In a new exhibit building on the work of local Asian American activists, History Colorado is taking a closer look at Denver’s lost Chinatown in Lower Downtown.
Denver once had a bustling Chinatown, but two separate incidents decades apart saw the community forced out of Lower Downtown. In 1880, an anti-Chinese race riot broke out among 3,000 white Denver residents, who destroyed buildings in Chinatown and lynched a man named Look Young.
In the 1940’s, what little remained from the 1880 anti-Chinese riot was razed by the city of Denver to make room for downtown redevelopment.
Memories of Denver’s Chinatown have since faded from collective memory. However, in recent years, Asian-American advocacy group Colorado Asian Pacific United has been working to bring back that history. The group worked to get the city to replace a plaque that whitewashed the past, pushed city leaders to formally apologize for the riot, and erected a mural as well as markers in Lower Downtown honoring the historic district.
This month, CAPU has teamed up with History Colorado and the University of Colorado Denver’s College of Architecture and Planning for the temporary exhibit “Where is Denver’s Chinatown? Stories Remembered, Reclaimed, Reimagined.”
The exhibit will use artifacts, descendent stories and reconstructed buildings to tell Chinatown’s story
“Where is Denver’s Chinatown?” has been a long time in the making. Josie Chang-Order, the school programs manager at History Colorado, has wanted to help create an exhibit on Denver’s Chinatown since she started at the museum as an intern a decade ago.
After a series of meetings and introductions, Chang-Order and Samantha Martin, the museum’s associate curator of architecture, were able to get the ball rolling.
The exhibit, located on the first floor of the History Colorado Center on Broadway Avenue, opens Thursday. Visitors will see installments focused on telling the stories of people who lived in the historic district and their descendants.
“[The descendants] have been doing this memory work and this historic preservation for decades, and so they really helped us guide and inform and understand the stories they provided,” Martin said. “Personal artifacts and photographs, family heirlooms that will be on display as well, that really help establish the history of some key families in the neighborhood, both in the past and in the present day.”
Testimony from descendants of Chinatown were vital in researching how to structure the exhibit. Museum staff said finding documents from the 1800’s was difficult since residents didn’t leave behind any journals or diaries and there weren’t any Chinese newspapers at the time.
Chang-Order said a goal of the exhibit is educating a wider audience about the history of Denver’s Chinatown. While efforts to raise awareness have been successful, the museum’s exhibit will bring the history lesson to a new level of exposure.
“As a school programs manager, as someone who's going to be bringing thousands of school children into this building to talk about the stories that make up Colorado's past, I'm really excited to be able to talk about, this is part of it too,” Chang-Order. “That there is a space where Asian Americans have been contributing to the Centennial State for a long time.”
The exhibit also features a component that challenges visitors to think about the future of Chinatown
The museum collaborated with Li Leyuan, a professor of architecture at the University of Colorado Denver, and his students to create depictions of what the neighborhood could have looked like if it wasn’t razed. Students also created models and drawings envisioning what the future Lower Downtown could be if reimagined as a cultural district for Colorado’s Asian American communities.
That vision included a museum, a food hall featuring carts inspired by dim sum restaurants, a community center, and multi-generational housing akin to how Chinese immigrants would live when moving to the U.S.
Leyuan, a Chinese immigrant himself, said one of the first questions he asked when he moved to the U.S. was “What happened to Denver’s Chinatown?” He said his goal was to build a bridge between the past and the present.
“It is very important for us as architects to contribute or theorize this as part of the discourse,” Leyuan said. ”To understand how we could contribute to this particular issue and empower the underrepresented communities with our expertise and our architecture knowledge.”
History Colorado’s “Where is Denver’s Chinatown? Stories Remembered, Reclaimed, Reimagined” will be open through next August.
