The Chinatown That Became a Parking Lot

If you walk down Commercial Street in Salt Lake City today, you'll find parking lots, a few office buildings, and not much else. It's the kind of anonymous downtown block that exists in every American city — functional, forgettable, empty of history. There is only a small plaque on Regent Street, easy to miss. Otherwise, there is nothing to indicate that for nearly a century, this was Plum Alley: Salt Lake City's Chinatown, home to hundreds of Chinese immigrants, a community erased so thoroughly that most residents don't know it ever existed.

The men who built the transcontinental railroad lived here. They came from Guangdong Province, survived the brutal labor camps of the Sierra Nevada, and settled in Utah when the work was done. They opened laundries and restaurants. They raised families. They built a neighborhood. And then, in 1952, the city demolished it all to make room for a parking structure.

This is the story of Plum Alley — how it was built, how it survived decades of persecution, and how it disappeared.

The Railroad Men

The Chinese came to Utah to build. In the 1860s, the Central Pacific Railroad was racing eastward from California, trying to lay more track than the Union Pacific and claim a larger share of the government bounty paid per mile. The work was brutal — blasting tunnels through granite, laying rail in desert heat, surviving Sierra winters. White workers wouldn't do it, or wouldn't do it cheap enough. So the railroad recruited Chinese laborers, eventually employing over 10,000.

They were paid less than white workers, given the most dangerous jobs, and housed in separate camps. They died in avalanches, explosions, and accidents that nobody bothered to count accurately. But they built the railroad — including the section that crossed Utah and linked up with the Union Pacific at Promontory Summit in May 1869.

When the golden spike was driven, thousands of Chinese workers were suddenly unemployed in the middle of the Utah desert. Some returned to California. Some went to the mining camps. And some walked south to Salt Lake City, where they found a narrow alley between Commercial Street and Regent Street and began to build a community.

"To me, it is just like a slap in the face. We built the railroad, but we were not recognized."

— Margaret Yee, Descendant of Chinese railroad worker

Plum Alley

The neighborhood that emerged was called Plum Alley — a narrow street, really, running between Second South and Third South. By the 1880s, it had become a self-contained world: Chinese groceries sold dried fish and preserved vegetables imported from San Francisco. Laundries served the broader city, since washing clothes was one of the few businesses white Salt Lakers would tolerate. Restaurants fed workers who couldn't cook for themselves. Gambling halls and opium dens operated semi-openly, tolerated by police who collected regular bribes.

There was also a temple, tucked into an upper floor, where the residents practiced a mix of Buddhism, Taoism, and ancestor worship that confused and alarmed the Mormon majority. The Joss House, as it was called, was one of the few places the men of Plum Alley could gather to observe traditional holidays and remember the villages they'd left behind.

The population fluctuated. Census records show roughly 300 Chinese in Salt Lake City in 1880, rising to over 500 by 1900. Almost all were men — the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 prohibited the immigration of laborers' wives and children, creating a bachelor society that would persist for generations. The men of Plum Alley grew old alone, sending money home to families they would never see again.

The Persecution

Plum Alley survived because it had to. The Chinese were not welcome anywhere else in Salt Lake City. They faced housing discrimination, employment discrimination, and periodic violence. In 1886, a mob of white workers attacked Chinese-owned businesses throughout downtown, smashing windows and beating anyone who didn't flee fast enough. The police did nothing.

The Salt Lake Tribune ran editorials calling for Chinese expulsion. Local politicians campaigned on anti-Chinese platforms. Laws were passed requiring Chinese businesses to pay special taxes. The message was clear: stay in your alley, stay quiet, stay invisible.

And so they did. Plum Alley became a refuge — the one place in the city where Chinese families could live without daily harassment. The neighborhood developed its own economy, its own social structures, its own way of coping with a hostile world. They didn't bother the white city. They just tried to survive.

"They used to have those little shops where you could go and buy Chinese groceries that were sent from San Francisco... and you'd look in the back and there would be a bunch of guys settin' around tables gambling."

— Henry Ju, Former Plum Alley resident

The Slow Death

The Chinese Exclusion Act didn't just prevent new immigration — it ensured that Plum Alley would slowly die. Without women, there were few families. Without families, there were few children. Without children, there was no next generation to inherit the businesses, maintain the temple, remember the language.

By the 1920s, Plum Alley was aging. The railroad workers who had founded it were old men now, or dead. The laundries and restaurants still operated, but they were struggling. The Great Depression hit the neighborhood hard — the customers who once paid for laundry service couldn't afford it anymore. One by one, businesses closed.

World War II brought a brief reprieve. China was suddenly an American ally, and Chinese Americans experienced a slight warming in public attitudes. The Exclusion Act was finally repealed in 1943, though with a laughably small quota of 105 immigrants per year. It was too little, too late. By the end of the war, Plum Alley was a shadow of what it had been — a few dozen elderly men, a handful of businesses, buildings falling into disrepair.

The city began to notice the valuable real estate they were occupying.

The Demolition

In the early 1950s, Salt Lake City embarked on an urban renewal program. The goal, as in cities across America, was to clear "blighted" neighborhoods and replace them with modern development. Plum Alley was targeted. The buildings were old. The residents were poor. The land was valuable. It was an easy decision.

By 1952, the demolition was complete. The laundries, the restaurants, the gambling halls, the Joss House — all of it reduced to rubble. The remaining Chinese residents were scattered across the city. Some moved to the west side. Some left Utah entirely. The community that had existed for nearly a century simply ceased to exist.

In its place, the city built a parking structure. Later, more parking lots. Office buildings. The block became what it is today: anonymous, functional, empty of memory.

The Ghosts

There's a strange coda to the Plum Alley story. In the decades since the demolition, people working in the buildings and parking structures that replaced it have reported unusual experiences. Cold spots in basements. The smell of incense in empty rooms. Footsteps in hallways where no one is walking.

The Rio Grande Depot, which stands nearby, is said to be haunted by a "Purple Lady" — though some historians believe that ghost story was actually invented to distract from darker legends about the Chinese workers who died in the neighborhood. A few paranormal investigators have claimed to pick up Chinese language fragments on recording devices, though such evidence is, of course, unverifiable.

It's easy to dismiss ghost stories. But there's something fitting about the idea that Plum Alley refuses to stay buried. The city erased the buildings. They erased the records. They erased the memory. But the land remembers. Maybe the ghosts are just the neighborhood's way of insisting it existed — that people lived and worked and died here, and that their erasure was a choice, not an inevitability.

What Remains

If you want to find traces of Salt Lake City's Chinese history, you have to look carefully. The Chinese American community that exists today is descended mostly from later immigrants, not from Plum Alley. The old neighborhood left few physical artifacts — some photographs in the Utah State Historical Society archives, some artifacts in storage, some oral histories recorded before the last survivors died.

There is no Chinatown in Salt Lake City today. Unlike San Francisco or New York, there was no critical mass of residents to rebuild elsewhere when Plum Alley was destroyed. The community was too small, too old, too scattered. It simply dissolved.

In recent years, historians and community members have worked to recover the memory of Plum Alley. BYU's Intermountain Histories project has documented the neighborhood. The Utah Division of State History has digitized photographs. A historical marker was finally installed on Regent Street during recent redevelopment — a small copper square in the pavement, a quiet apology for a century of erasure.

Walk down Commercial Street in Salt Lake City and you'll see nothing. Parking lots. Office buildings. The ordinary infrastructure of a modern downtown. There's no sign that hundreds of people once made their lives here, that the men who connected the nation by railroad spent their final years in these buildings, that a temple once stood where you're now walking.

Plum Alley lasted almost a hundred years. It survived the Exclusion Act, the mob violence, the Depression, the slow demographic death of a bachelor society. What it couldn't survive was urban renewal — the decision by city planners that this block would be more valuable as parking than as a neighborhood.

The Chinese came to Utah to build. They built the railroad that connected the nation. They built a community in a hostile city. And when the city decided it needed their land, they watched it all come down.

Now there's a parking lot where Plum Alley used to be. You can park there for $8 an hour. There's no discount for knowing the history.