Chinese American Museum
Downtown Los Angeles
September 3, 2015
Meredith saw the Chinese American Museum with her niece and our youngest daughter, as part of their tour of the Pueblo area. (See the post immediately below.) The Chinese American Museum is open from 10 a.m to 3 p.m. daily except for Mondays, and admission is free. It is located in the historic Garnier Building, which dates from 1890 and is the last surviving building from Los Angeles’ original Chinatown. (We learned that the original Chinatown was largely demolished to make room for Union Station, and a new Chinatown grew up nearby.)
The museum makes good use of its small space. Our group started with the timeline display in the first room, with explanatory text and photos and representative artifacts. That timeline takes the visitor through a century and a half of Chinese immigration to the United States, chronicling both the milestones that immigrants attained and the hurdles they faced, such as the exclusionary legislation which drastically limited the numbers who could come to the U.S. The nadir of their experience may have been the Chinese Massacre of 1871, when a mob lynched 17 Chinese men and boys in old Chinatown, perhaps with the complicity of the police and leading Angelenos.
We went on into a room set up to look like typical 19th century stores one might have found in Chinatown, with a general store counter and shelves on the left side and an herbal medicine counter, shelves, and jars on the right side. Two smaller rooms with sample artifacts completed the museum displays.
This museum participates in the Passport 2 History program, as do the Firehouse Museum (immediately below) and the Avila Abode (see the next post), both at the Pueblo also.