A Timeless Tradition in Center of Change

The desire for wealth and good luck is expressed every day at the wishing well in the middle of Chinatown.

Some close their eyes and cross their fingers when they fling coins at 10 bowls bearing labels such as “money,” “love” and “wisdom.” Others lean as close as they can and aim as carefully as they can.

Most who visit Chinatown’s Central Plaza at 947 N. Broadway, however, are just yearning for a little fun when they pepper one of Los Angeles’ most unusual landmarks with pocket change.

Cindy Prins of Gainesville, Fla., let fly Monday afternoon with a nickel, narrowly missing the bowl marked “happy.” Happily, she didn’t seem all that upset.

A moment later, Robert Santos of San Diego sailed a penny directly into a bowl labeled “lotto.” Grinning, he promised to play the next state lottery, “just to test” the wishing well’s power.

For 64 years the strange-looking sculpture in the center of one of the city’s most colorful ethnic neighborhoods has drawn dreamers of every description. But describing the Chinatown Wishing Well is almost impossible.

It is above ground, not below the surface like other wells.

It’s made of rough, irregularly shaped concrete, not stones set in a circle.

It’s painted in splotches of red, blue, green and yellow, not natural earth tones.

Tiny statues of Buddha stand on its ridges and peaks. Dead tree branches are carefully arranged on both sides and strands of plastic ivy are draped over a rear area. A small moat partly encircles the front. Turtles and occasional fish can be seen swimming in it.

A faded sign almost hidden behind the jagged cement gives the only explanation to the puzzling structure: “Miniature reproduction Seven Star Cavern built by Prof. H.K. Lu.”

That hardly begins to tell the story of how the unusual wishing well became a centerpiece to the changing luck of Los Angeles’ Chinese community in 1938, however.

Immigrants from China first came to Southern California in the late 1850s to help build wagon roads and lay railroad tracks. Initially barred from owning property, many of them eventually settled near downtown’s Olvera Street in rented homes and storefronts used for hand laundries, herb shops and markets.

About 3,000 Chinese were living there by the 1930s, when the whole neighborhood was uprooted to make way for construction of Union Station on Alameda Street. A group of families and merchants banded together as the Los Angeles Chinatown Corp. to create a “new Chinatown” to the north on Broadway.

Second-generation Chinese could own property. So American-born Department of Water and Power engineer Peter Soo Hoo led the group in purchasing a railroad storage yard they turned into a traditional Chinese-looking, tile-fringed pedestrian plaza.

The “New Chinatown” became one of America’s first shopping malls. And along with its striking pagoda-styled structures, one of its showpieces was the wishing well.

Artist Hong Kay Lu based its design on one of China’s most beloved natural landmarks, the sprawling Seven Star Cave. Artisans from China were called in to help with the cement work, which was touted as a true-to-scale version of the real 1,100-yard-long cavern.

Piped-in water cascaded through some of the mock cave’s chambers. Koi swam in the pond, which at the time encircled it.

The new Chinatown was an immediate success. Restaurants and shops were jammed. At night the neighborhood came to life with colorful lights, music and street entertainers. For three decades, the neighborhood steadily expanded around the Central Plaza.

“People would throw silver dollars into the wishing well. They were so heavy that the rice bowls and the figurines would get broken when coins hit them. Some even threw gold coins into it,” Roland Soo Hoo recalled Tuesday.

Soo Hoo is the nephew of Chinatown founder Peter Soo Hoo. (He is also the uncle of the late Los Angeles Police Officer Arthur Soo Hoo, who with partner William Wong, was killed in Chinatown in 1983 by a hit-and-run driver. A suspect in that case has been arrested after two decades on the run, police announced Monday.)

Things were changing by the 1970s, however. Waves of new Chinese immigrants led to an ethnic population shift eastward to the San Gabriel Valley. New Asian commercial areas popped up in suburban Monterey Park and Alhambra. Young Asian families settled down in residential neighborhoods in Rowland Heights, Walnut, Diamond Bar and San Gabriel.

By the 1990s, Chinatown tourism was down and the neighborhood’s luster was fading.

The area’s 192 property owners formed a business improvement district in 2000, agreeing to tax themselves to pay for sidewalk sweeping, private security patrols and beautification work.

These days freshly planted trees line some streets. A pair of Victorian cottages have been turned into the headquarters of the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California.

There’s talk of replacing a long-shuttered restaurant called Little Joe’s with an ambitious housing project. And the Gold Line is coming.

The trolley line, costing about $850 million and linking Pasadena with downtown Los Angeles, opens Saturday. Its Chinatown stop, about a block from the wishing well, is described by transit officials as the system’s “showplace station.”

“I think it’s going to bring a lot of people into Chinatown. They can come to shop without having to worry about parking. People can get off the Gold Line and have a Chinese dinner before taking a bus up to Dodger Stadium,” said Soo Hoo, who is current president of the Los Angeles Chinatown Corp.

There is no estimate of the amount of money that has been tossed into the wishing well over the past six decades, Soo Hoo said. Though money retrieved from it in the past went to community service, the coins now are applied to its maintenance.

The wishing well could be in for some good luck of its own, however, said George Yu, executive director of the Los Angeles Chinatown Business Council.

A $5,000 grant from the Neighborhood Matching Fund Program is available to begin the refurbishment of the wishing well. New water pipes and a modern electrical system are needed, along with fencing that is more attractive than the current barbed wire-topped chainlink, Yu said Tuesday.

It will cost at least $20,000 to return the site to its 1938 splendor. “It’s a landmark -- we can always find additional sources of money for it,” Yu said.

In Chinatown, they hope that’s not wishful thinking.