Written By: Deborah Starr Seibel
Here's a message the Los Angeles Convention and Visitor's Bureau never wanted to read in a fortune cookie: Chinatown is in trouble.
Talk to its residents, and it quickly becomes apparent that Chinatown's problems run much deeper than the recent economic downturn, which has depressed all of California tourism. This colorful but tattered historic neighborhood, established in 1938, is suffering from a lack of affordable single family housing, an unwillingness on the part of the younger generation to take over Chinese storefronts and restaurants, and a profound dissatisfaction with the Los Angeles public schools.
"Ultimately, what is important to the Chinese culture is education," says George Yu, executive director of the Chinatown Business Improvement District. "Are these people supposed to send their middle school children to a school that I would never send my kids to? Are they supposed to spend two hours every day on a bus? The average kid in Chinatown is leaving for school in the dark, and coming home in the dark. That's how I grew up in Taiwan. That's not a way to live the United States."
That widespread attitude has resulted in a 30-year-long exodus of Chinese residents from Chinatown to the San Gabriel Valley seven miles east, with a heavy concentration in Monterey Park. What remains is an aging population of Chinese business owners who don't expect to leave their shops to their children. "The young people have got to go somewhere else to make a living," says Teruko Fong, an elderly Japanese saleswoman who works at the old-world F. See On Company, a musty, crammed 59-year-old corner shop on Chung King Road specializing in oriental arts, antiques and interior design. "The children cannot take over because they can't make it."
This is a surprising statement, given the fact that Fong's shop is across the way from a number of modern art galleries that have moved into the vacant storefronts. The influx started over ten years ago, in 1998, with the arrival of Steve Hanson's China Art Objects Galleries. At the time, Chinatown was perceived as a bargain in the midst of wildly escalating real estate prices in Santa Monica and Culver City, the two more established gallery enclaves. "You had cheap rent," says the Chinatown Business Improvement District's Yu, who cited a first floor storefront and basement renting in 1998 for well under $1000 a month. (The same space today would go for around $2000.) "You had a very safe neighborhood. And you had a pedestrian-oriented community, which is attractive for business."
Unfortunately, most of the people doing the walking were residents, not shoppers or tourists. "One of the shop owners here flatly told me not to come," says Hanson, indicting an old Chinese grocery store across the road, whose owner is about to retire. "He said there wasn't enough foot traffic."
Eleven years later, there still isn't. On a recent Friday afternoon, when you might expect the Happy Hour crowd to be heading for a nice dinner of lemongrass soup and Chinese noodles, there are no more than a handful of pedestrians in the Central Plaza on Gin Ling Way, home to such businesses as the Via Café, Wonder Bakery and Hop Louie. Hanson says his gallery isn't tourist dependent, which is the only reason he's survived.
Still, it was the area's relative affordability that was attractive to gallery owner Robert Apodaca. Four years ago, young artist Apodaca bought the building that he has turned into the Fifth Floor Gallery. The gallery is located across the alley from Teruko Fong's shop on Chung King Road. "This was kind of a unique area in terms of having a live-and-work situation," says Apodaca, who has renovated all three floors of his 2400-square-foot space. The first two floors are gallery showrooms. The third floor, complete with outdoor courtyard, is his 700 square-foot apartment. "The previous owners were Chinese and their children really didn't have any interest in maintaining a building in Chinatown," says Apodaca. "So they were happy to pass it on to someone else who was interested, and who would take good care of the building."
It's been a year and a half since Apodaca opened his gallery, and he has survived, although a number of other galleries have recently gone under. The total number of galleries has remained relatively steady over the past eleven years, falling somewhere between twenty and thirty, but there has been little growth. According to Yu, these new businesses have brought media attention to the area, with its free advertising, but they have yet to have a strong economic impact on the neighborhood. "People still don't think of Chinatown as a place to look at art," he says.
Were the locals suspicious of these predominantly white, avant-garde artists, or did they welcome having new businesses to fill the empty storefronts? "I definitely did feel welcome," says Apodaca. "I never sensed any animosity. But I did sense a little bit of bewilderment about what we were doing down here, which was different from what they were used to."
One gallery, in fact, was so different that it created a bit of a neighborhood uproar. The Peres Projects gallery, which shuttered its doors in December of 2008, once displayed an eleven-by-seventeen-inch photograph of a naked man in its storefront window. "This was a photograph of a nude male, full frontal nudity, standing there with an erection," says Yu. "And residents had to walk by the gallery to access their residences. That photo could have been in Chinatown or South Pasadena, and even more people would have been up in arms. It's not a matter of the Chinese being particularly sensitive."
Yu spoke quietly to the gallery owner, who moved the photograph to the inside of the shop. "The Chinese in general adopt a live and let live attitude," he says. "We don't protest. We don't picket. But certain things would be bothersome to any community."
Apodaca hasn't had any protests over his fine art and furniture exhibits. His biggest problems have been the lack of tourism and the economy, which he describes as "a double whammy" for his new business. But he says he's willing to give it time to develop. His gallery's presence on the internet has also helped him stay afloat. But his Chinese neighbors, for the most part, have not become clients. The best thing he can say is that they feel comfortable enough to come into his shop and look around, and he admires the way they help him to be environmentally responsible. "There's a sort of symbiotic relationship in that when we have our openings - and we have bottles of beer and wine - they'll come in and take them and recycle them."
Yu continues to try to put a good face on Chinatown's struggle. "It's hard to beat Chinatown," he says, "because of how safe it is, how walkable is it, how much of a real community it is, with real restaurants, business and services."
And if its Chinese residents continue to flee? "Somebody else will purchase the shops and life will go on," he says, sounding resigned. "These are market forces at work."
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