The 99% Invisible City: A Field Guide to the Hidden World of Everyday Design

by Roman Mars

This left open questions, however, about how to rebuild a Chinatown from scratch. A local businessman named Look Tin Eli hired architect T. Paterson Ross and engineer A. W. Burgren to design some new structures for the Chinese community even though neither man had been to China. They instead relied on centuries-old images, primarily of religious vernacular, to develop a new look for the new Chinatown. The resulting architectural collages were drawn from various Chinese traditions as well as questionable American ideas of what China looked like. Their approach was picked up by others in the neighborhood and became the basis for a fresh aesthetic that would come to shape Chinatowns around the world. The hybrid look launched by San Francisco’s Chinatown may seem convoluted, but the idea was quite straightforward: community leaders knew the area would be a tourist attraction and played to that crowd. It was vaguely exotic but safe enough for middle-class white America. The visitors and their cash began to flow into Chinatown, and Chinatowns around the country soon followed suit.