When Heather Clifton was a child, she would stand at her grandmother’s bedside after dinners and parties and admire the matriarch’s wooden curio cabinet. One day, when she was 13 or 14, her grandmother told her to pick an item out for herself, so Clifton selected a shiny gold ring with a big blue stone — which she still wears frequently.
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“I’ve never had it appraised but I probably should, because it might be valuable,” said Clifton, a descendant of one of Denver’s original Chinatown families.
These families lived in what’s now Lower Downtown from the 1860s through the 1940s, according to History Colorado, with their community blooming along Wazee between 15th and 17th streets, and later growing to include parts of Market between 15th and 20th streets.
Now she’s reappraising Chinatown at large. Its rise and fall was dramatic, with a deadly riot in 1880 stoking anti-Chinese sentiment nationwide. But its erasure has been so complete that most people don’t even know it existed, Clifton said. All that remains are a couple of plaques and a mural that is a few blocks from Coors Field.
“Although Denver is usually not the first city to come to mind when one considers the history of Chinese immigration to the United States, the establishment of the city’s Chinatown and its subsequent destruction had a profound impact on the history of race and immigration policy in the country,” History Colorado researchers wrote in their 2019 paper “The Rise and Fall of Denver’s Chinatown,” noting the national publicity the riot received in 1880.
Drawn here by railroad and mining jobs, Denver’s Chinese immigrants quickly set up businesses that catered to both their own community and the local population; they had a vigorous work ethic, something that often defines immigrant communities, according to History Colorado. But with only a few hundred permanent residents at its height — and because most of its buildings were demolished due to urban renewal projects in the late 20th century — even people with direct ties to the area have been in the dark about its history.
“I didn’t really know about Chinatown when I was a child,” Clifton said, noting that her grandmother lived in one of the few brick buildings that have survived, at 2019 Market St. That changed when she and her cousin, Linda Lung, began researching its history.
Lung, who also traces her family directly to Denver’s Chinatown, and Clifton are working to enshrine the neighborhood’s culture. Through oral histories, family archives, walking tours, historic preservation applications, partnerships with Asian American and Pacific Islander organizations, and a major exhibit at History Colorado Center, they’ve increasingly brought to light the struggles, triumphs and daily rhythms of the former neighborhood.
“I have lived here my entire life, and I had always wondered why we didn’t have a traditional Chinatown,” said chef Tommy Lee, whose parents moved to Denver in the 1960s from Hong Kong, in a 2022 Denver Post interview. “I started doing research and I found out there was actually a Chinatown in Denver.”
Lee named his restaurant Hop Alley — after the nickname for Denver’s Chinatown, and the stereotype of opium-smoking Chinese — and it’s a knowing riff.
“My family never called it Hop Alley,” Lung said of the area, whose denizens watched out for one another amid threats from white residents. Those culminated in an 1880 anti-Chinese race riot that left resident Look Young dead by hanging, dozens of Chinese residents seriously injured, and most of their businesses burned and destroyed.
Residents rebuilt, but with anti-Chinese sentiment in overdrive after decades of racist news coverage and discriminatory federal laws, the community dwindled through the early part of the 20th century, and the Chinese culture that had defined the area was quickly forgotten after that.
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Urban renewal further erased structures as Denver’s boom-and-bust cycle rolled along. Out of the 200 or so buildings that comprised the neighborhood, only 19 remain, owing to a spate of demolition by the city of Denver that started in the 1960s to make space for more development, said Samantha Martin, History Colorado Center’s Temple Buell associate curator of architecture.
Like the Latino population that was displaced in the 1970s from what’s now the Auraria campus, as well as immigrant and Indigenous communities across the state, Chinatown’s residents found that outside pressure forged lasting bonds that united them through periods of chaos. Understanding that history is newly important as the cycle threatens to repeat itself, they said, with residents of the La Alma/Lincoln Park neighborhood (many of them already displaced from Auraria 50 years ago) fearing displacement due to a new Denver Broncos stadium in nearby Burnham Yard.
Gentrification, increased taxes, and traffic are usually forced upon working-class, immigrant and non-white residents when these types of land grabs occur, said Nolbert Chavez, who’s writing his Ph.D. dissertation on how communities of color can move forward with institutions after displacement and urban development. As a regent for the University of Colorado Denver, Chavez’s office is located in what’s believed to be Denver’s oldest residence, at 1050 9th St. — also known as the Centennial House due to its construction in 1876 (the same year Colorado became a state).
“You can’t really tell the full story (of Denver) without telling our story,” Chavez said. “Rather than glossing over or hiding or downplaying it, we should embrace it and make something beautiful about it.”
For Chavez, that’s included award-winning historic preservation wins, making good on promised scholarships for displaced residents, and other initiatives that seek to celebrate the lives of the hundreds of people and businesses who were pushed out to make way for the Auraria Higher Education Campus.
Remembering the original Auraria residents and Denver’s Chinatown is crucial because we’re still dealing with some of the same dynamics today, Chavez said. Lies and stereotypes about race, class and cult85ure prompted the violence in Chinatown in 1880, with a reported 3,000 whites attacking every Chinese person they saw. But there was no evidence that Chinese residents engaged in risky behavior any more than Eurocentric immigrants and residents.
“Our families dealt with opium and prostitution, because that’s just what they did,” Lung said. “But whites would come through because they saw Chinatown as exotic and mysterious, and they liked the opium and gambling and prostitution and spectacular fireworks and focus on food. They were giving it that reputation themselves.”
Resurfacing the full history of Denver’s Chinatown and the city’s displaced residents in general requires lots of time and resources, Lung and Clifton said, and the work has only just begun. But whatever the future holds, they don’t want Denver to forget the regular people who lived and worked there.
“There are ideas for an art history project, for reactivating the alleyway, for designing new spaces and concepts,” said Leyuan Li, assistant professor of architecture at the University of Colorado Denver, at the History Colorado Center exhibit on Chinatown. He and his students joined with the Colorado Asian Pacific United group and others on the exhibit, “Where Is Denver’s Chinatown? Stories Remembered, Reclaimed, Reimagined,” which closed last fall.
“When we started hearing about the real stories of our families, we were amazed by how resilient they were,” Lung said. “They were redlined and forced to live there, but they didn’t mind. There was actually safety in numbers and other businesses, so they could get items they wanted — food, clothing, and just that sense of community you couldn’t find elsewhere. It’s a history that’s worth remembering.”
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