By John Wenzel

Denver’s Chinatown took a violent hit on Oct. 31, 1880, after a wave of racist rioting and fires washed over the neighborhood, inside what’s now Lower Downtown. But there still may be a future for it.

“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, as he surveyed models of redesigned buildings inside a History Colorado Center exhibit last week.

Unlike New York City, San Francisco or even Portland, Ore., Denver’s biggest modern concentration of Asian businesses is not downtown, but rather around Federal Boulevard, led by the historic, pan-Asian Far East Center.

Denver’s former Chinatown — along Wazee and Market streets, between 15th and 20th streets — was a flashpoint for many white residents and journalists who fed anti-Chinese sentiment by falsely stereotyping the area as a red-light district, according to History Colorado research. Over the decades, most people have forgotten that Denver even had a Chinatown, Li said, despite containing about 1,000 residents at its peak in 1890.

So Li worked with History Colorado and the Colorado Asian Pacific United Group, as well as his students, on an exhibit that would bring it back to life. Fortunately, “Where Is Denver’s Chinatown? Stories Remembered, Reclaimed, Reimagined” goes beyond the tragic 1880 event in which 3,000 white people attacked a far smaller number of Chinese immigrants, setting their homes and businesses ablaze in the process.

The exhibit’s goal is to collect and present detailed memories of the neighborhood, which housed mostly male Chinese workers who came to Denver during the mineral- and gold-rush era of the late 1800s.

To read the entire article: https://www.denverpost.com/2024/11/22/denver-chinatown-colorado-history-exhibit/