About 33 million Americans can trace their roots to Ireland, the small island off the western coast of Europe, which has a population of just 4. The Irish, like many immigrant groups arriving in America, were fleeing hardships at home, only to endure further troubles Yet people flocked there anyway, drawn by the Mediterranean climate, ample employment opportunities and Live TV. This Day In History. History Vault. Poverty and Prejudice: The Chinese Struggle for Acceptance As is the case with most immigrants, life in their new home was challenging for the hundreds of thousands of new Americans arriving from Asia, even as San Francisco became a hub of Chinese culture in the United States.
The Chinese Exclusion Act Unfortunately, anti-immigration fervor won out—at least for a time. Recommended for you. How the Troubles Began in Northern Ireland. Francisco Pizarro. San Francisco Earthquake of On April 18, , an earthquake and subsequent fires devastated San Francisco, California, leaving more than 3, people dead and destroying more than 28, buildings.
San Francisco Earthquake of On October 17, , a magnitude 6. Francisco Pizarro Francisco Pizarro was an explorer, soldier and conquistador best known for conquering the Incas and executing their leader, Atahuapla. Immigration Before The United States experienced major waves of immigration during the colonial era, the first part of the 19th century and from the s to Ellis Island Ellis Island is a historical site that opened in as an immigration station, a purpose it served for more than 60 years until it closed in In the beginning, the Chinese settled in different parts of the city depending on their employment.
As anti-Chinese feelings rose during the s and 60s, the Chinese associations and businesses in other areas of San Francisco were slowly forced to move into Chinatown. In the 19th century, most buildings were multi-use and made of brick with no ornament or decoration except for the windows sills. There was no formal zoning followed in the area. Because of the lack of space, each multi-storied building had various uses juxtaposed within it.
The storefronts of food and produce were opened out into the street so that the vendors could display their goods on hooks and counters. It was also common for the owner or employee of a store to live in an apartment in the same building.
The interiors of the slightly bigger restaurants were decorated with carved panels and wooden screens with geometric and abstract patterns imported from Guangdong.
The Chinese Opera became a wildly popular means of entertainment in San Francisco. The Shanghai Theatre and the Chinese Theater were popular opera houses where companies would come for a season of performances or more.
Three other major means of entertainment in the almost completely male Chinese community were gambling, prostitution, and opium smoking. During the early s, several Chinese gambling houses and brothels appeared in clusters around Sacramento Street and Bartlett Alley.
Opium establishments would be in the dark and dingy basements of these buildings. Initially, there were very few women and families, so the most common form of residence was the residential hotel. A lot of the Chinese lived in houses that were prefabricated structures imported from Hong Kong during immigration.
These were about 28 sq ft and 12ft high and made from a wooden frame composed of round timbers with a covering put over it. There was only one open space in Chinatown — Portsmouth Square. Commonly called Fah Yuen Gwok by the Chinese, it served as their community park.
After the Earthquake and Fire, the Chinese got the opportunity to redesign their space to better represent their culture and social structure. They created an environment filled with monuments for prominent associations, commercial buildings, and Christian institutions. The new buildings had to conform to the existing roughly rectangular Chinatown plots with only one edge exposed to a street or alley.
Chinese institutional buildings usually had axially symmetrical facades with a centrally placed entry gate opening onto a courtyard or the main hall. Ross Alley was known as the Street of the Gamblers.
These establishments had reinforced doors, often a series of them, to slow down the police, giving them time to hide the evidence.
Also, there were tunnels under Chinatown connecting the buildings which were used to foil police raids the tunnels vanished with the buildings in the great fire in Ross Alley was also frequently the scene of tong warfare, and had its share of opium dens as well. The criminal tongs imported young girls from China and sold them to brothel owners in slave auctions held in St. Louis Alley ; most of these girls were between 10 and 16 years old, and they had a life expectancy of about five years.
The girls were acquired through various means. Some were sold by their own families, some were lured with promises of work, and some were kidnapped. Much of the prostitution in Chinatown occurred in the alleys. Almost every building in Bartlett Alley was a brothel; some of the worst ones were on that passageway.
A map of the old Chinatown survived, showing the street and alley layout in , as well as the location of the buildings associated with vice. Click to enlarge. The power of the tongs and the indifference of the other residents of the city left no one to fight for the protection of the young girls sold into slavery.
The Chinese Benevolent Association tried to curtail prostitution but didn't make much headway. Donaldina Cameron took on the task of helping these girls escape and ran a Presbyterian mission in Chinatown to care for the rescued girls. She also led raids on brothels herself and was called Fahn Quai, or White Devil, by her adversaries. She lived to be 98 in spite of death threats from the tongs and dynamite being left at her front door!
Most of the brothel owners were men, but two women achieved notoriety as madams of Chinatown brothels. One of them is buried in the cemetery at the Mission Dolores. A Chinese woman named Ah Toy was brought to San Francisco as a slave in to work in a brothel; she was reported to be tall and beautiful, and she became famous. In her mid 30's, she was able to buy her freedom and set up her own brothel in a Chinatown alley, Waverly Place. She was involved in the slave trade herself, purchasing young girls at the slave auctions held in a basement on St.
Louis Alley. She retired in , supposedly married a wealthy Chinese merchant in San Jose, and lived to be She arrived in San Francisco with her riverboat gambler husband, Charles Cora. They had made a fair amount of money in the mining camps, and used that to start a brothel in Chinatown, also in Waverly Place. Belle Cora's brothel catered to San Francisco's "high society" of the time; luxurious, with lots of red velvet and higher priced ladies. Her husband met with a sorry end.
He shot a U. Marshall, Richardson, following a tiff at the theater when Mrs. Richardson objected to the presence of Belle Cora. Charged with murder, his trial ended with a hung jury, but Mr.
Cora was hanged in in Portsmouth Square in Chinatown by vigilantes fed up with the rampant crime in San Francisco. The word "vigilante" first came into being in San Francisco in , as a result of the formation of the Committee of Vigilance dedicated to suppressing the extreme lawlessness and violence that was occurring in the streets of the city during the Gold Rush.
Charles Cora had company on the gallows. A city supervisor, James Casey, who had assassinated a newspaper editor for exposing his corruption, was hanged next to Cora. At one point during his exile, he lived secretly at 36 Spofford Street, raising support for the revolution. Mary's Square in Chinatown.
The Chinatown Gate displays a quote of his written in Chinese : "All under heaven is for the good of the people". The earthquake in San Francisco set off a fire that consumed most of the older part of the city, including all of Chinatown. Mary's Church was the only surviving structure. It's generally believed that the church inscription under the clock, "Son Observe the Time and Fly From Evil" , was aimed at the men who might be considering a visit to one of the brothels in the area!
There were plans to move Chinatown to another area of the city, but residents quickly rebuilt in the same location to head off those plans. While the earliest Chinatowns comprised modest wooden and brick buildings, the Asian motifs—pagodas, tiled roofs, bamboo-shaped fonts, and dragon imagery—we see today came about as a way to promote tourism.
When the original San Francisco Chinatown was destroyed by the earthquake and the devastating fire that followed, a group of wealthy Chinese merchants saw an opportunity to combat anti-Chinese sentiment by giving their neighborhood a flashy makeover. The Chinese merchants hired Scottish-American architect T. Paterson Ross and engineer A. Burgren to design a new Chinatown, incorporating religious iconography and architectural elements of the 10thth century Song dynasty.
The new neighborhood was a fantasy vision of China, a country neither man had ever visited. Other Chinatowns followed suit, adopting similar aesthetics. Prolific L. But some Chinatowns took a different tack.
Visitors dined at chop suey restaurants, peeked into opium dens, and maybe witnessed a tong Chinese secret society gang fight in the alley. In , the Hart-Celler Act removed quotas based on national origins, which led to an explosion of newcomers from China , Taiwan , and Southeast Asian countries like Vietnam and Cambodia. Chinatowns, once again, became the first stop for many immigrants.
There were only a couple of authentic Chinese restaurants back then, so everyone came here. It was really a thriving time. Washington D. Civil unrest and urban decay, along with the search for more housing and job opportunities, prompted immigrants to move away from Chinatowns in D.
But before the pandemic, downtown living in many cities had gained popularity and commercial developers had started paying attention to once-neglected Chinatown real estate. Luxury apartments and trendy restaurants took over rent-controlled buildings and mom-and-pop stores. As a result, gentrified Chinatowns in cities like D.
Enter President Donald Trump and the coronavirus pandemic. California has tallied at least hate crimes against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders since the pandemic began.
0コメント