Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.

 Posted by on 29 March 2009  Photography, Vintage/Retro
Mar 292009
 

Great movie, Chinatown. Too bad about the sequel. I stumbled across some of the real history of the real California Chinatowns when I was looking for a vintage bank vault picture to go with Keith’s post about the safety of banks, below.

Although the Roman Polanski-directed film, starring Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway, was set in Los Angeles, I happened to find period pictures from the San Francisco Chief of Police at about the same time as the movie was set (it was set in the 1930s, but inspired by real events of 1910-20-ish).

The picture I found came from an archival collection held at The Bancroft Library, at the University of California, Berkeley. It’s the “Jesse Brown Cook Scrapbooks Documenting San Francisco History and Law Enforcement” — Jesse Brown being the police chief of San Francisco in the very early 20th century. He had an amazing desire to keep accurate photographic records — evident in the approximately 8,000 photos that are in the collection (several down volumes) plus what they describe as “ephemera” — newspaper clippings, etc.

Here, for example, are the real cops of Chinatown.

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It’s thrilling to come across pictures like this next one, too, which I just know I’ve seen somewhere in a movie.

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It’s the pumping station at Fort Mason, according to the data, and since Chinatown is all about water, I thought it might be from there, but I couldn’t seem to find it in any of the online lists of filming locations. I’ll have to watch Chinatown again, I guess!

I just spend an hour looking through tons of pictures in that collection, and I was totally engrossed, yet haven’t even scratched the surface. It’s unfortunately difficult to browse from one picture to another, but I saw lot of pictures documenting the Great Quake of ’06, and the resulting fire, as well as the rebuilding of important municipal buildings.

There are also mug shots, and various street scenes. Sticking with the Chinatown theme, though, check out this collection of “Chinese opium smokers in there [sic] dens in China Town in 1889.” (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11)

And here’s the Queen of the China Town celebration, 1915. Really cool stuff.

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Grant Hamilton

  • Colin Corneau

    This is really really cool, G-Ham (trying to stick a hip-hop style nickname on you…) Thank you for posting this.

    San Fran has the oldest Chinese community in North America — if the whole “Chinese explorers found North America (in BC) before Leif Erickson did” story is in doubt, anyway.

    Fascinating stuff.

    • http://www.absurdintellectual.com/ Grant Hamilton

      I was enthralled for, literally, over an hour, just clicking through the massive collection of photographs. Some of the post-earthquake ones are pretty poignant, too.

      As to pre-Columbian, pre-Viking Chinese explorers, I think it’s pretty likely that there was at least some contact, but I thought it was more South America, not North. I’m digging deep into hazy memories here, but I seem to remember reading it was internal Chinese politics that caused the fleets to be called back, ending that era of exploration and beginning a long era of isolationism.

  • Colin Corneau

    Yes, it was mostly internal politics and the occasional upheaval of a new dynasty that ended a more outward focus. China had by far the best technological edge in the world at that time – their largest ships were basically the aircraft carriers of their time.

    I read a book a while back about a guy who tried to track down the legends of a Chinese monk who landed in North America and made his way from BC to Mexico in his travels, before heading back to the Motherland…he tries to take the same route as this monk would have – not easy considering some of it went through Afghanistan.