Hop Alley and the 1880 Anti-Chinese Riot

Right here in Lower Downtown, along Wazee Street, once stood Denver's first Chinatown, a neighborhood the newspapers mockingly called Hop Alley. And on Halloween of eighteen eighty, it became the scene of one of the largest anti-Chinese riots the country had ever seen. The violence did not come out of nowhere.

For weeks, the Rocky Mountain News had run article after article stirring up fear of Chinese immigrants, and just the night before, some three thousand people had gathered at a political rally chanting that the Chinese must go. The spark came the next afternoon, inside a saloon on the sixteen hundred block of Wazee, where two Chinese men were playing pool. A group of white men picked a fight, followed them into the street, and struck one with a board.

Within hours a mob of roughly three thousand surged through Chinatown, smashing, looting, and burning nearly every Chinese home, laundry, and business in the city. A twenty-eight-year-old laundry worker named Look Young was dragged through the streets by a rope around his neck, beaten, and killed. He was the only person who died, and the losses ran to more than fifty thousand dollars, well over a million in today's money.

Not everyone joined in. A gambler named Jim Moon stood in front of a Chinese laundry with a revolver and turned the mob away single-handed. A saloonkeeper and a madam named Lizzie Preston hid Chinese residents inside their own buildings, and the mayor and fire department tried to break up the crowd with a fire hose and opened the jail and the hotels as shelters.

No white rioter was ever convicted of Look Young's murder. Denver's Chinese residents were never paid a cent for what they lost, even after the Chinese government formally protested. About a hundred people left the city for good.

This riot was not an isolated outburst. It was one of more than a hundred and fifty such attacks across the American West in these years, part of the same wave of hatred that produced the Chinese Exclusion Act of eighteen eighty-two. For more than a century, the story was largely forgotten.

It was not until two thousand twenty-two that the City of Denver finally issued a formal apology for what happened here.