Blake and Twentieth: Where Hop Alley Stood

As you pass Blake and Twentieth, you are driving roughly through where a city erased a community. Where Coors Field rises now and the Lower Downtown warehouses stretch off toward Wynkoop, this was Denver's Chinatown for half a century. The newspapers called it Hop Alley, after the seventeen opium dens that operated here at the riot's peak.

About sixty percent of the people smoking the pipe in those dens were not Chinese. They were white men from uptown, the ones whose addiction the newspapers blamed on the people who managed the houses. In eighteen eighty this neighborhood held a city census count of two hundred and thirty eight Chinese residents, though the Chinese consul who visited put the real figure closer to four hundred and fifty.

Among them lived six cooks, two physicians, nine shopkeepers, four grocers, three clerks, and seventeen cigar makers, alongside the laundries the racism of the time forced most of the community into. By eighteen ninety the community had grown to nine hundred and eighty. By nineteen twenty, two hundred and twelve.

By nineteen forty, the buildings were gone, demolished in the name of urban renewal. For decades the only public memorial on this corner was a small plaque installed in nineteen ninety four that simply read, Hop Alley slash Chinese Riot of eighteen eighty. It named no victim, and used the words Chinese riot rather than anti-Chinese riot.

In August of two thousand twenty two a Colorado historian named William Wei pulled that plaque down. It sits today inside History Colorado's exhibit on Denver's lost Chinatown. The replacement is a network of three markers, one at Sixteenth and Wazee on the broader history, one at sixteen twenty Wazee for the riot itself, and one at eighteen ninety Lawrence for Look Young, the twenty eight year old laundryman who was killed.

Someone stole the first marker in December of two thousand twenty three. Volunteers with Colorado Asian Pacific United reinstalled a reinforced replacement in September of two thousand twenty four. On April sixteenth, two thousand twenty two, one hundred and forty two years after the riot, Denver's mayor delivered a formal letter of apology to descendants of the people who had lived here.

The descendants received commemorative gold coins. The neighborhood remains a memory, finally marked, even as you drive on past it now.