Prominent merchants were able to dominate the Five Points Chinese enclave because relatively few Chinese actually lived in the neighborhood. Laundrymen were scattered throughout the city, living wherever their businesses were located. By the mid-1880s, “China Town” had become a shopping, social, and leisure center for the city’s far-flung Chinese residents. “All the Chinese do not live here,” observed a Frank Leslie’s reporter on a visit to Mott Street, “but it is safe to say that all of them are regular and frequent visitors to this centre of Mongolian business, society and dissipation.” Those who did make Pell, Doyers, or lower Mott Street their home were primarily merchants and professionals, cigarmakers, those who worked in menial capacities in the district’s businesses, and newcomers who had not yet found work or raised capital to start businesses of their own. In 1885, the Tribune estimated that 80 percent of New York’s Chinese immigrants toiled as laundrymen, but they made up fewer than one in five of the Chinese inhabitants of Five Points.34
“DRIVING OUT THE CHINESE”
Like the Italians on Mulberry Street, the Chinese in Five Points lived in both individual apartments and boardinghouses. Boarding facilities must have been especially popular given the overwhelming preponderance of men in the enclave. Like the Irish and Italians before them, enterprising Chinese immigrants in Five Points also tried to lease entire buildings and then sublet the individual apartments. But as the city’s Chinese population began to expand rapidly in early 1880, the newcomers found it more and more difficult to find accommodations in Five Points, because many neighborhood landlords refused to rent to them. The Rutgers Fire Company refused to lease its vacant house at 3 Mott Street to Chinese, even when the immigrants offered to pay a large advance on the rent. The owners’ representative vowed he would “sooner pull down the building than allow a single Chinaman to live in it.” Another Mott Street landlord let his property stand vacant rather than accept $1,000 a year from the Chinese.
According to the press, the Irish in particular sought to stop the Chinese influx into Five Points. “A determined effort is being made by property owners in the upper end of Mott Street to prevent the colony from spreading,” reported the Herald, describing the portion of the street above Pell where no Chinese had yet settled, “and to all offers of high rents they give a stolid denial. They feel that if the Chinese get sufficient headway they will take possession of that quarter of the city.”35
Some landlords even began evicting the Chinese from some of the Mott Street buildings they already occupied. On May 7, under the headline “Driving Out the Chinese,” the Times reported that the Irish Catholic parishioners of Mott Street’s Transfiguration Church, resentful of having “to cut their way through an army of ‘haythen’ on Sunday,” had spearheaded the expulsions of the Chinese from their homes. The church “had leased the whole series of tenements from Pell-street to Park, and refused to let to Chinamen on any terms.” Many current residents were told to vacate immediately; a few were given until the end of the month. “Other landlords in the vicinity took the cue, although they liked their tenants, and for the last week a wholesale eviction has been going on.” Even wealth provided little protection from the evictions, as merchant Wo Kee was forced to relocate his landmark grocery from Mott Street to dark and quiet Park Street. Yet like Wo Kee, most of the expelled Chinese managed to stay in the neighborhood.36
A Times editorial lashed out at “the Irish proscription of the Chinese colony in this City,” complaining that
. . . hatred of the Chinese springs eternal in the Celtic breast. In fact, the hospitable and generous Irishman has almost no friendship for any race but his own. As a laborer and politician, he detests the Italian. Between him and the German-American citizen there is a great gulf fixed. So, when a little colony of Chinese, scarcely one thousand in number, settles in the midst of what has been an Irish-Catholic quarter, there springs up at once an active enmity against the new-comers. . . . There might have been, at least, an attempt to convert these heathen. . . . But the most natural thing for the Americanized Irishman is to drive out all other foreigners, whatever may be their religious tenets.
But perhaps the Times was allowing its own prejudice against the Irish to color its reporting. The newspaper’s confession that it would not like “a colony of Chinese occupying the Stewart mansion on Fifth-avenue, or hanging their washing out to dry on the roof of the Union League Clubhouse,” indicates that Irish Catholic Five Pointers were not the only New Yorkers who did not want the Chinese in their neighborhood.37
In 1880, the Chinese vice-consul in California sent a telegram to New York’s Chinese leaders instructing “the companies and merchants to move to the west side of the city.” Frank Leslie’s reported that the Chinese were scouting out possible locations on Eighth Avenue uptown. But in the end, the Chinese had an even harder time renting property in other parts of town. Chinatown could not be moved. To protect themselves against the whims of Caucasian landlords, however, Chinese Americans began to buy Five Points buildings themselves. By 1883, Wo Kee had managed to move his store back to Mott Street by purchasing 8 Mott for $8,500. Another of the most prominent Chinatown businessmen, Tom Lee, bought 16 Mott at about the same time for $15,000. Other Chinese-American merchants acquired 10 and 12 Mott.38
Ironically, Wo Kee upon taking possession of 8 Mott demanded that the occupants pay a 40 percent increase in rent or vacate the premises. The other new Chinese property owners made similar demands and evicted many tenants. Chinese residents of Mott Street held an indignation meeting to protest the rent increases and collected funds to fight the evictions in court. Eventually, a compromise was reached. The landlords agreed to adopt procedures already followed in San Francisco, which stipulated that when Chinese bought buildings already occupied by Chinese, the rent would remain unchanged for one year. As the Chinese became Chinatown property owners, all talk of moving the enclave came to an end, as did most efforts to prevent the Chinese from settling in Five Points.39
THE GREAT MONGOLIAN MAGNATE OF MOTT STREET
Unmarried men dominated the Chinese community. The 1880 census taker did not find a single Chinese-born woman in Five Points, and only a small proportion of the men married Caucasian women. As a result, the Chinese-operated businesses that sprang up in Five Points catered largely to its bachelor society.
One staple of a bachelor community is the restaurant, and Mott Street soon became renowned for its “outlandishly quaint Chinese restaurants.” During the 1880s and ’90s, most Chinese restaurants in Five Points (there were eight in 1888) were located on the second or third floors of Mott Street tenements. They were small establishments that could rarely seat more than a few dozen patrons at a time. The eateries were sparsely decorated, usually adorned with little more than long scrolls on the walls bearing “maxims from philosophers for the entertainment of those who eat.” Cooks prepared the food in a kitchen at the rear of the building or in the tenement’s basement. Their custom-made wood-burning stoves, with separate stations for roasting, boiling, steaming, and frying, were often imported directly from China.40
The Chinese who patronized these first restaurants ate many of the same Cantonese dumplings, soups, and noodle dishes still served on Mott Street today. But in Chinatown’s early years, when few Asian vegetables and spices were available in America, the immigrants were forced to improvise with American ingredients to create dishes pleasing to the Cantonese palate. One such dish was “chow chop suey,” which Americans typically believe was created for their own edification, when it was actually developed by Chinese-American cooks for their Asian customers. Wong Ching Foo characterized chop suey as “a staple dish for the Chinese gourmand,” describing it as “a mixture of chickens’ livers and gizzards, fungi, bamboo buds, pig’s tripe, and bean sprouts stewed with spices. The gravy of this is poured into the bowl of rice,” with a Chinese condiment Wong termed “the prototype of Worcestershire sauce.” By the 1890s, Chinese farmers had begun to grow Chinese vegetables on Long Island,
but until then, dishes like chop suey remained an integral part of Chinese-American cuisine.41
At first, Americans looked upon Chinese cooking with suspicion. But curious Americans soon began to patronize these eateries, and by the 1890s, Caucasians ventured to Chinatown just for the food. “Chow chop sui calls Americans to Chinatown,” observed Frank Leslie’s in 1896. “An American who once falls under the spell of chop sui may forget about all things Chinese for awhile, [but] suddenly a strange craving that almost defies will power arises; as though under a magnetic influence he finds that his feet are carrying him to Mott Street.” Other American favorites were “yok-e-man, a strong, palatable soup, containing bits of chicken, pork, and hard-boiled egg,” as well as “chow main.” Those who visited Five Points for an afternoon or evening of “slumming” could now include an exotic meal to round out the fun. The Tribune noted that there was “a free and easy atmosphere about the Chinese eating house which attracts many would-be ‘Bohemians.’” The dark and intimate confines encouraged patrons to “loll about and talk and laugh loudly.” By the turn of the century, Chinese restaurants had become so popular that they began to open outside Chinatown. Those in Five Points continued to thrive, with some, such as the famous Port Arthur at 7–9 Mott, catering to an exclusively Caucasian clientele.42
By contrast, white New Yorkers were almost never granted entrée into another mainstay of Chinatown’s bachelor society—its gambling dens. “The Celestial is a shameless and inveterate gambler,” remarked George Walling, a former New York chief of police, in the 1880s. “It is a rare thing to find a Chinaman who is not infatuated with games of chance.” These might have been the exaggerated comments of a prejudiced outsider, but Wong Ching Foo, who vehemently defended the Chinese community from almost every other criticism hurled its way, admitted that the Chinese were obsessed with games of chance. Stopping the Chinese from gambling, Wong asserted, would be as monumental a task as stopping the annual floods of the great rivers of China.43
Two games were especially popular: fan tan and pak ko piu. In fan tan, a large pile of coins was placed on a table. Coins were removed, four at a time, until no more than four were left. Gamblers placed bets on whether four, three, two, or one coin would be left on the table, and those who selected the correct number won three dollars for every one bet, minus a 7 percent commission. Those who were risk-averse could bet on two of the four numbers, and if successful were paid even money. A gambler could even hedge his bet still further. A wager on number 2 “toward” number 1, for example, meant that if 2 was the winning number, the bettor won two dollars for every one wagered, but if 1 was the winner, he merely got back the money he had bet. Just as casinos in Atlantic City and Las Vegas do today, Chinatown’s fan tan parlors gave their best customers free food, drinks, and lodging in order to keep them at the tables. By 1891, more than a dozen fan tan parlors operated in Five Points, in back rooms, basements, and in spaces above some of Mott Street’s most prestigious shops.44
Pak ko piu was essentially the same “policy” game played in antebellum Five Points. In this lottery, players were given sheets on which eighty Chinese characters appeared. Each gambler marked off a certain number of characters (the number varied from game to game) and submitted his wager (which could be as low as a few cents) with his ticket. The syndicates that operated these games held daily drawings. If the bettor matched five of the characters drawn that day, he won two dollars for every dollar wagered. If he matched six he was paid 20 to 1, seven correct earned him 200 to 1, eight correct 1,000 to 1, and so on, up to as much as 3,000 or 10,000 to 1, depending on the total number of characters drawn. By the early 1890s, about a dozen lottery offices operated on Mott Street where gamblers could lay their pak ko piu bets. Walling was told that big winners typically moved back to China with their prize money.45
Fan tan players. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper (December 17, 1887): 296. Collection of the author.
In most Western societies, gambling and alcohol go hand in hand. But visitors to Mott Street invariably noted that they never encountered drunken Chinese. Opium, rather than alcohol, was the stimulant of choice. No journalist considered a story on Chinatown complete without a detailed description of its many opium dens. “Opium joints” were usually nondescript rooms lined with divans set up by the Mott Street merchants who sold the drug. An 1888 print in Cosmopolitan magazine even depicts bunks for opium smokers in a Chinese barbershop. But some opium dens operated independently in dark, secluded spaces where heavy users—opium “fiends”—could spend a day or two sleeping off the soporific effects of the narcotic.
Preparing the opium for smoking involved an elaborate ritual. First, the smoker rolled the black opium paste into a small ball ranging from the size of a pea to that of a marble, and skewered it on the end of a long piece of metal that resembled a knitting needle. Then he suspended it over the flame of a small oil lamp and rotated it to heat it evenly until the drug attained the consistency of a hard pill. Next, the smoker ran the end of the needle into the small hole on the top of the long wooden opium pipe until the opium pill became lodged in the top of the hole. Then he removed the needle, heated the pipe over the flame, and drew in opium smoke through the pipe’s ivory mouthpiece. An experienced smoker might consume the entire opium pill in one very long breath.46
The earliest depictions of Five Points opium dens were rarely judgmental. Journalists devoted most of their attention to the process of smoking itself and to conveying the exotic and mysterious nature of the drug, which was not then illegal. Describing a Donovan’s Lane opium den in 1873, a journalist for the Daily Graphic reported that “those in the habit of coming here say that it has a beneficial medicinal effect, and, if only inhaled in small quantities, animates the spirits and gives energy to the intellectual powers, at the same time imparting a languor to the body, leaving the mind free from nervous effects.” Yet those who smoked too much, the Chinese admitted, found themselves “for several days in a lethargic, torpid state, neither caring for nor taking food.” Through the early 1880s, descriptions of Chinatown opium joints took a similarly detached attitude.47
But in 1883, New Yorkers began to reassess their stance on both opium and Chinese gambling. In fact, both Chinese Five Pointers and their non-Chinese neighbors began to complain about the district’s vice industry. The Chinese objected not to the presence of gambling and opium in their community, but rather to the control exerted over them by a single man, Tom Lee.
Few facts about Lee’s life can be documented with certainty. He was apparently born Wong Ah Ling in about 1840 in Canton or its environs. He immigrated to California, eventually becoming a labor contractor there. In the mid-1870s he moved to St. Louis, where he operated a cooperage business and become a naturalized American citizen in 1876. After a return visit to China, Lee relocated to Philadelphia, where he was a merchant. He finally settled in New York in 1878, and in 1879 married a Scots-German immigrant, Elsie Kaylor, whom he had met in Philadelphia. They eventually had two sons.48
Lee appears to have first settled in New York at 4 Mott Street, where according to some accounts he ran a cigar store. But his business interests were undoubtedly more varied. Lee was “the accredited New York agent of the Six Companies in San Francisco,” that combination of powerful families and merchants that controlled the bulk of the Chinese import-export trade in California. Although a relative newcomer to New York, Lee skillfully used the press to promote his image as one of Chinatown’s most important residents. In August 1878, the Herald reported that Lee hosted a sumptuous Chinese banquet at his Mott Street home to honor attorney Edmond E. Price, who had successfully defended Chinese interests “in a number of cases.” Six months later, Price and other white New Yorkers were once again fêted at Lee’s expense.49
Just what kind of Chinatown interests Price had defended became clearer a few weeks after this second banquet when, in March 1879, police made their first ever raid on a Chinatown vice operation. Nearly fifty officers stormed the g
rocery and apothecary at 13 Mott—“one of the places which are popularly supposed to abound in pickled rat, edible dog and savory candles”—where they found a fan tan game and opium smokers. Thirty-one men were jailed on gambling charges. Appearing for the defense the next day, Price argued that the police had found not a gambling business but merely a social gathering. The judge ordered the men released, commenting that those arrested were only engaged in “some private amusement such as is not uncommon in the best clubs and in private houses.”50
One writer has surmised that the dismissal of charges in this case resulted from Lee’s influence among politically well-connected New Yorkers such as Price. Although there is no evidence to substantiate such speculation, Lee was making significant strides toward increasing his power base in Chinatown. In 1879, thanks to the political connections he was forging, Lee was named a deputy sheriff of New York County. And in the spring of 1880, Lee helped establish Chinatown’s first tong.51
Tongs were secret fraternal associations first created by seventeenth-century Buddhist monks to help organize the overthrow of Manchurian rule in China. When Lee and a few other prominent Chinatown residents filed articles of association for their tong in Albany in 1880, they described it as more of a mutual aid society, designed to provide “aid in sickness, poverty, adversity, and affliction.” Each of the city’s prominent newspapers transliterated the name of Lee’s tong a bit differently. The Times called it the “Lone We Tong.” The Herald referred to it as the “Loon Ye,” while the Tribune spelled it “Lung Ye.” Whatever the case, Lee’s tong became one of the most powerful entities in nineteenth-century Chinatown.52
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