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Where EAST meets the Northwest
UNCOVERING A CHINATOWN’S PAST. Michael Gutierrez, left, Julia Monevilay, center, and Kathy Omachi walk through tunnels in the Chinatown of Fresno, California. The brick-walled passages were once home to people and activities that couldn’t be mentioned aboveground. Now, a group of archeologists is using ground- penetrating radar to find evidence of the secret passages. (AP Photo/Gary Kazanjian)
From The Asian Reporter, V17, #43 (October 23, 2007), page 8.
Archaeologists probe secret tunnels beneath Fresno’s Chinatown
By Juliana Barbassa
Associated Press Writer
FRESNO, California (AP) — Tunnels run beneath Fresno’s Chinatown: brick-walled passages that were once home to people and activities that couldn’t be mentioned aboveground.
Rick Lew knows, because he walked the passages as a child, entering through a trapdoor in his grandfather’s liquor store.
"There was a nightlife you couldn’t see from the streets," he said.
Now, a group of archaeologists is using ground-penetrating radar to find evidence of the secret passages, which are believed to branch out from long-abandoned basements littered with cobwebs and filth.
The project, funded by the city and headed by a group working to preserve Chinatown, will take data gathered via radar and compare the findings to the memories of those who recall the neighborhood’s heyday, said Kathy Omachi, vice president of Chinatown Revitalization. That will help archaeologists decide where to dig trenches and look for the passages, researchers said.
The approximately six blocks just west of the railroad tracks that make up the historic Chinatown were Fresno’s birthplace, said Karana Hattersley-Drayton, the city’s historic preservation officer. Unlike the better-known Chinese enclaves of San Francisco and New York, there’s little left of it today — at least on the surface.
But fire insurance maps from the 1880s show a densely populated area, a stark contrast from the wide-open ranch and farm country all around.
It was home to the Chinese laborers who laid Fresno’s foundations, and to successive layers of immigrants — Japanese, Armenians, Mexicans, Portuguese, Basques, and others — who were kept separate from the growing white population by the iron boundary of the train tracks.
The area long housed family-run stores, temples, churches, and Chinese and Japanese schools. But it was also host to illicit activities kept out of the "good side of town" — gambling, drinking during Prohibition, and prostitution.
Omachi’s father, who was from a Japanese immigrant family, was born here in 1913 "between a bar and a house of ill repute," she said.
Many establishments had basements, some of them interconnected. Of those that can still be seen today, some end in bricked-off walls that longtime residents say hide tunnel entrances.
As late as the 1950s, when Lew was a boy, Chinatown was still thriving — both its respectable establishments and as its shadier side.
He remembers visiting the underground world with his father, first passing though a dark basement before descending into a lit tunnel with an arched roof and enough space for two people to pass by each other. There were people there he recognized from the neighborhood. And then there were the glamorous women whose images remain seared in his memory decades later.
"They were off to the side, in bright satin dresses, one red, one blue," said Lew, speculating that they were probably prostitutes. "I later asked my father about it. He said it was something we don’t mention."
Jon Brady, lead archaeologist on the project, said the tunnels may have been built to provide cool underground storage in a region known for sweltering summer heat. But they later proved handy for other purposes, even escape when necessary.
"These groups that lived on the fringe could have resorted to them to protect themselves, communicate away from public view, who knows what else," Brady said.
Local lore holds, though it still hasn’t been proved by research, that a tunnel one time extended beyond the railroad tracks into the traditionally white part of town, possibly allowing "respectable" citizens access to the illicit charms of Chinatown.
"Some say that was blown up during Prohibition," said Hattersley-Drayton, who received many calls from longtime residents once the project got started. "I’m hearing that from a lot of people, but we just don’t know yet."
In the 1950s and 1960s, many of Chinatown’s buildings were torn down to make way for new development or freeways, and much of the history was buried, Lew said.
"Many of the older residents packed up and left, and it started getting rough," Lew said. He now lives far from Chinatown, but remains surrounded by artifacts from the days when his family was an important part of the neighborhood: tall, elaborately decorated vases, paintings and sculptures handed down by his grandfather, and the old manual cash register that rang up purchases at the liquor store.
Today, Fresno’s Chinatown is largely abandoned, peopled by the homeless, with many of its facades boarded up. It’s a part of the region’s history that’s been largely forgotten.
As downtown develops, it’s critical "to look at where we were," said Patti Miller, spokeswoman for the city.
Someday, Hattersley-Drayton hopes, Chinatown and its excavated tunnels might be developed for heritage tourism, bringing some income to the now-impoverished area. For now, however, researchers just want to understand what’s there.
"This is a first step, and it’s about approaching parts of community history that are not in books," said Brady. "Parts that are literally below the surface, but that deserve to be told."