

While grape-growing and wine-making were long the major product of greater Los Angeles’ agricultural economy, oranges were gradually assuming greater importance, though the industry hearkened back to 1841 and William Wolfskill’s planting south of the pueblo of the first commercial grove in the Golden State. The Herald cited the recent success of J.E. Reed, who, in 1869, planted 4,000 orange and 160 lime trees near Adams Street, which was out in the sticks in those days, on 80 acres he bought for just $700. He had a further 40,000 young, non-bearing trees, including some lemon and lime, as well as apple, pear and peach trees in an orchard and the paper encouraged others to follow this example, saying his place was worth up to $35,000.

A major problem with citrus was the persistent pest of the scale bug and a testimonial from James deBarth Shorb, son-in-law of Benjamin D. Wilson at Lake Vineyard in present-day San Marino (Shorb’s homeplace is now the Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens), and neighbor Edward J.C. Kewen of El Molino Viejo (the Mission San Gabriel’s mill) concerned the use of the Babcock fire extinguisher to treat the scourge. Shorb tried it on 800 infected trees with the device, adding “certain ingredients,” and found efficacy within a few days. Kewen merely agreed and recommended it use to others “as the most economical agent” for freeing his trees “of that destructive pest.”

Another major project of note concerned the exploration for petroleum in the San Fernando Oil District, located near modern Santa Clarita along the eastern extremity of the Santa Susana Mountains west of Interstate 5. Among those most actively prospecting at the time was F.P.F. Temple, whose operations in Towsley Canyon were under the auspices of the Los Angeles Petroleum Refining Company, of which he president.

The Herald referred to the “San Fernando Oil-well Boring Company,” which was the refining firm and which had a meeting the prior day. It was stated at the confab that some $1,700 was expended to date on drilling operations and superintendent William H. Spangler, who was experienced in the Pennsylvania fields where America’s oil industry was born, noted that the well was approaching 100 feet in depth with “considerable oil running into it.”

Spangler added that “everything was in perfect order, and working like a charm,” while the paper lauded the efficiency and economy of the effort, stating that “fifteen hundred dollars, the amount paid for an engine and a set of tools, is said to be very cheap.” This excluded the derrick, shipping of materiel and the labor of the installation of the equipment and the Herald concluded with, “success to the Well-boring Company; may they strike it big!” While there were reports later of modest production, the Temple well never achieved its aims and ambitions and it was sold after his Temple and Workman bank failed early in 1876.

Lastly, there was an interesting item from a correspondent, “Hampden,” who criticized how property assessments were determined in the county. He told the paper that “in a leisure moment to-day my eyes accidentally fell upon the Assessment Roll” for 1874 and thought he say typos. For example, he wondered how 719 tons of varied grains could be valued at just $10 a ton or that 17 miles of irrigating ditches were deemed worth just $2,000, but the assessed value of the county’s canine population of 1,301 was $6,610, “a little less than the whole grain crop.”

As to the excursion to the Calle de los Negros, the piece started with a variety of quotes, some utterly demeaning and others relatively reasonable, in a chapter about the Chinese simply titled “John,” a pejorative for them, by Charles Nordhoff, author of the recently published California: For Health, Pleasure and Residence, that showed two divergent points of view. One emphasized theft, opium smoking, the sending of dollars back to China and the claim that the “whole race are [sic] vicious and degraded,” while the other touted sobriety, penchant for savings, usefulness and potential good citizenship.

The Herald followed by commenting that “if there is any being in the world whom you utterly fail to understand, it us your little, sleek, mild-mannered, docile John.” He may learn a good deal, but “imparts nothing.” It considered it a service to locals to know “where their faithful field hands, their servants and their handy men generally betake themselves, when at night the work has been accomplished in neatness and order” and then head out for leisure time. The unnamed writer claimed that ” a friend of ours whose business makes him acquainted with ‘the ways that are dark and tricks that are vain,’ invited us to take the midnight rounds with him” and added that the tour was “one of the strangest of our experiences.”

As for the locale, the correspondent observed that,

Negro Alley, the Chinese quarters, has, as all know, on either side long rows of tumble-down adobe buildings, which present all of the characteristics of ancient ruins, with little of their usually attributed poetry. The awnings which run along the fronts of the buildings have long since ceased to be ornaments, if they ever were such. Here and there the roof has taken a crazy tilt up or down, the soil which covered it in lieu of thatch is gone and numberless sky-lights improvised by time and elements let streaks of sunshine through the fast decaying mass.

He went on to note that the interiors comprised small apartments, many of 7 x 9 foot dimensions, with low ceiling and few windows “and these are filled to their utmost by Celestial humanity, in all of its various phases,” including those who cleaned laundry, made and repaired shoes and ran shops. The Chinese, however, lived and worked in these cramped quarters, and the writer colorfully observed that “at night, the scene is a busy one, lights are all burning, and the inhabitants are continually passing to and fro, buzzing in their odd lingo, like a hive of bees.”

A guide named Gee Lung was obtained and “the first room which we visited was a gambling house,” in which “Tan,” or “Fan-Tan” was played. After passing through an ante-room where a guard allowed entrance thanks to Gee Lung’s presence, the writer noted that the only item in the interior space was a table covered with rush matting “around which the players were thickly gathered carrying on their game.” The account went into some detail about the elements of Fan-Tan, which essentially consisted of players guessing whether the number of copper coins on a pile on the board was even or odd.

An adjoining space, however, revealed “a party of Mexicans . . . seated at a long, narrow table playing the Spanish keno game” and the assemblage was deemed “a motley group, young and old, women, men and boys,” with each player given what looked like a checkboard, but with pictures in the squares. The conductor of the game had a board with all possible pictures, as players had varied combinations, and held a copper egg-shaped vessel filled with wooden pieces with the pictures on them. He then pulled one out and called out the name of the picture, with players placing a bean on their board when they had the image—this is not unlike bingo, especially as winner was the one who “had the first continuous row of beans across his board.”

Next, in another space, was where three groups played different gambling games:

In one corner four of the Mongolians were hob-nobbing over a table and rattling dominoes [this appearing to be mah-jongg, which became fashionable among white Americans decades later]; a second party had a game of draw-poker in progress; and a third was conducting a game of “tan,” similar to that which we have described. If you wish to read character drawn out upon a page truthfully and unerringly, watch the face of a man engaged in a game of chance, with money staked on his operations.

One player was described to the writer as “a laboring man . . . and industrious, too; he is also one of the worst gamblers in the place,” and lost $400, a significant sum during the day, but did better in late hours with “his ill-gotten profits in a little pile of silver on the table beside him.” After observing his facial gestures and those of the other three players, the writer noted that those playing Fan-Tan were more composed than the others in the preceding space, suggestive, apparently, of their being “of a higher grade than the others—perhaps the aristocracy of the heathenish society.

As to the well-kept gent managing the game, he was deemed “a very polite looking rogue” who was acting with a nonchalance as if he was “picking your pocket or cutting your throat.” When Gee Lung offers to join in for a round, however, he was politely dissuaded as not understanding the game and the correspondent adjudged this to be “very sage counsel, truly, and honestly given.” A number of other spots were visited, “but time and space forbid a detailed account further,” though some found Chinese at work and others those relaxing, some gambling and others smoking opium, along with “scenes, among the rest, which would hardly figure to print to good advantage.”

The account did conclude that,

We had the pleasure of forming the acquaintance of an opium smoker and inspecting closely the modus operandi of this peculiar form of dissipation. The man was reclining lazily upon his divan, as is the custom while smoking, and his mood was most affable, to be sure, for so short an acquaintance. Sometimes in the intervals of our pigeon-English conversation, he would open upon us with a volley of his pure mother tongue . . . during our confab, as another mark of his good humor, he suggested, Would we smoke? We were compelled to decline his kind offer, and reluctantly bid him a final good night, wishing him happy dreams and a light headache in the morning.

With this, it was time to decamp with the writer stating that “at last we drew our strange ramble to a close and leaving the still busy Chinatown behind us, we sought our homes as the clock struck the hour of two.”

This extraordinary account, whatever its accuracy or its sensationalizing, is one of the earliest detailed discussions of Los Angeles’ first Chinatown and reflects attitudes among some Anglos toward the location and the Chinese community, even as we can assume that it touted the more notorious elements rather than what was the majority of persons and activities in that section of the Angel City.