Salem's Chinatown, Erased Block by Block
Near Salem, Oregon
A block or two from where you are driving, there was once a Chinatown. Chinese immigrants began arriving in Salem from the California goldfields in the eighteen sixties, and by eighteen ninety their community numbered three hundred sixty-seven people, more than ten percent of the city's total population. The neighborhood on Liberty Street between Court and State was a working district of laundries, restaurants, markets, and homes, sustained by men and women who had crossed the Pacific to build lives in the American West.
They did so under extraordinary legal pressure. Under the Chinese Exclusion Act of eighteen eighty-two and Oregon's own discriminatory laws, Chinese immigrants could not become naturalized citizens, could not own property in Oregon until nineteen forty-three, and could not enroll in public schools. Because they could not own property, they were entirely dependent on landlords, who had little incentive to maintain buildings that the city could then condemn as substandard.
That is precisely what happened. Around nineteen oh-five, the Salem city council ordered a block of the Chinatown district condemned on grounds of health and police concerns. The community scattered. By nineteen twenty, only seventy-two Chinese residents remained. The physical neighborhood was gone.
It is worth holding that sequence of events clearly: a community was barred from owning property, their landlords let properties decay, and the city then used that decay as justification for demolition. The erasure was systematic, not accidental.
Today, the Willamette Heritage Center has worked to recover this history through research and public exhibits. The locations of Salem's Chinese businesses, temples, and homes have been documented. The people who lived here are no longer entirely forgotten, even if the neighborhood they built no longer stands.
