The Neighborhood Buried Under Los Angeles Union Station: Old Chinatown

Los Angeles Union Station presents itself as a monument to arrival. Its waiting room, tiled courtyards, and long platforms have welcomed generations of travelers since 1939.

Fourteen feet below parts of the terminal lies an older street level. It belonged to Old Chinatown, a neighborhood of roughly fifteen streets and alleys where thousands of Chinese residents built homes, businesses, temples, associations, and a life in a city that often denied them the rights of citizenship.

Los Angeles did not simply choose a convenient rail site. It selected a community whose immigrant residents had been made politically vulnerable by exclusion laws and insecure ownership. The station unified the city's railroads by dividing and displacing the neighborhood beneath it.

A Community Beside the Plaza

Chinese immigrants began settling in Los Angeles in the 1850s and 1860s. The first concentration formed near Calle de los Negros, an alley east of the old Plaza. Workers came through the western mining economy and the railroads, then established laundries, restaurants, produce businesses, shops, and lodging houses.

On October 24, 1871, a mob attacked the Chinese community after a gunfight between rival groups. At least eighteen Chinese men were murdered in one of the largest mass killings in Los Angeles history. Eight defendants were convicted, but every conviction was later overturned.

The community rebuilt. By the turn of the century, Chinatown stretched east from the Plaza across Alameda Street. At its height, more than 3,000 people lived among approximately 200 buildings on fifteen streets and alleys.

Exclusion Made Residents Into Tenants

Federal and state law narrowed almost every route to security. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 restricted immigration and prevented most Chinese immigrants from becoming naturalized citizens. California's alien land laws later restricted property ownership by immigrants deemed ineligible for citizenship.

Many Chinatown residents therefore leased buildings and land rather than owning them. The arrangement made the neighborhood vulnerable when landowners, railroads, and the city decided the property had a more valuable use.

That vulnerability did not prevent a complex community from forming. Family and district associations offered financial help, mediated disputes, organized festivals, and maintained connections across the Pacific. Temples, an opera theater, herbalists, newspapers, restaurants, groceries, and workshops made Chinatown a center of Chinese life in Southern California.

A Terminal Los Angeles Had Rejected

Three major railroads served Los Angeles from separate terminals. City planners argued that a single union passenger terminal would reduce dangerous street crossings and organize the growing rail network.

The location was fiercely debated. Voters rejected an earlier proposal for an elevated rail system, while railroad companies resisted consolidation. When competing propositions finally reached the ballot, the measure tied to the union terminal passed by only 51.1 percent to 48.9 percent.

The Plaza itself was considered for demolition. Preservation campaigns helped redirect the terminal across Alameda Street, onto Old Chinatown. Saving one historic landscape shifted the destruction onto another whose residents had less political leverage.

Condemnation and Clearance

Uncertainty had already shadowed Chinatown since 1913, when litigation involving the Apablasa family, the city, and contested street ownership threatened a large part of the district. Investment declined as landlords and tenants waited to learn whether the neighborhood would survive.

On May 19, 1931, a California Supreme Court decision cleared the way for condemnation and construction of the Los Angeles Union Passenger Terminal. Demolition proceeded in stages. Businesses closed or relocated, residents searched for housing, and familiar streets disappeared behind fences and excavation.

The burden fell on people who often held leases, inventories, and community ties rather than land titles. Compensation for a condemned property owner could not rebuild a tenant's business or preserve the customer network around it.

About 2,000 residents and dozens of businesses were displaced from the portion cleared for Union Station. Remaining fragments of Old Chinatown survived briefly near the Plaza before later road projects and demolition removed most of what was left.

Two Chinatowns Open

Displaced residents did not move together to a ready-made replacement. Two rival projects emerged.

China City, created by Christine Sterling, opened in June 1938 as a tourist attraction built around a stylized Chinese village. Eighteen days later, New Chinatown opened farther north. Organized and financed by Chinese American community leaders, it became the first such development in the country owned by Chinese residents themselves.

New Chinatown's central plaza, shops, restaurants, and community institutions carried part of the old neighborhood forward. China City suffered fires and closed in 1948. The two developments showed different answers to displacement: one packaged Chinese identity for visitors; the other created a new base for a community denied the power to preserve its old one.

The Station Opens

Union Station opened in May 1939 with a three-day celebration attended by an estimated half million people. The $11 million terminal was praised as the last great American railway station.

Its architecture fused Spanish Colonial Revival, Mission Revival, Streamline Moderne, and Art Deco influences. The design evoked an idealized California past while the construction site buried a real immigrant neighborhood.

During the Second World War, the station operated around the clock as troop trains carried tens of thousands of service members through Los Angeles. Its civic importance is undeniable. So is the cost of placing it where the city did.

What Remains Under the Platforms

The Garnier Building near the Plaza, now part of the Chinese American Museum, is one of the most important surviving structures associated with Old Chinatown. Archaeological excavations around Union Station have recovered ceramics, bottles, tools, household objects, and traces of the streets below the fill.

An exhibition inside the station, Where You Stand: Chinatown 1880 to 1939, returns photographs and oral histories to the site. It asks travelers to see the waiting room not as the beginning of the location's history, but as one layer built over another.

Old Chinatown was not an obstacle that happened to stand in the terminal's path. Laws and political choices made its residents easier to displace, then made their displacement appear inevitable.

Every train entering Union Station crosses a neighborhood Los Angeles removed from the surface but never completely erased.