Hope for Last Rural Chinatown

In the eastern shadow of an earthen levee holding back the Sacramento River, the little town simmers under a blanket of spring heat, a decrepit relic with a sorrowful tale to tell.

This is America’s last rural Chinatown, a place of faded beauty and elusive dreams. For decades, Locke has sagged, dogged by discriminatory land policies of generations past. Its one main street fell into disrepair, its immigrant founders died off, their offspring moved on. Today 80 people call it home, only 10 of Chinese ancestry.

But the tiny town, equal parts historic enclave and housing slum, is on the verge of redemption.

County leaders in Sacramento, 30 miles up the two-lane levee road that bends its way alongside the river’s mocha-colored waters, agreed recently to purchase Locke and start the arduous process of repairing this sullied little settlement of 51 businesses and homes.

Connie King has been waiting decades for this day.

She arrived in Locke as a bride half a century ago. King, 78, jokes that she married not just a man, but a whole town. She raised children in Locke, ran an art studio on Main Street, helped with births and buried the dead.

Her family came from China’s Canton province. Her father-in-law numbered among the Chinese laborers who forged the Western rail lines. He spoke enough English to earn respect and the honorary title of “king,” which caught on as the family’s anglicized name.

King has been among those toiling for two decades to save Locke. As the original Chinese inhabitants aged and passed on, she promised each that she would work to keep the town from withering away.

The immigrants who founded Locke in 1915 were the same Chinese laborers who helped shape the Golden State. They constructed the vast network of levees and dikes of the Sacramento River Delta, draining the tidal wetlands to create some of the world’s richest farmland. Early converts to the California dream, they built their own homes and businesses, established churches and created a community.

But they never owned the land beneath their feet.

Chinese Were Barred From Acquiring Land

Therein lies Locke’s curse. The Alien Land Act prohibited the town’s Chinese inhabitants from acquiring property. Locke came into existence because George Locke, a farmer, agreed at the behest of Chinese leaders to lease property after a fire destroyed the original ethnic enclave just downriver in Walnut Grove.

Locke’s first residents built a thriving place, a startling melding of Western and Eastern culture. Yet they could sink their roots no deeper than the fragile redwood foundations of whitewashed storefronts and clapboard houses crowded onto the town’s 10 acres.

In its heyday there were more than 300 inhabitants. There were butchers and shoe repair shops, each one carrying the name in English and Chinese. There was also an opium den. Fireworks blazed during Chinese New Year. Locke was long known as a wide-open town, home to several gambling parlors finally closed in the 1950s.

Despite sin businesses aplenty, there was virtually no other crime. The elders made sure of that. Solid families were raised, and parents tutored their children in the immigrant dream. The children went off to college, places like Stanford and Berkeley. Some of the parents moved on, others grew frail and eventually died off.

Those who remained were hard-pressed to see to basic maintenance, let alone keep their homes and businesses in pace with modern times. Without ownership of the land, financing could never be secured. Even though the Alien Land Act was repealed in 1952, the town was not subdivided into parcels anyone could afford.

Slowly, the once-proud storefronts and clapboard homes fell into disrepair. The sewer system, little more than a communal septic tank, succumbed to the years. Of late, water sanitation officials have issued notices of violation. Bureaucrats have talked ominously of shutting the place down.

The town is half shut down already. Many of the decaying buildings on Main Street are empty. The old Star Theater, once the home to Chinese opera troupes from San Francisco, looks like it could fall over in the stiff afternoon breeze that blows in off the delta. It bulges precariously at the junction of the first and second floors, like a pair of puckered lips. Everywhere, paint is chipped and faded.

Some days, a tourist bus will stop. Even in disrepair, Locke remains a tantalizing curiosity. The town became a National Historic Landmark in 1990.

The one establishment with a thriving constituency is Al’s Place, a venerable eatery that for years was the only business run by non-Chinese. Al’s continues to draw crowds of boaters and delta denizens with its roguish ambience and charbroiled steaks. Its owner, Stephen Giannetti, has watched Locke wither around him with dismay.

“I grew up down here, and I don’t want to see it go by the wayside,” he said. “But I’m hopeful we can turn it around.”

New Inhabitants an Eclectic Crowd

Out back, Locke’s two dusty residential blocks are lined with little homes of wood, corrugated steel and sun-washed paint. The new inhabitants are an eclectic crowd. There are artists and farm workers, white people and Latinos and the smattering of surviving Chinese Americans.

The town and more than 400 acres of surrounding orchards were purchased in 1977 by a Hong Kong family, but they simply carried on the tradition started by John Locke, collecting meager monthly rents (less than $100 for a business, as little as $25 for a home).

Clarence Chu, general manager of Locke Property Development Inc., said his family considered subdividing the town into small lots and selling the parcels to the inhabitants. But the costs proved formidable, most notably the more than $1 million needed to upgrade the antiquated sewer system.

“There’s been lots of unfair fingers pointed at us,” said Chu, an amiable man who runs a Main Street curio shop filled with Chinese trinkets. “This is a positive change that’s been long overdue.”

The county is already working to stabilize 11 battered buildings at the point of collapse or condemnation. Several others have been deemed unsafe to occupy.

Under plans approved recently, the county will purchase the 10-acre town site for $250,000. A grant is nearly secured from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to fix the sewer system. Once that work is completed, the county will subdivide the properties, selling them off at about $5,000 a lot.

At long last, each of the buildings and the land below will be united by deed and recorded title, placed in the hands of individual owners. The town will have a future.

“Locke has such a unique history and story to be told,” said county Supervisor Don Nottoli, who has pushed to save the town. “It’s such a strong part of the history of the delta and development of California.”

Years of hard work remain. There are plans to establish a nonprofit group to help run the town. Tight building restrictions are envisioned to maintain its historical character. Each of the commercial buildings on Main Street will require $16,000 in fire sprinkler upgrades. Most will also need substantial and costly construction work before anyone would declare them shipshape.

But for the first time in years, King sees hope.

As she walks down Main Street in the afternoon quiet, she points out storefronts that once held prosperous businesses.

“The Chinese people built the levees, they planted the crops, they built all this,” King said. “That’s why I want it preserved.”