What started as a bar fight virtually destroyed Denver’s Chinatown. Only the victims paid.
October 31, 1880: On Halloween, a white mob attacked Denver’s Chinatown, known derogatorily as Hop Alley, in what became the city’s first race riot.
Many Chinese workers had come to Colorado seeking better opportunities after the decline of West Coast gold mining and the completion of the transcontinental railroad. By 1880, Denver’s Chinese residents lived and worked in a district in what is now Lower Downtown, known today as LoDo.
That fall, Chinese immigration was a national issue in the presidential election, and both major parties’ platforms called for restricting it. Each accused the other of being soft on the question. The Democratic candidate, Winfield Scott Hancock, supported a ban. On October 28, the Rocky Mountain News reported open talk in Denver of running the Chinese out.
On October 30, about 3,000 people attended a Democratic Party anti-Chinese demonstration. Marchers carried anti-Chinese signs, and prominent Denver Democrats gave speeches warning of the supposed danger of continued Chinese immigration.
Bloody Halloween
The next day, two Chinese men were playing pool at John Asmussen’s Saloon on Wazee Street when a group of white men came in and started harassing them. Asmussen advised the Chinese men to leave through the back door to avoid a fight, and they did.
The white men followed them out, and one struck a Chinese man with a board. A crowd gathered and began attacking Chinese people working in the laundry next door.
More and more people joined. Mayor Richard Sopris and the fire department tried to scatter the mob with a fire hose, but it did little, and the eight police officers on duty were largely powerless. The mob set fires, looted and destroyed property, and attacked residents.
Look Young, a 28-year-old laundryman, was dragged through the streets by a rope around his neck, beaten and lynched. Hundreds of other people were wounded.
Chinese Exclusion
The riot died down by the next morning. But nearly every Chinese home and business in the neighborhood had been destroyed.
Few rioters were convicted of any crime, in part because of the size of the mob and the chaos of the scene. No one was punished for killing Look Young, even though credible eyewitnesses saw his beating and lynching.
Chinese residents were not compensated for their losses.
This was one of more than 200 anti-Chinese riots across the American West around that time, including the Los Angeles Chinese Massacre of 1871. That wave of violence helped fuel the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which passed with bipartisan support.
Remembering Clearer
Chinese residents tried to rebuild, and by 1890 more than 980 Chinese lived in Denver. But the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the rise of steam laundries shrank the community. In June 1940, a Denver Post headline announced that Chinatown had been ordered torn down. Warehouses and industrial buildings later filled the alley.
For decades, the only marker at the site was a plaque near 20th and Blake Streets titled “Hop Alley/Chinese Riot of 1880.” Advocates objected that it never called the attack anti-Chinese, lingered on opium dens, did not name Look Young, and praised white citizens.
In April 2022, Mayor Michael Hancock signed a resolution formally apologizing to the descendants of Denver’s Chinese immigrants. That August, the city removed the plaque, which History Colorado is preserving. A mural by Nalye Lor and new historical markers, including one that tells Look Young’s story, now stand in the area.
It took Denver 142 years to apologize.