Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Fall 2007 - (Page 56)

any for a business-minded immigrant group to get its start — just as long as the “soil” was “watered.” The “water” that helped grow Chinatown was the steady stream of Chinese who visited the mission and patronized the shops and institutions once Chinatown was established. Additionally, African-Americans, prohibited by Jim Crow laws from visiting stores on Canal Street and elsewhere, provided an important customer base for Chinese shops and restaurants. In this sense, Chinatown shared the same commercial interface along South Rampart Street, between the predominantly white front-of-town and the mostly black back-of-town, that Jewish tailors and merchants occupied. An enclave like Chinatown could have formed anywhere within circa-1900 New Orleans’ “immigrant belt,” that mediumdensity, medium-priced, mixed commercial/residential zone that lay between the city’s high-density commercial core and its leafy residential perimeter. This fascinating zone stretched loosely from the lower French Quarter and the Faubourg Marigny, through the Faubourg Tremé, through the Chinatown/back-of-town area, to Dryades Street, and around to the uptown-riverfront area known loosely as the Irish Channel. Relocation, structural demolition, and socio-economic change put an end to New Orleans' Chinatown. The Decline of Chinatown One Times-Picayune journalist noticed in 1920 a cultural assimilation among the Chinese that, as it turned out, foretold Chinatown’s decline. “The Chinatown of New Orleans is passing,” he noted. “The honored ancestors … in the Flowery Land must stir in their sleep if they know how their descendents … have taken up the language and customs and methods of their adopted country within the last few years.” Chinese merchants acquired telephones, cash registers, and account ledgers to replace their abacuses. Families learned English at the Chinese Mission, and huddled around English textbooks while tending their Tulane Avenue shops. Opium and games of chance, once widespread, became as scarce in the district’s shops as chopsticks in the enclave’s restaurants. In 1920, “the only atmosphere left [was] the exotic scent of the East that is as inseparable to the Orient life as garlic to the Latin races.” Exclusionary immigration laws on the books since 1882 had greatly restricted the flow of new immigrants directly from China, rendering the Chinese-American population of New Orleans decreasingly Chinese and increasingly American. Nevertheless, even as the number of Chinese laundries halved throughout the city from 1898 to 1921 (perhaps due to market saturation), Chinatown remained integral. In 1926, the Presbytery of New Orleans sold the 215 South Liberty property and moved the Chinese Mission to 223 South Roman Street, depriving Chinatown of an important institution. At the same time, the Chinese-American community became increasingly economically and geographically mobile and less dependent on Chinatown to fulfill retail and social needs. Then, in 1937, the downtown side of 1100 Tulane heart of Chinatown was slated for demolition. Being renters rather than owners, the merchants were forced to relocate. “Chinatown is moving lock, stock, and herb barrel from Tulane avenue to the 500 and 600 blocks of Bourbon street,” announced the Times-Picayune. On September 20, 1937, “Chinese merchants…started moving their pungent bales and barrels of stock, their Chinese clothes, nuts and herbs, dried fruit, firecrackers and noodles…their chestnuts and mushrooms and bamboo shoots from their old headquarters on Tulane avenue between South Rampart street and Elk Place, because the shuttered stores are to be razed soon to make way for a parking lot.” A 56 LOUISIANA ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES\Fall 2007

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Fall 2007

Contents Friends & Letters Editor’s Column Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities Big Charity: A History of New Orleans’ Public Hospital Historic New Orleans Collection Making Groceries: A History of New Orleans Markets New Orleans’ Faubourg Tremé: Rooted in Tradition Jazz Notes Louisiana Association of Museums Chinatown New Orleans Louisiana Foodways A Question of Secession Louisiana Architecture Louisiana State Museum The Unnatural History of Cypress Parish Terra Incognita Bookstand Sound Advice Forum

Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Fall 2007

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