Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [895]
Soon the little complex received another and far larger demographic infusion, this time from California. Tens of thousands of Chinese, overwhelmingly unskilled peasants from rural Guangdong (Canton) and Fukien, had come to America to build the transcontinental railroad. Its completion in 1869 threw twenty thousand of them out of work. Most of them returned to California, where many entered the hand laundry business. When the depression of the 1870s struck California, many white workers scapegoated the Chinese, whom they considered unwitting capitalist tools. Animosities exploded into violence—pogroms of a sort—and led California to enact punitive antiimmigrant provisions. Many Chinese fled east along the transcontinental link they themselves had constructed.
Their arrival in the New York region in the late 1870s and early 1880s galvanized a new metropolitan industry. Each week, in Belleville, New Jersey, Captain James Hervey’s Passaic Steam Laundry Factory machine-washed and hand-ironed six thousand shirts newly manufactured in the garment factories of New York City. Considering his workforce of Irish women to be obstreperous in their wage demands, and finding it hard to snare sufficient numbers of greenhorns on trips to Castle Garden, Captain Hervey imported sixty-eight Chinese from San Francisco, sneaking them into his factory compound by dead of night. This touched off protest rallies in Tompkins Square Park against coolie labor. And in the end, the Chinese too proved unsatisfactory, peeling off, as their contracts expired, to open their own hand laundries.
At first “washee washees,” as metropolitan journalists referred to them, were few in number, perhaps thirty by 1877. In 1879, with the West Coast exodus underway, a Sun reporter found two hundred hand laundries in Manhattan. By 1888 Wong Ching Foo, a scrappy bilingual journalist-lecturer who wrote about and defended New York’s Chinese, estimated there were over two thousand such laundries in New York, with another eight or nine hundred in Brooklyn. There was, he explained, no other way to make money as surely and quickly, given “the prejudice against the race.” Start-up costs were low, perhaps a hundred dollars, and the average laundryman could save a nest egg of fifteen hundred or two thousand dollars, sell the laundry to relatives flocking in from the West Coast or Hong Kong, and return to China. Soon nearly every street and avenue in New York was festooned with signboards bearing good-luck names painted in flaming red.
The 1890 census counted 2,048 Chinese in the city, though the true figure was probably four to five times that. Of these, less than 20 percent lived in Chinatown, mostly cigarmakers who worked in the vicinity or merchants, clerks, barbers, doctors, and professional gamblers. Many in the Chatham Square area lived in dormitories, set up in the cheapest parts of dilapidated private houses, further divided into cubicles for those who could afford minimal privacy, with the rest stuffed into tri-tiered bunks, often two to a bed (three-per-bedders got rock-bottom rates of $i .50 to three dollars a week).
Most Chinese, however, were scattered about the city, domiciled in quarters attached to the hand laundries where many spent 80 percent of their lives. Others lived in mansions of the uptown rich, who had taken to hiring male Chinese house servants—there were still virtually no Chinese women in the city—to replace refractory Irish girls. Isolated and lonely—the only Asian faces they were likely to see were