Sixteen Hundred Wazee: The Saloon Where the Riot Began

The riot started here, inside a saloon at sixteen hundred Wazee, on the Halloween afternoon of eighteen eighty. The building you are looking at is not that saloon. That one is gone, torn down decades ago.

The Historic Sugar Building stands on the corner now, raised in nineteen oh one to designs that lean on the Chicago architect Louis Sullivan, all rope brick and ornamented terra cotta, and beside it the blackened stainless steel of the SugarSquare addition from two thousand sixteen. Picture the corner as it was that afternoon. Gas lamps casting yellow light on a polished wooden bar, the smell of whiskey and tobacco and sawdust on the floor, the sound of billiard balls cracking on green felt.

Two Chinese men were playing pool. A group of white men entered, drunk, and began harassing them. The proprietor, a German immigrant named John Asmussen, saw what was coming and tried to defuse it.

He told the Chinese men to slip out the back door. They did. The white men followed.

One of them struck a Chinese man across the head with a wooden board, and that single blow detonated everything that had been building in this city for weeks. Within hours a mob of roughly three thousand white men, perhaps as many as five thousand by some estimates, surged through the Chinatown blocks just north of here, burning, looting, and destroying nearly every Chinese home and business in Denver. They dragged a twenty eight year old laundry worker named Look Young through the streets by a rope around his neck, beat him, cut off his braided queue as a final symbolic degradation, and hanged him from a lamppost.

He was the only one who died. No one was ever convicted for his murder. The Rocky Mountain News, the same paper that had run anti Chinese articles all month, reported the next morning, Chinatown is now a mass of ruins.

As you drive past this corner, notice what is not here. There is no marker on the Sugar Building to tell you what happened on this exact pavement. The newer markers a few doors up the street do the work this corner does not.