Fire threatens historic town Chinese laborers built in the California Delta

National Park Service

Locke's Main Street is only three blocks long.

AN IMPORTANT piece of Asian/American history almost went up in flames last weekend. One of the old wooden buildings in the town of Locke, California, the only remaining town built by the Chinese workers, caught fire and threaten the entire town of old, wood-frame structures built by the Chinese laborers who worked on the transcontinental railroads and transformed the California delta into one of the richest farmlands in the country.

Fire is one of the greatest threats to the century-old buildings that line the main street of Locke, which was settled and largely built by Chinese laborers in the first half of the 20th century.

"We all thought the whole town was going down, the way it was burning," said Judie Wall, owner of Al's Place bar and restaurant on Main Street. 

"We had to evacuate Al's," a few doors down, she told the Sacramento Bee.

The fire department responded immediately to the 2nd storey fire that started around 4:15 Sunday in an apartment above a storefront. Multiple fire departments – including from the surrounding communities of Walnut Grove, Clarksburg and Elk Grove quickly dispatched assistance.

All of Locke's wooden buildings are equipped with fire sprinklers but for some reason, the sprinklers didn't automatically turned on. Fortunately, the fire did not spread to the adjoining buildings. The investigation continues as to the cause of the fire.

National Park Service

The apartment that caught fire is two doors down from Al's (better known as Al The Wop's), for many years the only non-Chinese business in Locke. Note the wooden sidewalks.

When the Transcontinental Railroad was completed in 1869, thousands of Chinese laborers, primarily from Guangdong Province, were hired to work on an extensive levee project in California's Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. Their knowledge of how to develop farmland in river valleys, learned from farming the Pearl River Delta region in southern China, was used to construct a large network of earthen levees that eventually turned 500,000 acres of swamp into some of California's most valuable farm land.

There used to be a half-dozen such Chinese built towns in the Delta. Locke is the last and has been designated as a National Historical Landmark.

When Walnut Grove's Chinatown burned down, the Chinese immigrants persuaded rancher George Locke to lease them land to build their town because California law at the time prohibited Chinese immigrants from owning land. By the time Locke was founded in 1915, the levees had been completed and the workers turned to agriculture

In the 1940's restaurants, bakeries, herb shops, fish markets, gambling halls, boarding houses, brothels, grocery stores, a school, clothing stores, and the Star Theatre lined the bustling streets of Locke. At its peak 600 residents, and as many as 1500 people occupied the town of Locke.

By 1920, Locke was a popular location for Prohibition-era speakeasies and was providing recreational facilities to both the agricultural workforce and non-Asians from nearby cities.

On August 2, 1970, Locke was added to the registry of national historical places, by the Sacramento County Historical Society, because of its unique status as the only town in the United States built exclusively by the Chinese for the Chinese.

Today, there are only about ten Chinese still living in the town of 70 to 80 people. Most of the young people have left for better jobs and the town is maintained by the County of Sacramento working with the California State Historic Preservation Office, The Locke Foundation and Locke residents.

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For more news about Asian/Americans & Pacific Islanders, read AsAm News.

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/news/state/california/fires/article87543487.html#storylink=cpy

CSPAN takes a look at Oakland's Chinatown

Writer/historian Bill Wong talks about growing up in Oakland's Chinatown.

WILLIAM GEE WONG, author of Yellow Journalist: Dispatches from Asian America, talked to C-SPAN about the history of Oakland’s Chinatown neighborhood and his experience as a Chinese/American growing up in the area.

C-SPAN’s Local Content Vehicles (LCVs) made a stop in their “2015 LCV Cities Tour” in Oakland, California, from October 31-November 5 to feature the history and literary life of the community that sits across the Bay from from the better-known San Francisco.

Working with the Comcast Cable local affiliate, the C-SPAN crew visited literary and historic sites where local historians, authors, and civic leaders were interviewed. The history segments air on American History TV on C-SPAN3 and the literary events/non-fiction author segments air on Book TV on C-SPAN2.

As an assistant managing editor of the Oakland Tribune owned by the legendary Robert Maynard, "Bill" Wong played an important role in my growth as a journalist. 

It was 1982, the Philippines had deposed dictator Ferdinand Marcos and The Philippine News, where I was managing editor, had just won an award for Community Journalism  from Media Alliance. Bill was one of the award judges. 

At the time, transitioning from ethnic community newspapers to mainstream media was rare. There was always that haughty attitude that the ethnic newspaper reporters were not "real" journalists. Nevertheless, Bill knew of my work with the Philippines News, took a chance and hired me as a copy editor even though I lacked the traditional training and background of mainstream journalists.

The Maynard-owned Trib (at the time, the only big-city newspaper owned by a minority) had gained a reputation for good journalism and attracted some of the best writing and editing talent in the country. It won a Pulitzer for its photo coverage of the Loma Prieto earthquake and was a finalist for the Pulitzer for its coverage of the East Bay hills firestorm. 

However, the business side of the newspaper business resulted in some poor decisions, most notable of which was to cut suburban coverage. Maynard eventually was forced to sell The Trib to the California-based McClatchey group of newspapers. That led to a topsy-turvy few years when McClatchey sold to Dean Singleton who formed the Alameda News Group.

Neither Bill or I felt comfortable with the Singleton management team and - at different times -  we eventually left the paper. Bill to write his book on Chinatown's history and I continued my career at the nearby Contra Costa Times.

Eventually, I lost touch with Bill, but I heard he finished his book. I consider him a mentor and owe him a debt for thinking out of the box to hire an untraditional journalist.

Watch Bill Wong's segment here.