CHINATOWN REVEALED by W. W. Overton

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Mountain View, Cal. · May 2, 1906

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 32, No. 18.

CHINATOWN REVEALED.

By W. W. Overton

[By W. W. Overton, in despatch from Los Angeles. Mr. Overton was one of those who were in the city at the time of the earthquake and fire.]

STRANGE is the scene where San Francisco's Chinatown stood. A heap of smoking ruins marks the site of the wooden warrens where the slant-eyed men of the Orient dwelt in thousands. The place is pitted with deep holes and seared with dark passageways from whose depths come smoke wreaths. All the wood is gone and the wind is strewing the ashes.

Men, white men, never knew the depth of Chinatown's underground city. They often talked of these subterranean runways. And many of them had gone beneath the street levels two and three stories. But now that Chinatown has been unmasked, for the destroyed buildings were only a mask, men from the hillside have looked on where the inner secrets lay. In places they can see passages one hundred feet deep.

The fire swept this Mongolian section clean. It left no shred of the painted wooden fabric. It ate it down to the bare ground, and this lies stark, for the breezes have taken away the light ashes. Joss houses and mission schools, grocery stores and opium dens, gambling-hells and theaters—all of them went.