“We Have a Right to Think We Are Being Persecuted”: A Real Photo Postcard of the Los Angeles Chinatown, Postmarked 28 August 1909, Part Two

by Paul R. Spitzzeri

Continuing with this post based on a real photo postcard, postmarked 28 August 1909, with an image of a portion of Los Angeles’ Chinatown, there are other items of interest found in local newspapers during that period. One concerned the late Bartolo Ballerino, a remarkable figure in Chinatown for many years and who’d recently died at the age of 80. The native of Chile and Gold Rush ’49er settled in Los Angeles in the 1850s and acquired substantial property in the original Chinatown on the Calle de los Negros, just off the southeast corner of the Plaza.

Called the “Emperor of Chinatown” just before his death in July, Ballerino was reported to have controlled a large number of “cribs” inhabited by prostitutes, as a prior post here discussed, and the 6 August edition of the Los Angeles Record ran a brief feature that, in colorful and evocative language, reported that, with his estate reputed to be a handsome sum of a quarter million dollars (other sources said $750,000),

Digging and delving into the dark recesses of the squalid region known as the old “red-light district,” adjacent to Chinatown, treasure-seekers toiled all day Thursday. They were hunting for the hidden golden hoard of the late Bartolo Ballerino, former “king of the tenderloin” . . . The three sons of the deceased were among those who wielded picks and shovels. They are convinced that large sums of money are hidden somewhere about his property.

The piece concluded with the note that Ballerino, who went through an ugly public separation from his wife, María Amparo Salcido, who died in December 1909, “left all of his estate, with the exception of a few thousands dollars, to his nurse. Whether anything was found at the diggings, sixty years after the Gold Rush, there was a great deal of unearthing of claims to Ballerino’s sizeable estate during the remainder of the year—a story we might pick up with a future post.

As noted in the first part of this post and others here pertaining to the media’s obsession with crime in Chinatown because the sensationalism drew attention, particularly when the racial element was played up by the press, the following day’s Record briefly reported that “Anna Barnett, colored, was arrested . . . on a charge of assault with a deadly weapon” with it added that she was “charged with attacking a white man, whose identity is unknown, with a large knife in a restaurant in Chinatown.” Nothing further, however, was located about this incident.

Sometimes, strange little pieces were published regarding Chinatown activities that were not related to crime, vice and sordid details that were all too appealing to journalists, editors and publishers, as well as the reading public. The Los Angeles Times of the 13th, for example, commented that “a novel and interesting sight in Chinatown is a crop of sweet corn and cabbages growing in the gutters,” these “carefully tended by the Chinaman in front of whose stores the vegetables,” said to be in fine form, “are growing.” Why this was considered newsworthy is interesting to ponder, other than the topic likely seemed alien and foreign to the Anglo reader.

Returning to crime, the Los Angeles Herald of the same day indulged in further sensationalism in its coverage of an incident in which it stated,

After driving nearly every Celestial indoors, and romping about the streets for several hours, brandishing a huge knife, John Botello, a Mexican [as if that had to be pointed out as important for the reader to know], was captured and locked up . . .

Botello, realizing that the saloons would be closed election day, stocked up well the night before, but he imbibed too freely and, looking for trouble, decided that the Chinese should be exterminated.

Procuring a long-bladed knife, he started after every celestial he met, and a reign of terror ensued among the orientals . . .

The piece ended with the remark that Botello left, but returned the following day, but police officers were notified and were waiting to nab him. As with the Barnett incident, nothing further was found about the matter, though it does remind of the terrible Chinese Massacre of October 1871, nearly four decades prior, when a mob of hundreds of Anglos and Latinos lynched eighteen Chinese men and a teenage boy.

The Times of the 17th contained reference to an usual local subject for a musical opening on New York City’s Broadway. The play, A Broken Idol, with the book by Hal Stephens and music by Harry Williams and Egbert Van Alstyne, “begins in Los Angeles Chinatown during a Chinese New Year’s celebration.” The paper’s synopsis of the storyline is more than confusing, but the second act involved a house in Santa Monica.

The piece went through forty performances in just over a month before closing and was performed in other Eastern cities, while a Columbia Records phonograph was issued with two of the songs. In June 1911, A Broken Idol was performed at the Grand Theatre in Los Angeles and among its cast were two veteran stage actors who became enormously successful in film: comedian Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle and the master of disguises and horror, Lon Chaney.

Also in that paper that day was a more typical topic under the headline “Without Opium, Chinamen Die” and in which the Times observed that

When a Federal law was passed in April, forbidding further importation of the narcotic, the price began to soar. In four months the drug has trebled in value.

In passing this law, the legislators sounded the death knell of the older Chinese residents of America. Dozens of them are dying monthly because forced to abstain from the “dream pipe.”

The article went on that the Los Angeles supply largely dried up since April, while “those who have dared to secretly sell it have been reaping a small fortune.” Moreover, the account continued, “the victims of the opium habit are willing to pay any price for a single ‘pill,'” as the drug “is dearer to them than anything they own.” When it was learned that fifty tins of opium were held at the Central Police Station, plots purportedly were concocted to get them, as their value was said to be some $3,000.

Some Chinese hired an attorney and filed for the return of three tins, but were rebuffed and a police judge was to make a ruling concerning the destruction of the inventory. The Times then remarked that, amid the federal law and local reform efforts carried out by Progressives,

As the last of the opium is being consumed the death sentence of Chinatown is being carried out. Three years ago, it was a quaint, picturesque and little flourishing oriental village. The clack-clack of the heavy doors in the gambling joints was like music to the ears of the Celestials. The inhabitants numbered 3000.

But all has changed now. The police have put a ban on gambling. The dens have been turned into stores, or are vacant . . . Today there are only 600 residents. It is believed that in a few years Chinatown will be no more. Mexicans are already crowding out the Celestials [the Mexican Revolution of 1910 would lead to a massive increase of migrants in greater Los Angeles].

The 30 August edition of the Los Angeles Express further discussed the issue of the fact that, as a headline stated, “Opium Is Soaring In Price.” It began its coverage by averring that “all ‘hop-heads’ are notified to hang out the crape” as the rise in the price of the drug cost some $15 a week to users and this “becomes a severe drain on the pocketbook of the dope fiend.”

Whereas the Times focused solely on Chinese addicts, however, the Express noted, colorfully, that “such is the condition in Chinatown . . . the Orientals and many whites still find life merely the desert between the oases of birth and death without their visions” after smoking opium. A plainclothes police officer, George Willett, told the paper about the “high price among the ‘chinks’ and that the wise ones . . . now are having their bright young lives made happy by exchanging their ‘pin yen’ [opium] for [the] golden, glittering coin of Uncle Sam’s domain.”

Willett, who knew the Chinese of Manila in The Philippines, presumably while a member of the military police during America’s bloody seizure of that former Spanish possession during the war of 1898 and could read, speak and write in the language of those among whom he worked, added that a tin that went for $7 of a half-pint, was $12 after the implementation of the federal statute and was currently $15. He added that sailors informed him that the cost was $5 a can in México and Canada, so “the great stunt the fiends try to accomplish is to smuggle the drug . . . I understand that the raw materials in many instances are taken to Vancouver [British Columbia] and that the product is finished there.

Among the reform efforts, targeting prostitution and drug use, concerned the very popular pastime of gambling. The Express and Herald of the 31st addressed an effort by merchant Wong Yot to fight back against aggressive police efforts against him, with the former reporting that “two policemen entered his grocery in Chinatown by force and without legal papers,” more than a month prior, “and created a disturbance, claiming they were searching for evidence of lottery gambling.”

The latter added that Chief of Police Edward F. Dishman, who took office in April, recommended dismissal of the charges at a hearing of the city’s Police Commission. The hearing noted that the incident took place at Wong’s store in a structure that is no longer extant, but was immediately south of the surviving Garnier Block where the Chinese American Museum is today. A report that a lottery game was held there brought up to a dozen officers (the two charged were identified as C.D. Shy and R. Pautz) and followed a white man in, with an officer (wouldn’t it be something if it was Shy?) breaking the glass of a door to effect an entrance.

Once inside, however, the report continued, “they made a search and . . . failed entirely in finding any evidence of lottery playing.” Because of this violation of basic search-and-seizure rights, Wong told the commissioners that he believed the police department was targeting him but that this persecution made no sense, as he was quoted as observing,

Six years ago, when we had 6000 or 7000 Chinese in the district called Chinatown [sources now suggest the number was probably around 3,000 or under], there were two policemen, and now that we have less than one-half that number [the 1910 census, with these almost always undercounting, enumerated about 2,600] there are sixteen officers, ten in plain clothes and five in uniform in addition to a sergeant [future chief and mayor Charles E. Sebastian]. We have a right to think we are being persecuted.

The Herald concluded its coverage by citing comment from an unidentified attorney, “who is well acquainted with the district,” that “there is no doubt there is lottery [gaming] being conducted in Chinatown . . . but the officers always get the wrong persons.” In early October, it was reported that the charges against the officers were dismissed by the Commission, which acknowledged that “half burned lottery tickets” were found.

Moreover, the commission found that “it was established beyond question that Wong Yot was a confirmed gambler and had conducted a gambling joint for a number of years.” While the body seemed to have decided that the forcible entry was justifiable, Commissioner (and former Superior Court judge) Dummer K. Trask, owner of a ranch in the Orange County city of Westminster and for whom a major thoroughfare in that burg is named, abstained from the vote, “declaring the constitution of the United States provided against such forced entry.”

Lastly, Chinatown figured prominently in the bribery trial of former Chief Thomas H. Broadhead, who came to Los Angeles in 1887 during the great boom of the era, became an officer and then resigned as the department’s head in April as he faced the tribunal. It was alleged that Broadhead was given $1,000 by Chinatown saloon and crib owner, Nicholas D. Oswald, who also became part of a 1910 election contest for District Attorney between John D. Fredericks and Thomas Lee Woolwine.

Other enmeshed in the scandal were former mayor Arthur C. Harper, who resigned in March as he was the target of a recall by reformers; former Chief and ex-City Council member Edward J. Kern, who resigned from the police department when Harper appointed him to the Board of Public Works (he was later committed to an asylum for alcoholism and apparently committed suicide in El Paso, Texas); and former Police Commission member (serving all of about six months) Samuel Schenck.

Oswald testified that he’d been involved in Chinatown since 1900 and obtained leases from Bartolo Ballerino and told the court he had dinner with Harper and Broadhead in March 1909 at which he complained of the shuttering of some of his cribs, these located further south on Commercial Street east of Alameda, and the mayor answered, “I guess we can arrange that, can’t we, Tom?” The account continued that “it was agreed that I should open a few cottages” before these were again shut down, with Broadhead, who earlier blamed Chief Kern for the first closings, saying it was “the fellow on the hill,” meaning D.A. Fredericks, who was behind the second shuttering.

Oswald did testify that, when some of the Ballerino cribs were to be reopened under his supervision of their remodeling, Broadhead was flatly opposed to the idea. When asked if, after forwarding the grand to Broadhead, his businesses were left alone, the witness was, for reasons unstated, not allowed to answer, but did respond that his Commercial Street places in a district said to have 100 prostitutes, stayed open for two months before they were again closed.

In September, after a lengthy deliberation, the jury was deadlocked at ten for acquitting Broadhead and two for convicting him, and the trial was concluded. Though there was talk of a retrial, the Police Commission instead decided to remove Broadhead from his duties as captain. He then went to work for the police department of the Southern Pacific Railroad and remained in that capacity until his retirement in 1924. He lived quietly after that and died, at his Temple City residence, three decades later.

As for the photo, it is taken from Apablasa Street looking west including several buildings on its northern side, such as Mon Chong and Company, the large banner of which is along the railing of the second-floor balcony of the tallest of those structures. The firm was located on the upper end of the Calle de los Negros in the 1880s before relocating to 341 Apablasa (this would be the Union Station area today). In the distance, on the hill at the southeast corner of Temple Street and Broadway is the second version of Los Angeles High School (thanks to Paul Ayers for the correction, as it was first stated that this was the County Courthouse and to Larry Lin for noting that the characters actually translate to “the scene of the Lantern Festival in Los Angeles,” not “A Happy New Year, Los Angeles, California, as the sender wrote at the right edge, and that the 1909 Chinese New Year began on 21 January and the festival celebrated on 5 February).

This remarkable image is one of several in the Museum’s holdings and we’ll look to share more in future posts, so be on the lookout for them.