Where You Stand

The Chinatown History Project [Where You Stand], explores a core moment in the history of Asian Americans in Southern California. During the 1860s, 24,000 Chinese immigrants arrived in California to seek fortune in the gold rush, but faced discrimination and violence. Many moved to Chinatowns in Pacific cities. Many of the Chinese laborers crucial in building the western transcontinental railroad settled in Los Angeles. By the 1880s, LA's Chinatown had grown across multiple city blocks along Alameda Street right where the South Pacific Railroad originally ended. Despite the area housing a bulk of Los Angeles’s Chinese community, efforts to move the community and demolish the neighborhood began as soon as the 1890s. Then, in the 1930s, plans for the Los Angeles Union Passenger Terminal led to the demolition of Chinatown, displacing the 2,500 remaining residents.

The project uses digital humanities and augmented reality to revive Old Chinatown's history, highlighting the experiences of those who lived and worked there before their forced removal. It aims to educate on Asian American and Southern California history, fostering empathy and understanding of the consequences of urban planning decisions.

Originating from a box of old photographs of Old Chinatown, the project, led by historians William Deverell and Greg Hise, has grown to include diverse researchers. It focuses on the life histories of Chinatown's residents, revealing a lesser-known aspect of LA's history of racial antagonism toward Asian communities. The project combines humanities research with modern technology, offering a new perspective on this lost neighborhood.

The Temporal Memory Anomaly Research Institute (TMARI) believes the area in and around the station is experiencing temporal memory anomalies (TMAs). TMAs occur when a point in history, mostly forgotten by the average person, rapidly returns into the public consciousness. This rapid and localized re-remembrance leads to the generation and concentration of memory energy: an inter-dimensional state of matter that causes tears in the fabric of time and space itself.

In the case of the Union Station area, the buildings and people that momentarily appear are those of Los Angeles’s first Chinatown, which stood in its place before being demolished to make room for the station.

To further investigate these anomalies, TMARI has developed a special technology that stabilizes memory energy. They are asking anyone at Union Station to help mark memory anomaly locations and capture images of anything that appears on their screens.