Why College Street matters.
College Street is a layered corridor where Chinatown's immigrant character meets an 1849 street plan, hillside settlement and the successive communities that transformed the northern edge of the original pueblo.
Running through Chinatown between Elysian Park and the Los Angeles River, the east-west corridor follows a compact line from the hills west of North Broadway across Hill Street and Yale Street before descending through North Broadway and North Spring Street toward the historic rail approaches beside the river. West of Hill Street, sharp grades carry apartment buildings and detached houses onto slopes rising toward Elysian Park and Dodger Stadium. Broadway marks a pronounced change as the hillside street enters Chinatown's denser commercial blocks before reaching the flatter ground around Spring Street. The eastern end crosses a transportation landscape shaped by elevated rail infrastructure and the low ground separating the old pueblo from the Los Angeles River. The result is a corridor whose short descent from residential hills to Chinatown and the river-side plain compresses several of the oldest geographic layers of urban Los Angeles into a few blocks.
What defines College Street.
College Street is best known for preserving a name placed on Edward O. C. Ord and William Rich Hutton's 1849 plan of Los Angeles in anticipation of a Catholic school that was never constructed. Catholic clergymen petitioned the ayuntamiento on June 9, 1849 for pueblo land on which to create a college devoted to public instruction. Municipal authorities granted a square parcel measuring 150 varas on each side beside the cañada leading toward the San Fernando road, immediately north of the future street and west of Buena Vista Street. The grant prohibited sale, transfer or mortgage of the property and required any building erected there to remain devoted to education. Ord and Hutton arrived the following month to map the expanding American-era city and marked the adjoining road Calle del Colejio, translated on the plan as College Street. The proposed Catholic institution failed to materialize, yet the name endured through more than 175 years of urban change. College survives with Main Street and a remnant of Adobe Street among the few names in present-day Chinatown carried forward from the Ord-Hutton plan. The surrounding district was then part of the northern pueblo fringe, with undeveloped hills immediately west and agricultural ground extending across lower terrain toward the river. Migration from Sonora during the Gold Rush era transformed the area into Sonoratown, and Mexican households were subsequently joined by French, Italian, Croatian, Dalmatian, Syrian and Chinese residents across the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The street name preserves an unrealized educational project from the first months of American municipal government across terrain that soon became one of Los Angeles's most persistent immigrant settlement districts.
A different institutional history developed at 531 West College Street, where Los Angeles's French community created a hospital whose constituency changed repeatedly with the surrounding neighborhood. The French Benevolent Society formed in 1860 to provide medical care for French immigrants and acquired land on College Street for a permanent facility. French and Italian Angelenos laid the cornerstone for an adobe hospital in 1869, and the institution occupied the site from 1870. A larger hospital replaced the nineteenth-century facility in 1915, followed by another expansion in 1926 as medical operations grew. The destruction of Old Chinatown for Union Station during the 1930s shifted the center of Chinese American community life toward College Street, gradually changing the population served by the hospital. By 1989, Asian patients represented 55 percent of its patients and Chinese physicians constituted a substantial part of its medical staff, even as the French Benevolent Society retained institutional leadership. Financial pressure threatened closure that year before physicians and community members organized a purchase valued near $4.2 million for the hospital and equipment, with a separate option covering the land. The facility subsequently became Pacific Alliance Medical Center, carrying a nineteenth-century French institution into the Chinese American district that had developed around it. Its College Street history captures a rare continuity in which the same medical site followed the demographic transformation of northern Los Angeles from a European immigrant enclave into the heart of modern Chinatown.
How College Street fits.
College Street works as the anchor for an outing connecting Chinese American civic rebuilding, a school whose student body tracked successive immigrant migrations and a twenty-first-century rail station built above one of the city's oldest transportation districts.
Begin at Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, whose Los Angeles predecessor, the Wai Liang Association, formed in 1889 and operated from the Garnier Building in Old Chinatown before becoming the principal umbrella organization for Chinese American associations 1910. Union Station construction displaced Old Chinatown during the 1930s, forcing the organization and neighboring institutions from their earlier base. Peter SooHoo and the Chinatown Corporation subsequently coordinated development of New Chinatown between Broadway and Hill Street, and the corporation donated land at 925 North Broadway for a permanent CCBA headquarters beside College Street. Presidents Lai Hing Wong and Tin Hing Wong led the building campaign, with Chinese American architect Eugene Choy designing the two-story headquarters in a restrained Mid-Century Modern composition carrying East Asian architectural references. The CCBA and its Chinese Confucius School opened there in May 1952, reestablishing a civic institution uprooted from Old Chinatown within the community's new geographic center. Continue to Castelar Elementary School, founded in 1882 at College and Castelar streets as a four-room school serving 300 to 400 pupils with four teachers. Fire destroyed the original building in 1904, prompting construction of a two-story wooden replacement, and five classrooms were added in 1923 as Chinese enrollment increased. New Chinatown's growth changed the student body further, making Castelar the first Los Angeles school with a predominantly Asian enrollment. The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act and later arrival of Southeast Asian refugees drove enrollment from 529 pupils in 1965 to 1,156 in 1980, with Asian students comprising 80 percent by the latter year. William Chun-Hoon became principal in 1973 as the first Chinese American principal in the Los Angeles Unified School District and developed Spanish and Cantonese bilingual instruction for a student body in which 60 percent had limited English proficiency. Choy and Associates designed the replacement school completed in 1977, with landscaping donated by the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association. Conclude at Chinatown Station, the elevated rail facility opened at North Spring and College streets in 2003 as part of the original Gold Line between Los Angeles and Pasadena. Gensler designed the station, and artist Chusien Chang developed The Wheels of Change as an extensive public artwork drawing upon the I Ching. A 34-foot Ba Gua constructed from railroad tracks honors nineteenth-century Chinese railroad workers, and 64 granite pavers across the plaza carry the hexagrams of the ancient text. Castelar students assisted with placement of the pavers, physically linking the new transportation project with the neighboring school. Chang added a 16-foot granite I Ching dial and four benches carrying Chinese, Mexican, Italian and Croatian imagery tied to communities that settled the surrounding district. The progression moves from the CCBA's post-displacement institutional rebuilding through Castelar's transformation alongside successive immigrant populations and culminates at a rail station whose architecture and public art encode those communities into a modern transportation gateway, joining three generations of Chinatown civic life directly along College Street.
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