How The San Gabriel Valley Became A Mecca For Chinese Dining

As far as the younger generation and more recent immigrants are concerned, the gigantic Chinatown that is the San Gabriel Valley is something that has always existed.   I remember a comment on one of my interviews about the San Gabriel Valley was along the lines of "I always thought that my family used to live in East Los Angeles because they couldn't afford to live in Monterey Park at the time."  But indeed, I remember a time when there were very few Chinese or other Asians living in the San Gabriel Valley, and in fact at one time that the San Gabriel Valley was the most racist, lily white areas in Los Angeles County.

So naturally, the subject which intrigued me over the years is how such a gigantic Chinese dining mecca and Chinese community in terms of both population and geographic area could have developed in the San Gabriel Valley, and not anywhere else in the Los Angeles area or somewhere else in the United States.  Now it’s not that I didn’t have a clue, as some of my family's friends were among the first Chinese to move into Monterey Park in the 1960s.  As such I was there as the first authentic Chinese restaurants opened up, one by one, in the San Gabriel Valley starting in the mid-1970s.  Still the bigger picture issues of why in the Los Angeles area, and why the San Gabriel Valley in particular eluded me.  However, over time, and based on the confluence of my background knowledge of the disparate disciplines of law, real estate, Los Angeles history, and Chinese-American history, I have been able to piece things together.   While some of my early findings were included in prior articles on the Menuism website, this is the first specific article devoted exclusively to this subject.

As once described by food writer Lucas Kwan Peterson, the San Gabriel Valley is essentially a 200 square mile Chinatown, the biggest outside of Asia, full of food from all regions of China, with Chinese food perhaps as good as it gets outside of Asia.  Today’s generation of Angelinos only knows of the San Gabriel Valley as a mecca for Chinese dining, and as I indicated many presume it’s always been like this.  Yet I can remember when  most Asians were restricted to living only in certain neighborhoods in Los Angeles.  As it turns out, how the San Gabriel Valley became a powerhouse for Chinese dining and community is an interesting tale.

 

Traditional wisdom about the rise of the San Gabriel Valley as a gigantic Chinese-American community with hundreds, if not more than a thousand, authentic Chinese restaurants, invokes the name of Taiwanese American Frederick Hsieh, who had the foresight to market the city of Monterey Park as the "Chinese Beverly Hills" to potential migrants from Hong Kong and Taiwan more than four decades ago.  While Hsieh's influence in the growth of the Chinese community is indisputable, it wasn't like Brigham Young declaring "This is the place" for a Chinese American community to establish itself.  Rather, when Hsieh arrived in Monterey Park, there was already a budding Chinese-American community in place.  So really the question is how that initial Chinese-American community came about, where a generation previously the San Gabriel Valley had been a Ku Klux Klan stronghold.

Surprisingly, the primary reason why the San Gabriel Valley exists as we know it today is the pattern of housing segregation that existed in the Los Angeles area between approximately 1910 and 1960.  It’s not that Los Angeles was an unusually racist community, but rather the confluence of several factors that led to the unique development of Los Angeles. Early 20^th century Los Angeles was the biggest boom town ever seen in the United States.  Thanks to the combination of the motion picture industry, oil production, agriculture, and Owens Valley water,  Los Angeles exploded in size in the early 20^th century, from 100,000 residents in 1900 to 300,000 in 1910, and a whopping 1.2 million by 1930.  This required the construction of vast numbers of new residential neighborhoods in a short time period, making Los Angeles unique in having so much of its housing stock created in such a compressed period of time. 

The dark side of this housing boom in Los Angeles was that most of these houses contained deed restrictions (called racial restrictive covenants) which limited occupancy of the property to members of the Caucasian race.  Violation of the covenant would result in the ownership of the property reverting to the person who originally subdivided and sold the property.  These covenants did not originate in Los Angeles—rather they were developed in reaction to the Great Migration of African Americans from the rural South into the industrialized North which started around 1910.  There was no legal way around if a property included a racial restrictive covenant in the deed, a sample pictured below.  Consequently if you were Chinese, Japanese, Mexican or African American there were only a limited number of neighborhoods you could live in, primarily those developed before around 1915 when racial restrictive covenants came into vogue in Los Angeles.  If you were Chinese, that means you were most likely confined to areas of central, south or east Los Angeles.  That also meant that all the good Chinese food in Los Angeles was limited to a couple of areas in central Los Angeles.

 

Meanwhile, more overt racism kept Chinese and other minorities out of many surrounding communities on the outskirts of Los Angeles.   Certain towns were considered "sundown towns," a euphemistic term for localities which enforced the rule "n*****r don't let the sun set on you," and applicable to Asians as well as African-Americans.  Notable sundown towns near Los Angeles included Monterey Park, El Monte, Arcadia, South Pasadena, Pasadena, Glendale, Burbank, Palos Verdes, Compton, Cerritos, Lomita, Azusa, Culver City, Hawthorne, Inglewood and most of the San Fernando Valley.  Old timers still recall street signs in Glendale and other cities stating "Negroes and Orientals not desired."

Racial restrictive covenants were made ineffective by the 1948 Supreme Court decision in Shelley v. Kraemer.  As an interesting aside, since these covenants were part of contracts executed in the past, there was no way to expunge the offending language from deeds, and the only legal solution was to make the covenant unenforceable.  When I bought my first house in 1977, which was built in 1952, I was surprised to see the racial restrictive covenant in the deed to the house, even though it was built after 1948.  That's because the lot on my house was subdivided before 1948.  

But though the covenants were ineffective starting in 1948, housing discrimination in Los Angeles continued in some communities for many years.  I remember when I was in high school in the early 1960s and we were living in the Crenshaw area, in a section now also referred to as West Adams, which was one area that did open up to minority residents after the 1948 Supreme Court decision.  My parents were looking to buy a new house in a nicer hillside part of the Crenshaw area.  After viewing one particular house, the broker took my dad aside and told him not to bother making an offer because all of the residents on the block had signed a pact not to sell their house to any nonwhite.  This vividly shows how neighborhood opposition was to keep parts of the Los Angeles area still influenced by the sundown town mentality exclusively Caucasian even after the demise of racial restrictive covenants.

It was against this backdrop that the San Gabriel Valley Chinatown was born.    Like the Chinese Americans, Japanese American residents of Los Angeles were restricted where they could live, primarily in central and East Los Angeles in housing developed before the advent of deed restrictions.  There was a large settlement of Japanese in East Los Angeles, directly south of the Monterey Park city limit.  They could not move into Monterey Park, as having once been a sundown town it was a strong Caucasian enclave  described in the 1920s as “one of the whitest spots in Southern California’s white spot,” and home to large public Ku Klux Klan gatherings.  So Monterey Park seemed hardly the location to give birth to a giant Asian American community.   

In the late 1950s, the East Los Angeles Japanese-American neighborhood bordering on Monterey Park was condemned for the construction of the Pomona Freeway.  Meanwhile, at the time these Japanese residents were looking for a new place to move to, new homes were being built on the Monterey Park side of the line.  Even though Monterey Park was a whites only community, some of these Japanese asked the developer as to whether they could buy homes in the new tract.  This was not an existing neighborhood where the existing homeowners could agree among themselves not to sell to minority buyers, and when the builder said yes, many Japanese bought new houses there.  (It may be noteworthy that a number of these tracts were developed by Jewish homebuilders.)  Shortly thereafter in the early 1960s, another new housing tract appeared in the hills of northern Monterey Park, not far from the East Los Angeles neighborhood of El Sereno where many Chinese Americans had settled.   Here too, the developer was amenable to selling to these Chinese buyers, so many Chinese Americans started moving into the new Monterey Highlands development. By 1970 there were a couple thousand Chinese Americans, nearly all of Cantonese origin, largely engineers and other professionals, living in Monterey Park, thus setting the stage for Frederick Hsieh and other Chinese immigrants.

Propitiously, the establishment of this Chinese American beachhead in Monterey Park was soon to collide with the arrival of new Chinese immigrants permitted under the relaxed new American immigration laws.  Frederick Hsieh was an ambitious man who landed in Los Angeles from Taiwan in the late 1960s.  Eventually he made his way to Monterey Park and the existing suburban community of hillside homes occupied by many Chinese American professionals, and he had a vision.  He went into the real estate business, marketing Monterey Park as the Chinese Beverly Hills to potential Chinese buyers in Taiwan and Hong Kong.   

Of course, a few thousand Chinese Americans initially wasn't sufficient to warrant any local ethnic commerce.  Back in 1973 I was visiting a friend who had moved to Monterey Park, and we decided to go out for Chinese food, but our only alternative in Monterey Park was a typical Americanized Chinese restaurant on Atlantic Blvd. called Lum's Cantonese.    Los Angeles Chinatown was still the place for Chinese restaurants and stores to locate.  The first authentic Chinese restaurant to open up in Monterey Park was Kin Kwok on Garvey Ave. in late 1975 or early 1976, serving Hong Kong style Cantonese food.  By the end of the 1970s, just a handful more other authentic Chinese restaurants had opened up in the area, with Los Angeles Chinatown still dominant with its newly opened Food Street, two story indoor mall devoted to Chinese food opening in 1979.  Interestingly, of the handful of new Chinese restaurants in the San Gabriel Valley, one was Kin Kwok, a sister restaurant to Kin Hing, located on Garfield Ave. in Alhambra, and another was Kam Hong, located in Montebello, indicating that the Chinese community had already spilled beyond the borders of Monterey Park itself.  Alhambra is immediately north of Monterey Park and Montebello is immediately south, making them the logical first points of expansion for the Chinese American community.  Also opening in Monterey Park was Nam Tin, the first banquet sized facility which opened in the shopping center on the corner of Atlantic Blvd. and Garvey Ave.  And on the same block, Los Angeles Chinatown’s Mandarin Deli opened up a branch.

 

By around 1980, Monterey Park Mall on Atlantic Blvd. became the first predominantly Chinese shopping center in the United States, as numerous Chinese restaurants, shops and business offices moved in, so much so that the spacious parking lot appeared always to be at capacity and its shops and restaurants were forever bustling.   However as the Chinese San Gabriel Valley began to grow, this center today is quite calm and nothing like it used to be.

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Monterey Park Mall today. 

 

As the Chinese community community began to grow in the 1980s, two east-west arteries, Garvey Ave. and Valley Blvd. began to establish themselves as major Chinese restaurant destinations as the Chinese community expanded eastward.   Valley Blvd. became particularly popular for Chinese restaurants, as new strip shopping centers were built or rehabilitated, first in Alhambra, then eventually into the cities of San Gabriel and Rosemead.  However this block by block, shopping center by shopping center expansion of the Chinese communities in fully developed cities was about to be joined by a new model, which would serve to increase the footprint of the Chinese community in the San Gabriel Valley by leaps and bounds.  

An interesting characteristic of the Chinese American community is the affinity for new housing developments, particularly hillside developments.   As longtime San Gabriel Valley Certified Public Accountant Gordon Chow told LA Weekly, it was the search for newer and cheaper homes that sent Chinese buyers eastward on a decades long march that greatly expanded the footprint of the Chinese American community and the accompanying Chinese cuisine.  More recently this effect has been strengthened in the past decade by rich Mainland Chinese residents who have dived feet first into the San Gabriel Valley housing market purchasing primary or secondary homes.

In this regard, the key development (pun intended) occurred in the late 1970s, with the establishment of the new community of Hacienda Heights, about 15 miles east of Monterey Park.  Hacienda Heights marked the beginning of what is now known as the East San Gabriel Valley, and the beginning of a hill by hill model of the expansion of the Chinese American community   Here, as previously noted as to the initial residential influx to Monterey Park, there was again a lag time between the arrival of Chinese residents in the new hillside homes of Hacienda Heights and that of restaurants and other commercial activities.  

 

Later in the 1980s it was on to the next new residential development to the east in adjacent Rowland Heights.  The move into Rowland Heights represented a new phase in the development of authentic Chinese restaurants trailing the movement of the Chinese population.  Whereas the incursion of authentic Chinese restaurants into new territory had been on a one off basis, with new Chinese restaurants moving into available freestanding buildings or shopping center locations, Chinese food came to Rowland Heights in a much more organized manner.  In 1989, 99 Ranch Market opened its first supermarket anchored Chinese mall, in Rowland Heights, with room for up to a dozen Chinese restaurants and stores.  This in turn led to more Chinese residents moving into the area with new commercial areas being built in Rowland Heights and Hacienda Heights, along with neighboring cities of Walnut and Industry. The result today is that the East San Gabriel Valley may now be as important of a Chinese food center in the east as Monterey Park and the rest of the western San Gabriel Valley.

 

The next stop in the eastward Chinese new housing movement was Diamond Bar, seven miles to the east of Rowland Heights, at the far eastern end of the San Gabriel Valley.   Diamond Bar started to develop seriously after its incorporation as a city in the late 1980s.   However, there weren’t a lot of authentic Chinese restaurants in Diamond Bar, even in the mid to late 1990s, due to its relative proximity to Rowland Heights.  Only in the past decade has a critical mass of authentic Chinese restaurants developed in Diamond Bar, due to both its own increasing Chinese population and the development of more Chinese communities further east.

 

The early 21^st century saw the eastward march extend past the borders of Los Angeles County and the San Gabriel Valley into the San Bernardino County community of Chino Hills, and not without resistance.  Though less than 10 miles to the east of Diamond Bar, the two communities are separated mostly by open space, with Chino Hills previously unaccustomed to an Asian presence.  Consequently, the 2007 opening of 99 Ranch Market in the former Ralphs Market location created much friction.    However, dire warnings from the locals about the Chinese presence proved unfounded, and to the contrary has led to a boom with sparkling new shopping centers anchored by Chinese restaurants and stores.

 

The most recent beachhead for Chinese Americans looking for new housing tracts is a dozen miles east of Chino Hills, in Eastvale, a flatlands community outside of Corona, in Riverside County.  Once again the incursion was led by 99 Ranch Market which first opened a new store in Corona, a larger adjoining city, followed by a second store in Eastvale itself.   While Chino Hills and Eastvale are outside of the San Gabriel Valley, they are close enough to the East San Gabriel Valley such that restaurants and businesses in the East San Gabriel Valley draw a good deal of business from residents of Chino Hills and Eastvale.

 

And while expanding nearly 25 miles from Monterey Park to Diamond Bar over a number of decades using a series of residential hillside beachheads, the Chinese community has also infilled virtually all of the remaining communities in between, including Arcadia,  San Marino, Temple City, South El Monte, El Monte, West Covina, Baldwin Park, Monrovia, Duarte, Covina, Glendora, Irwindale and Azusa to create this giant Chinese community.  And who would have thought that with all of the varying influences that came together to create the existing San Gabriel Valley, it all happening before my very eyes?

 

The other question I raised is why this Super Chinatown developed in the San Gabriel Valley near  Los Angeles and not someplace in the San Francisco Bay Area or New York.  My conclusion is that certain unique factors converged to make the Los Angeles area the place.  Perhaps the most overlooked and indeed counterintuitive fact is that Los Angeles did not have a historically large Chinese population, and was third fiddle in California behind San Francisco and Sacramento.  In 1960, on the cusp of immigration law reform, there were just 10,000 Chinese residents of Los Angeles.  With the 1960s convergence of Chinese and Japanese residents being able to find integrated housing in Monterey Park, along with the immigration law changes bringing in an influx of new Chinese residents, Monterey Park became the single node for the establishment of a major suburban Chinese American community.  Throw in the salesmanship of Frederick Hsieh, the continuous development of new nearby residential communities, the booming Los Angeles area economy, and even the evolution of a young Asian American adult food culture, and you realize this is the only place it could have happened.