San Gabriel River Park Lunar New Year Celebration Postview: Yep Lung (1870-1953), a Chinese Capitalist in Los Angeles

by Paul R. Spitzzeri

It was a pleasure to staff a table at today’s Lunar New Year celebration held at San Gabriel River Park, a county park just a few miles west of the Homestead that recently opened on the former site of a duck farm on the east bank of the watercourse and also paralleling the 605 Freeway. We’d previously participated in last summer’s grand opening as well as a November nature event and shared information on the Museum and exhibited artifacts from our collection.

For today’s event, marking the Year of the Snake and featuring Lion Dancers; a marionette show from the Franklin Haynes company, which performed at our recent Holiday Open House; guided nature walks; and more, we displayed a group of photographs and documents pertaining to the history of the Chinese in late 19th and early 20th century Los Angeles, including views of the Chinatowns that existed on the Calle de los Negros southeast of the Plaza and where Union Station is now east of the Plaza, dragon dancers in parades and more.

One of the artifacts shared with visitors was a clipping from the 7 December 1913 edition of the Los Angeles Examiner and which reported that “what is declared to be the first building ever erected by a Chinese [person] in Los Angeles for rental purposes has recently been completed on Prospect avenue, Hollywood.” The paper continued that the two-story edifice, on Prospect Avenue just east of Vermont Avenue and near Hollywood Boulevard near the Barnsdall Art Park, comprising four units and shown in a photo, “was built by Lung Yep [the reversal of the names was common], vice president and manager of the Sing Fat Company and president of the Oriental Cafe.”

Moreover, the article went on, “Lung Yep controls several valuable leases in the downtown district,” including a typical 99-year agreement “on a lot on Hill street, near Tenth,” though it was added that “an effort will be made to buy the existing lease on the property, and if this is done a large building possibly will be erected there soon.” Beyond this, the Sing Fat firm was said to have leased a lot on the west side of Broadway between Ninth and Tenth streets, the latter now Olympic Boulevard, “and will erect a two-story building covering the entire lot,” with future plans to build as high as ten levels.

The Examiner remarked that,

The Sing Fat Company is one of the wealthiest Chinese organizations in the world, and has large stores in San Francisco, New York and China, Los Angeles and elsewhere. Lung Yep believes in the future of Port Los Angel[e]s, and with his co-partners has already invested near the new Government reservation . . . He claims Los Angeles will be greatly benefited by the expositions of San Diego and the Panama Pacific International Exposition of San Francisco.

Yep Lung was born in San Francisco on 20 September 1870, the year that the ratification of the 15th Amendment guaranteed voting rights to any male born in the United States regardless of ethnicity or race, and a likely early reference for him is from the San Francisco Chronicle of 29 July 1891 concerning an “application from Lung Yep of the firm, Ling Fat & Co. [sic], for a release of packages seize” by the customs collector and requesting assistance from the Department of the Treasury, which, however, refused to intervene. It was later stated by the Los Angeles Times that Yep was a nephew of Sing Fat (regular reader Larry Lin points out that the owner of the Sing Fat Company was Tong Bong, so Yep would presumably have been the son of Tong’s sister).

The 1900 federal census at San Francisco lists a “Lung Yipp,” born in September 1870 and married for seven years, living in the city’s large Chinatown in a boarding house headed by a white woman and with the occupation given as “Manager, Curio Store.” Curiously, however, the place of birth is given as China and the immigration year shown as 1880, though there are many instances of Yep’s voter registration listings, which would only have been possible because of his birth in the United States.

After returning from a trip to China at the end of November 1906, he migrated to Los Angeles to preside over the opening and then manage the local branch. The Los Angeles Times of 7 May remarked that up to 1,000 Chinese residents were recent transplants from San Francisco with a few hundred more soon expected. It was added that San Francisco companies “will spread out in all their glory here” with Sing Fat a notable example, though the prominent local figure George Lem discussed that the firm intended to “make this city its distributing point for merchandise and imports from both China and Japan.”

The Los Angeles Record of 25 March 1907 contained an advertisement that Sing Fat had “opened a Los Angeles branch with the Central Department Store, housed in a new building on the west side of Broadway south of 6th where the Los Angeles Theatre is now. It was added that the firm was “the largest dealer in Oriental, Chinese and Japanese wares in the United States” and readers were informed of “a marvelous display of curios, bronzes, brasses, cloisonne, carved ivory, hand embroidered screens, jade stone jewelry, porcelain, ebony furniture and all kinds of silk embroidered and hand drawn work.”

In early 1908, Sing Fat moved to its own location on the east side of Broadway north of 6th Street, but, two years later, the store returned to the former Central Department Store quarters and it remained there when the Examiner article was published. Yep continued managing the enterprise for most of the 1910s, but, at the end of February 1912, Yep branched out into the restaurant business with the grand opening of the Oriental Café, on the west side of Main Street, north of 5th, where a parking lot is now next to the Rosslyn Hotel Annex and with a lease of $1395 annually for a decade.

The Los Angeles Express of the 27th ran an ad in which the eatery was proclaimed as the “Finest Cafe on the Pacific Coast” and it was also proclaimed that “The Choicest Foods and Refreshments, Excellent Cooking, Rapid Service and Good Music is Promised.” The restaurant was open from 11 a.m. to Midnight, with lunch offered from 11:30 to 2 and dinner from 5 to 7 p.m. and “American and Chinese short orders served all day.”

Yep then moved very quickly into real estate speculation with the Times reporting in its 6 October 1912 edition that,

As a result of a ninety-nine year lease just concluded between Louis C. Booker, as owner and lessor, and Lung Yep, general manager for Southern California for the Sing Fat Company, as lessee, a five-story hotel of attractive design and up-to-date construction is to be erected on the east side of Broadway 100 feet north of Tenth Street [Olympic].

The paper added that a new Sing Fat lease of thirty years was also arranged for a lot across the street and slightly north “and will result in the erection of a three-story brick ‘taxpayer'” structure. Moreover, stated the Times, “Lung Yep, who is acting for himself and not for the company he represents, is said to have been influenced in his decision to secure a Broadway holding by the fact that the Sing Fat company was pioneering south of Ninth street.”

Finally, the account commented that architect S[amuel] Tilden Norton, a native Angeleno and from an early Jewish family in the Angel City, was working on drawings for both the Sing Fat structure and the hotel, with the latter to sport two stores on the ground level and 64 rooms on four upper levels. The piece concluded that “it is the intention of Lung Yep to erect a building of ten or more stories in height within the next ten years or as soon as the advance southward on Broadway seems to warrant the expenditure for such an improvement.”

At the end of November, Yep and George Mosbacher and Sam Behrendt, also Jews of long-standing and prominence in Los Angeles, formed the Lung Yep Building Company, but the 2 February 1913 edition of the Times reported that the 946 S. Broadway site, now the north unit of the Broadway Palace Apartments, was the location at which Mosbacher was embarking on a concrete loft building. The paper noted that the property “was recently acquired by the present holders from the Lung Yep Building Company.”

Perhaps this transaction was conducted to allow Yep to pursue another project, with the Los Angeles Express of the 22nd recording that “Lung Yep of the Sing Fat company, has secured a 99-year lease on the west side of Spring street, south of Eighth street, and will build a building” with “the terms of the lease call[ing] for the construction of a Class A building costining [sic] $125,000 or more.”

The next day’s Times added more about this endeavor, stating that the property at 820-822 S. Broadway and owned by wholesale drug company owner Frederick W. Braun was to soon have a reinforced concrete edifice designed by architect Walter J. Saunders and with footings for ten stories, though a much smaller structure was to be built initially and to house a single firm for the upper floors and street-level stores and in a loft-type arrangement. The paper continued,

The building is being erected for Lung Yep, vice-president and manager of the Sing Fat Company, who has taken a lease on the property for a period of fifteen years, at a given total rental consideration of nearly $400,000. Yep controls several valuable leases in the downtown district.

Notably, the article commented on the growing theater district in that section of Broadway and flanking what is now know as the Braun Building and comprising six floors are the Rialto and Tower theaters to the north and the Orpheum to the south. In early 1914, Yep leased property at the southwest corner of Main and Tenth (Olympic), where the main block of the Broadway Palace Apartments sits, giving more evidence of his realty holdings during this busy period.

Yep was also politically savvy, as evidenced by his gift to Mayor George Alexander, a reformer who swept into office in the aftermath of the resignation of his predecessor, Arthur C. Harper, with the merchant and restaurateur presenting “an immense cloth solidly embroidered with gold” on the occasion of the chief executive’s 50th wedding anniversary in April 1912. When Police Chief Charles Sebastian ran successfully for the mayoralty three years later, Yep was reported to be among the very first persons to sign the petition formally requesting the candidacy.

This goes to the heart of the one reason why Yep Lung is known, if at all. The 18 November 1913 edition of the Record, under the heading of “Los Angeles’ Chinese Policeman Too Much American To Wear Mandarin Coat,” published a feature by Estelle Lawton Lindsey that began with:

Lung Yep is a police officer; Lung Yep, as you may have guessed, is also a Chinaman. Connect those statements and you have the reason why the appointment of Lung Yep to the office of policeman is an event.

After Sebastian ceremonially affixed a badge on Yep, the columnist asked the chief if Yep, the first Chinese police officer in the nation, was to be assigned to Chinatown and was told, “good Chinamen are few, we wish to preserve them. There are healthier jobs for a Chinaman than policing Chinatown.” Yep then stated that a major problem was shoplifting, such as at the Sing Fat store, where hundreds of dollars were lost monthly, but, after Lawton asked if such theft was common in his homeland, the new officer burst out laughing and replied, “sure, they steal everywhere” before answering a query that he would arrest women as well as men.

After dealing with another reporter’s questions and those of some women from a local woman’s club or similar type of organization, Yep was implored to wear a “splendid mandarin coat” he’d brought to the ceremony and told the assemblage, “I was born in the U.S. In China is too much trouble all the time. I know; I live there 10 year,” a son, Hing, was born at Canton, now Guangzhou, in 1895. Demurring on donning the coat, said to be worth $1,100 and in his family for three centuries, Yep responded, as a young boy was marched into the station on a charge of stealing apples, “me too much American now, I no like to wear him [the coat.]”

In its coverage in its edition of the same day, the Times remarked that Yep “stepped from the comparative obscurity of a clerkship in Sing Fat’s store,” though he was, as noted above, the vice-president and manager, to receive his commission. It was added that Sebastian decided on this course after speaking with regular officers “patrolling that picturesque district” of Chinatown and that he “agreed with the men that a native policeman is needed, one who speaks the Chinese language and knows their ways by nature.”

At the end of November, the officer was presented with a decorative star by the employees of the Oriental Café with Yep’s father and friends in attendance and Chief Sebastian was there to bestow the item which was deemed by the Times of the 30th as “a beautiful specimen of the jeweler’s art” and including the city seal, the title of “special officer,” and, on the back in Chinese characters, the message: “Presented to Lung Yep by employees of the Oriental Cafe, November 29, 1913.”

If Yep reached the pinnacle of his careers as a capitalist and a police officer by 1914, he experienced a steep decline in the former within just a few years. The Express of 15 February 1918 reported that

War conditions which have been productive of a general demoralization in manufacturing and transportation lines, is the cause assigned by the Sing Fat company . . . for quitting business.

The Chinese government recently placed a ban on the manufacture of many lines of goods dealt extensively by the Sing Fat company. This, together with the scarcity of ocean steamers and greatly increased freight rates, caused the board of directors to vote on discontinuing business.

It took the rest of the year for the store to close, but this was also accompanied by the bankruptcy of the Oriental Café, for which Yep and others incorporated in 1915. The Times of 9 May briefly observed that the Hart brothers, who owned the building, were owed $13,000, while Lung Wing, a Chinatown resident, was a creditor for $18,000 and the firm’s asserts were tied up in “machinery” with only $750 in stock.

By 1920, Yep formed the Hing Fat Company and was joined by his son Hing in the business, located on Hill Street across from Pershing Square, but it does not appear that the enterprise lasted long. He applied for a dance hall license in November 1925 at a location nearby on 6th Street, where the New China Café was operated by Ching Kim and where it was alleged a couple of months prior by the police department that opium was being sold and smoked, leading to the revocation of the dance hall license. It may be that Yep was successful as the eatery reopened in time for Thanksgiving, but, in summer 1926, a reputed attempted assassination of the café’s owner, Charles Kim, suggests that the reality might be otherwise.

Voter registration listings for 1930 show Yep as a merchant and, later in the Great Depression period as an “operator,” though of what is not known. After 1940, he may have been retired as he and his family resided in a house that still stands in the Larchmont neighborhood near Paramount Studios. Notably, a 1934 ad for the sale of a chop suey café gave this address for inquiries, so it’s possible Yep operated that eatery.

Yep died in early May 1953 at age 82, apparently in obscurity and close to four decades after his peak as a Chinese capitalist of significance in Los Angeles, but his story is an interesting and notable one for our region’s history.