General Rides Again

“I don’t know what we’re doing, but we’re doing it,” says architect Mark McManus. “We’re capitalists trying to preserve a soulful enterprise.”

McManus is one of three partners who are reopening--and re-conceiving--the much beloved but long-shut General Lee restaurant on Gin Ling Way in Chinatown’s Central Plaza. Though no longer owned by the Lee family or anyone of Chinese heritage, the new incarnation of the 140-year-old establishment still follows the Lee family tradition of adapting the restaurant to the times. This General Lee promises a novel aesthetic, a new menu and an even more ambitious mission when it opens in October. (It may also have a new name--permission to use “General Lee” is still being secured.)

McManus stands in the 17-foot-high main space, where for the last two decades the slatted bamboo screens on the tall south windows filtered only a motionless light into the dark interior. Like a lot of the regulars down here, he is dressed in forgettable clothes fit for any kind of task. Here the task at hand is transforming the space into a “public house.” A bar-cafe. An artist’s local and political base.

Today the bamboo screens are thrown back against the walls. The air is bright with sawdust, the rotted interior replaced by red-orange patterned plywood that runs floor to ceiling on the east and west walls, identical to the building’s unabashed exterior. Beyond, a more intimate space with a low V-sloped ceiling houses the bar, which is finished in the same red plywood. The only surviving element from the past is the elegantly turned wood staircase leading up to the studio and wood shop of home-grown, globally renowned artist Jorge Pardo, partner number two.

In the studio, the physics-educated, architecturally trained McManus works with a handful of other artists, who help Pardo realize his complicated sculptures and environments. The third partner is Steve Hanson, co-owner of the art gallery China Art Objects, who lives in Chinatown with his wife, artist Frances Stark. Founded in January 1999, China Art Objects is one of the oldest “new” galleries on nearby Chung King Road. Hanson’s associations with Chinatown go back to punk rock days in the 1980s. The new bar-cafe has won the support of reigning Lee patriarch David Fon Lee, 81, building owner and the restaurant’s former proprietor, who perceives the trio as kindred spirits in their boldness and savvy timing, given Chinatown’s resurgence. “They are risking, just as we risked coming here across the water in a boat,” he said. The project also has earned the respect of neighboring business people, 23 of whom signed a petition presented to the Community Redevelopment Agency supporting the plan.

Lee, a popular and well-known figure in Chinatown, said the family restaurant dates back to a “2-by-4 shack” built in the 1860s by Lee’s Canton-born grandfather on the site of Old Chinatown at Union Station. Later, they moved the business to a two-story building, with a restaurant upstairs and an herb store downstairs.

By the 1940s and ‘50s, the restaurant was run by four Lee brothers, David, Norman, Merton and Walter. It had an ethnically diverse but devoted clientele, Lee said, including “defense workers needing a release at the end of the day, Gregory Peck, Otis Chandler, news reporters”--one of whom suggested renaming it General Lee because its original title, Man Jen Low (“Ten Thousand Treasures”) wasn’t catchy. “People could remember General Lee’s--it’s like Prince Romanov. There was no prince, either,” Lee added.

Clothing designer Rudi Gernreich designed the flamboyantly colored waiters’ uniforms which were displayed on the pages of Life magazine in 1956 and were the envy of women diners who begged to buy them.

When Chinatown began to languish in the mid-1980s, and David Lee’s son died in a car crash, he closed the restaurant.

None of the new partners have restaurateur bloodlines. Cuban-born Pardo, 39, who graduated from Art Center College of Design’s fine arts program in 1988, holds an elite position in the international art world. These days, his work is likely to be fabricated in Leeds or Delft and exhibited in Tokyo or Rome. A huge new concrete house he designed in Puerto Rico is nearly complete, its floor reminiscent of the floor he designed with McManus’ help for the Dia Center for the Arts in New York in September 2000, an explosion of colorful ceramic tiles patterned on fractal geometries.

Pardo and his old friends, the architect and the art gallery owner, are keeping their day jobs while they negotiate city bureaucracy and the concerns of a community still smarting from Chinatown’s decline in the late 1970s, which was exacerbated by the fallout of late-night revelers from the punk rock days of Madame Wong’s of the early ‘80s and then again by the 1992 riots. The opening, originally slated for July, is now planned for October.

The venue, which will host readings and lectures and offer the requisite espresso and a select range of beers, will have all the hallmarks of a Pardo museum installation. An array of Pardo lamps will complement huge chandeliers of plastic, laminate and plywood made in the studio, one of which quickly gained in-house repute for its “Pabst Blue Ribbon” allusions, veering between tackiness and high art. If this were a museum, such an installation might cost from $20,000 to $100,000, Pardo said.

Even the making of the bar might be considered a form of art, given Pardo and McManus’s belief in blurring boundaries or confounding expectations about the everyday. With Pardo involved, the endeavor also slyly suggests that anyone intentional and persistent about a goal is making art, which makes anyone calling themselves artists ... artists. “It may be a seminal piece,” said Brian Butler, owner of 1301 PE Gallery in West Hollywood and a representative of Pardo’s art, only partly tongue-in-cheek. “But at the end of the day, people are going to ask, ‘Is this a good place to have a drink? A conversation? Can you hear each other talk?’”

The project signals a maturation of the art community north of downtown. Four years ago, the scene inserted itself as yet another wash of cultural color into an urban fabric imbued with Italian precedents and Vietnamese newcomers. Now the art “scene” is creating its own traditions even as artists’ and business owners’ roles blur and meld.

For example, Joel Messler may be found instigating art at the Diannepruess Gallery on nearby Chung King Road ... or tending bar at Hop Louie’s, the famous pagoda-shaped restaurant and watering hole in Central Plaza.

The partners’ purpose, however, isn’t to link two communities. It is to strengthen one: artists’. “Artists have to be a lot scrappier here [in the U.S.]. They don’t have the government subsidies or the prestige they have in Europe. They have to be more entrepreneurial,” McManus says.

“It’s never going to be a bar bar,” says Pardo. “I’m not sure that people will know what they’re going to get, and I’m not sure we know what we’re putting out.... Look, most artists are weasels. They’d sell their mothers to be famous. Very few of them are interested in actually making work, or in giving back to the community.

“I’m interested in setting up an envelope of art culture here that actually can be taken seriously, in setting up a consequent, political base. There’s a lot of money coming out of City Hall. Maybe instead of morons deciding what should be public art, you have an educated group of people who have an international understanding of the art world. The kind of base we’re trying to make doesn’t exist here.”

Pardo makes clear that the bar-cafe is entrepreneurial. “The only way to survive and do what you want is to have the money to do it. If this place is profitable, no one’s in a position to edit the content of what comes out of this place.”

In many ways the neighborhood camaraderie the new gathering place proposes to enhance is already here informally. “What’s really happening down here in Chinatown is about daily life,” said Messler of the Diannepruess Gallery. “Sure, a lot of people come down here once a month, but really it’s about Frances Stark and Steve taking their laundry basket and kitty litter downstairs [from their apartment].... It’s about people actually talking about things that matter, about exchanging rather than guarding. I think General Lee’s will be a great venue for that.”

The art scene in Chinatown is about shaking things up, doing as much as one can with as little as possible, said McManus. The partners’ investment was matched by an interest-free loan from the Community Redevelopment Agency’s Chinatown Project of $97,500, with 10% of the principal forgiven each year as long as the business is profitable. According to project director Len Betz, the loan is part of a current $1.9 million allotted to improve facades and buildings.

The powerful Chinatown Community Advisory Committee, a state-mandated group that advises the Chinatown Project, supports the new incarnation of General Lee--with conditions the partners volunteered, such as not having music or a happy hour that might disrupt the community, said Don Toy, longtime CCAC member.

The project is one example of how to use available city funds with some imagination. Building owner-architect Roger Hong, son of Y.C. Hong, the lawyer who helped create Chinatown’s Central Plaza in the late 1930s, is bringing in young Asian American tenants to propel a different new Chinatown, one cut more to Hong’s sense of refined sensibilities and contemporary architectural trends in Asia, which in turn are informed by a Modernism with a European pedigree.

Two doors down from the General Lee site, the Via Cafe is to open in September, proffering exotic teas and coffees. Ensuring that new vision meant evicting Dorothy Lee, who has operated Imperial Dragon, a clothing and object shop, since 1979. Chock-a-block with stuff, it embodied an older paradigm of Chinatown. In contrast, Hong’s other tenants, such as Tokyo A Go-Go, which specializes in Japanese streetwear, have a far sparser repertoire of edgier merchandise.

Neither the Via Cafe nor the General Lee project will be isolated art objects. After all, one translation of Man Jen Low is “Ten Thousand 10,000 treasures,” but another translation could be read as “Ten Thousand Realities,” a phrase embracing not only the original restaurant’s virtually limitless menu, but the plethora of artistic values and cultural visions of Chinatown as well.

“We had a tremendous reputation, but everyone gave up on it,” Lee said of his family business. “Now, on the outside, the restaurant is a sunshine cloud of orange. For an old-fashioned man like me, it was a shock, but you can’t stop progress, you can’t stop dreaming. If they want to try, let them prove themselves. I wish them luck, with all my heart. Make something of it.”