Chinatown

This guide to Chicago's Chinatown traces how the On Leong Merchants Association came to run the neighborhood after Chinese immigrants, barred from legally buying land in the early 1900s, leased blocks along Wentworth Avenue through a middleman firm starting in 1912. You'll hear how the association's members funded a grand new headquarters at Cermak and Wentworth by 1928, borrowing dragon tile and terracotta patterns from southern Chinese architecture, and how the building doubled as bank, school and hostel for new arrivals. Look up at the painted canopy over its entrance to see what the association was really running behind those beams.