Los Angeles, CA Photo - New Chinatown in Los Angeles, California

The area that today encompasses New Chinatown was originally Los Angeles' Little Italy. In the early 20th century, Italian immigrants settled in the area north of the Old Plaza. Many built businesses, including wineries (San Antonio Winery is the only one of these still in existence. In the 1920s and 30s, Italians began moving out of Little Italy to elsewhere in the city. When the Italians moved out, the Chinese began moving in. In the 1930s, under the efforts of Chinese American community leader Peter Soo Hoo Sr., the design and operational concepts for a New Chinatown evolved through the collective community process, resulting in a blend of both Chinese and American architecture.

Carol M. Highsmith (born 1946) is a photographer, author, and publisher who has photographed all 50 of the United States, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico for 30 years. She specializes in documenting architecture, ranging from the monumental to the everyday and whimsical. Highsmith is donating her life ’s work of more than 100,000 images, copyright-free, to the Library of Congress, which established a rare one-person archive. Out of 14 million images, the Carol M. Highsmith collection is featured in the top six alongside of Mathew Brady and Dorethea Lange. Credit line: Photographs in the Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Credit line: The Jon B. Lovelace Collection of California Photographs in Carol M. Highsmith's America Project, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.