What's left of San Diego's Chinatown

Amy Chu's best stories in the Reader

Author

By Amy Chu

Publish Date

April 23, 2023

Joe Quin will tell you today that he lives in Chinatown, and it’s true, you can see all that remains of Chinatown from his house. (Craig Carlson)

The Climb to Gold Mountain: San Diego's Chinatown

Joe Quin has a wholesale produce business at 431 Third Avenue, between Island Avenue and J Street. He and his family live above the lugs of vegetables and wooden produce crates of the business, as the Chinese have traditionally done. If you stand by the railroad tracks at the bottom of Third Avenue and look north, you will see his big, pale green house. ( April 8, 1982)

Robert Carlon: “Other races can consume a shot of alcohol and get rid of it in forty to forty-five minutes. It takes the Indian two to three hours.” (Robert Burroughs)

The slow massacre

"I can remember drinking at the age of ten, because it was there. I started drinking at home. My mother and my stepdad drank every day, although they were very hard workers. I would wait until they went to work. I knew where they hid their wine." (June 10, 1982)

"People can order anything that’s on the menu, anytime. One man ordered cherry pie with brown gravy on it." (Craig Carlson)

In conversation with a Rudford's girl

I leave home before four, especially if I’m working up front. The first thing I do is go to the iceboxes and see what I have to bring up from the back. That is very important. I do the trays of tartar sauce and get out all the butters. (July 29, 1982)

Green Tiger Press – a true tale of the publishing business

Harold Darling had operated a private film club, the Classic Cinema Guild, and a short-lived theater on University Avenue, the Shadow Box Theater, and a bookstore known as the Sign of the Sun, first in Hillcrest and then on College Avenue. When Darling opened the Unicorn Theater in December of 1964, Harold Leigh came to the first show, and never left. (Oct. 28, 1982)

Mission Valley. The centers have leapfrogged, too, with their sales figures: first it was Fashion Valley, then Mission Valley, then Fashion Valley ahead again. (Craig Carlson)

A complete survey of San Diego shopping malls

Today there isn’t much about South Bay Plaza to distinguish it from the commercial buildings around it: just two parallel lines of stores separated by an unpretentious pedestrian mall. It was the biggest shopping center in San Diego when it opened in two phases, in 1955 and 1956, on what had been a cabbage field at Plaza Boulevard and Highland Avenue in National City. (Dec. 16, 1982)

Inside the long, narrow room of the Santa Clara Recreation Center that has served as temporary home to the San Diego Rowing Club since 1979, Coggeshall moves like a giant wading bird. (David Covey)

Can you spot the millionaire in this picture?

A.W. Coggeshall came here when the city was still young, just forty-two years after Alonzo E. Horton founded New San Diego. That was in 1909, the same year that Horton died. Like Horton, Coggeshall as a young man clerked in a grocery store and was an outstanding athlete; like Horton, as soon as he could he started buying land, in what by then was downtown San Diego, and made money doing so. (March 17, 1983)

The Enthroned Christ: Some Russian Orthodox believers used a fingernail to carefully scrape off a flake of paint from the hand, took it home, and brewed it into a cup of tea. (David Covey)

How they restore great paintings in Balboa Park

A recent Tuesday morning in Balboa Park had brought a wooden angel weakened by insect tunneling, a fragmented jade sculpture, and a portrait of the owner’s grandmother that was mildewed and improperly framed. (April 26, 1979)

Agility at Tahquitz. A lot of climbers in Southern California could have been surfers, and in a way they do surf the rocks.

I learn courage on the south face of Tahquitz Rock

Harlan peels a banana in the reserved, even reticent way he addresses all things. He chews it thoughtfully and thoroughly, and folds the peel into a plastic bag. As he eats, he speaks in a calm and even voice, and he talks about what he loves most in the world. It is rock climbing. (Jan. 31, 1980)

726 Fifth Avenue, c. 1886. “It is principally a negative collection, not a print collection.” (J. A. Sherriff)

The archive

It was mostly dirt. A dirt road, a bunch of one-story houses and a few two-story ones, a scattering of low wooden fences, and a lot of dirt front yards and dirt back yards. Around it some trees, the tallest of them barely higher than the rooftops, some low scrub, and more dirt. This was Old Town in 1867 when Alonzo E. Horton arrived and said, “I would not give you five dollars for a deed to the whole of it. ” (Nov. 13, 1980)

Toria Hiscock: "This is the one thing I’m really devoted to." (David Covey)

Those who would dance

Waiting: sitting, standing, stretching, eating an orange, talking quietly or with animation, trying not to be nervous. At least some of them had not been able to sleep the night before. It’s a familiar locker-room scene but the teen-agers in it are not athletes. (April 23, 1981)

"My mammy bought me a guitar for $3.75 — to her sorrow.” (Zeke Larsen)

Elizabeth Cotten, adopted by the Seeger family, then discovered

“I was here about a year ago, I think they told me last night. It's kind of hard to remember. . . places I go to and how long it’s been, because I don’t think about it. And I didn’t know this is where I was coming until I got here." (July 2, 1981)

Amy Chu's mother. She still tells me to be careful if she knows I’m driving by myself to Los Angeles, and to chant to Buddha all the way there. (Lee Staicer)

My 75-year-old mother lives, works in streets of New York

I go to New York to see my mother. She has lived in New York City for thirty-eight years and been to Brooklyn only once — in 1972. Most of those years she has worked in an old-age home where almost all the residents have been younger than she is now. (Dec. 10, 1981)

Amy Chu served as calendar editor and wrote feature stories for the Reader in the late 1970s and early 1980s.