More than 1 Chinatown in city’s history
Riverside’s Save Our Chinatown Committee has been preserving the vacant site south of downtown that once held the homes and businesses of about 300 Chinese immigrants.
Riverside has a Save
Our Chinatown Committee, a group whose mission since 2008 has been to preserve the vacant site south of downtown that once held the homes and businesses of about 300 Chinese immigrants.
Many Riversiders may be only dimly aware that their city had a Chinatown. Even fewer would know that that 1885-1974 settlement wasn’t the first Chinatown.
It was the third.
Three Chinatowns, not one? I couldn’t help thinking that if a certain 1974 movie had been filmed in Riverside, not L.A., someone would have told Jack Nicholson sadly: “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatowns.”
Two members of Save Our Chinatown Committee filled me in on the history last week. M. Rosalind Sagara, its chair, and Kevin Akin met me at the Chinese Pavilion on Mission Inn Avenue.
Of all the luck, the pavilion is newly surrounded by chain-link fencing and inaccessible as the adjacent former library is remodeled into the Cheech Martin Center for Chicano Art.
Akin and I had met already at Olivewood Cemetery for an annual activity of the committee, a tomb sweeping ceremony to tidy the graves of some of the city’s Chinese pioneers.
Chinese immigrants have a deep connection
to Riverside. In fact, they were here before Riverside. The first arrived in the late 1860s, working as brick masons to construct the Cornelius Jensen house, today a landmark.
Some worked as cooks, servants and field hands for the settlers who established the city in 1871. or in orange groves and canning factories, according to a timeline by the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California.
By the mid-1880s, about 40 had leased land for farming, where they grew vegetables that supplied much of the city’s fresh produce. One was a servant for Eliza Tibbets, planter of the parent navel orange tree, and by local lore, his agricultural know-how saved the tree, thus launching the citrus industry.
Sagara, Akin and I walked west on Mission Inn Avenue a couple of blocks. Behind the Loring Building is an alley that once was home to Chinese boarding houses and a laundry, Akin said over noise from construction next door on the Stalder Building site.
This Chinatown, the first, is so little known, “nothing about it has appeared in a newspaper since about 1923,” Akin had told me impishly a few days earlier. “You can have a first-in-a-century mention.” I’ll take it.
Founded circa 1878, this Chinatown was shortlived. In 1882, the small cluster of structures was razed to make way for a “citrus pavilion.”
Sagara, Akin and I crossed Eighth Street and kept walking south. Midway down an alley is essentially where the second Chinatown began, bounded by Orange Street to the east and Ninth
Street to the south.
None of its modest wooden structures remain either, but a low retaining wall of brick may be a physical reminder of that 1880s period, Akin said.
Hostility toward the immigrants was fanned by Riverside Press owner Luther Holt, whose newspaper was headquartered at Eighth and Orange. An 1883 fire at his print shop — which backed up to Chinatown — was put out in part by his Chinese neighbors, assistance for which he offered public thanks.
Two years later, though, Holt and other interests put the pressure on to evict the Chinese from downtown. An ordinance prohibited wooden buildings and landlords prepared to boost rent precipitously.
Six acres were found at Tequesquite and Brockton avenues, a sufficient distance from the business district to satisfy the local gentry. The village relocated there in 1885.
Akin, Sagara and I reconvened by car at the site. Immediately south of Evergreen Cemetery, the remaining 2 acres are fenced, empty but for weeds and a few palm trees. A couple of signs mark it as Chinatown.
It’s owned by the Riverside County Office of Education, whose office is adjacent.
This Chinatown lasted nearly a century, from 1885 until the death of George Wong, its last resident, in 1974. In 1980, the ruins were cleared as a public nuisance.
Sagara and Akin joined a preservationist fight in 2008 to block development of a medical office building on the site, which had been declared a county and city landmark. They won.
“When I learned the site was under threat because of development, I wanted to get involved to save it,” said Sagara, who became so fascinated by historic preservation that she switched careers and now works for the Los Angeles Conservancy.
Some of that history is underground, the remnant of an 1893 fire. Debris that was pushed into pits and covered has artifacts of that period. Some was dug up in the 1980s and given to the Riverside Municipal Museum. The majority is still undisturbed, to the pleasure of activists, who’d prefer it remain that way.
“We’d like to see a Chinatown Memorial Park here,” Sagara said, “that would serve as a way to protect the sensitive archaeological remains and allow the public to learn about the history of Chinese people in Riverside and the region.”
The region? Yes. Other area cities and communities had Chinatowns, including San Bernardino, Redlands, Cucamonga, Upland and Pomona.
The park the committee envisions, which has no funding, would have an interpretive center, gardens, an area for outdoor events and a Chinatown history timeline.
Apparently we need that timeline. The Chinese presence in Riverside goes back more than 150 years and it’s a similar story in other cities. Yet the Asian American and Pacific Islander community is treated like perpetual foreigners on our shores, with incidents of hate on the rise.
Growing up in Riverside, Sagara had no idea her city had any Chinese American history.
“Places associated with our heritage have always played an important role in our community,” Sagara said. “They give people today a sense of continuity and belonging and a connection to earlier generations that were here.”
Remember it, Riverside. It’s Chinatown.