Near the corner of 16th Street and Wazee in downtown Denver, a small concrete block stands as a double ode to what’s no longer there. Until a couple of months ago, the concrete block had supported a historical marker, installed last August in the heart of what once was Denver’s Chinatown.
The Chinatown has been missing from Denver since the late 1960s, when it was razed in the name of urban renewal. The marker has been gone since at least Dec. 4, when its mysterious disappearance was first reported to Colorado Asian Pacific United, the group that helped design, arrange and install it.
“It’s sturdy,” said Joie Ha, executive director of Colorado Asian Pacific United. “It definitely is something that you need to really work to take out.”
The marker was first reported missing by a worker from RiNo Sign Works, the company that fabricated the markers, a police report shows. The worker was doing routine maintenance on all of the historic Chinatown markers when he noticed its absence.
The heart of what used to be Chinatown
The marker, in front of the historic Sugar Building on the 16th Street mall, told the district’s origin story, about the way that Chinese immigrants came for gold and railroad work and ended up running laundries and restaurants.
It started with the gold rush. Between 1840 and 1851, an estimated 25,000 Chinese immigrants moved to California with dreams of striking it rich. When promises of gold didn’t pan out, many immigrants were left thousands of miles from home without jobs or their families.
Then came the railroads. The Central Pacific Railroad, the western leg of the transcontinental railroad, was commissioned in 1862, and it swept the immigrants up with the allure of a steady salary and a road to citizenship.
When the railroad was completed in 1869, the Chinese laborers looked for their next endeavor. Some ended up in Denver. They congregated in the area now known as Lower Downtown, setting up restaurants, saloons, mercantiles, laundries and an infamous row of opium dens.
Denver’s first race riot broke out in the heart of Chinatown on Oct. 31, 1880, when a mob of roughly 3,000 people descended upon the district, beating the Chinese business owners and attempting to hang one in front of his laundry business.
The Chinese population, which had swelled to just under 1,000 in 1890 from four in 1870, began to reverse course. Widespread racism and the Chinese Exclusion Act severed the path to immigration. Business owners never recouped damages from the riot, and the physical evidence of Chinatown began to disappear. Whatever remained of Chinatown by the late 1960s was leveled for Denver’s Skyline Urban Renewal Project.
Reclaiming Chinatown
Out in California you’ll still find small mountain towns erected for the gold rushers and the railroad workers — one in the Sierra foothills is called, quite simply, Chinese Camp. And the Chinatowns in Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles have sustained a growing Chinese population since those times.
But elsewhere in the West, including Colorado, reminders of the Chinese population are mostly relegated to historical markers and strip-mall size squares. Some historians have called the late 1800s Chinese immigrants the “silent spikes,” for the way they were systematically anonymized — newspapers and books written during that time knowingly omitted the workers’ names, and they were rarely featured in photographs.
In Denver, the missing marker is one of three historic markers, conceived of in late 2020 to replace Denver’s subtle and problematic acknowledgment of the former district. Before then, a single bronze plaque mounted on the corner of 20th and Blake provided information about the “Hop Alley/Chinese Riot of 1880.”
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Hop Alley was a derogatory name referencing the opium dens found along the backside of Chinatown, and the “Chinese Riot,” is a misnomer implying that the Chinese population rioted — it was in fact a white mob that descended upon the district.
The old bronze plaque painted the district as a sort of labyrinthine ghetto, with trapdoors and tunnels connecting a network of opium dens. The plaque also, however inadvertently, mirrored the failures of the late 1800s documents by omitting the name of the Chinese man who was killed — Look Young — and named instead only the white residents who “showed remarkable courage in protecting the Chinese.”
In late 2020, a number of organizations, including the Denver Asian American Pacific Islander Commission and Colorado Asian Pacific United, set out to reenvision the way Chinatown was represented. Their ideas ranged from the three informative markers to an entire revitalization of the historic alleyway.
“Those are some of the first things that we really wanted to do,” Ha said. “To replace the existing marker that was problematic with these historical markers that were beautiful, that were in visible locations, that were large and hard to ignore. Markers that told a more thorough story from a Chinese perspective.” The group also commissioned a mural that was installed on Denver’s Fire Station 4.
How to help
Colorado Asian Pacific United started a GoFundMe page earlier this week to raise funds for a replacement marker. So far, Denver police have not provided any updates, Ha said Thursday.
“We want to say that it was an accident,” she said. “There’s always a possibility it could have been done with malicious intent, though. Because it is so difficult to actually take out. It is possible that a large truck might have run into it and torn it off of its base, but then our question is then: Why can’t we find the marker anywhere?”