With generations carrying on tradition, Chinatown celebrates 70th anniversary
The downtown L.A. community has lasted, with second- and third-generation Chinese Americans continuing their families' legacy. Festivities will begin Saturday.
Ron Louie has successfully designed high-end homes from Santa Monica to San Marino for four decades.
But at least once a week, the architect leaves his Pasadena home and heads to Chinatown in downtown Los Angeles to run his family's aging trinket store, K.G. Louie.
His brother Bill, a retired teacher, comes in three days a week to work the register. Brothers Hoover, an accountant, and Raymond, also a retired teacher, man the shop once a week, selling the usual figurines, bamboo umbrellas and silk slippers to wandering tourists.
Chinatown: An article in Saturday's California section about the 70th anniversary of Central Plaza in Los Angeles' Chinatown said Phoenix Bakery was more successful than ever and quoted one of its owners, Kelly Chan, as saying, "We've spent the last 20 years making more money than we know what to do with." Chan actually said that the bakery was most successful 20 years ago and that the business was struggling today.
Making a profit isn't the point. They're lucky to ring $100 a day.
Carrying on the store is an act of respect to the siblings' father, Gar Fong Louie, and mother, Lee Shee Louie, who were some of the original tenants of Central Plaza, the colorful center of Chinatown.
As "New Chinatown" marks its 70th anniversary today, among those celebrating will be the so-called grandchildren -- the second- and third-generation Chinese American professionals like Ron Louie who no longer live in Chinatown but keep a finger there nonetheless.
"We all have our professions, but we want to keep the tradition alive," said Louie, 69. "If it wasn't for our parents' sacrifice, we wouldn't be where we are today."
The Louies opened in Central Plaza -- then called China City -- because the original Chinatown was razed for Union Station. Its founding families lived in a time when the Chinese were prevented from buying property, obtaining bank loans and securing desirable jobs.
It wasn't until the generation after that Chinese began to find mainstream professional success. Many fled Chinatown and moved to the modern Chinese community to the east, in the San Gabriel Valley.
Yet a handful of families, like the Louies, who were part of the neighborhood's 1938 opening still cling to the narrow pedestrian streets and pagoda-style buildings.
Many will be present Saturday night at a retro anniversary celebration open to the public meant to evoke the glamour days when Hollywood stars would descend on Chinatown.
Organizers will show historic photographs, a swing band will perform and one of Central Plaza's more recent tenants will unveil newly-installed neon lights along the roof lines of his three buildings -- an ornament that long distinguished Central Plaza until the lights fell into disrepair in the 1980s.
