12 LA Chinatown

LA’s Chinatown is a short walk from the Union Station, the main railway station of Los Angeles. But the history of LA’s Chinatown begins precisely there, at the Union Station. Today, the area referred to as “Chinatown” is in fact New Chinatown. The Old Chinatown, the first area where Chinese immigrants settled from around 1850s into the first decades of the 20th century, was located where the Union Station now is. The initial settlement was displaced in the 1930s, after several litigations over land ownership and the approval of the construction of a new railway station. Through a mixture of racism and economic factors, Chinatown, which stretched from Almeda Street to the Plaza, were demolished to make space for the station. The local residents were moved a few miles north, in the current Chinatown in the LA area.