The first immigrants from China moved to Baltimore in the late 1800s. Many of them had originally landed on the West Coast to work on the railroad but fled east to escape anti-Chinese sentiment.
Here, they discovered that one section of the city already bore a Chinese name. John O'Donnell, a former sailor, named his large East Baltimore plantation Canton in honor of the Chinese port city.
The city's first Chinatown centered around Marion Street, near the current location of Lexington Market. Immigrants opened laundries, restaurants, import stores, gambling parlors and joss houses - small temples - in the neighborhood, according to the History of Chinese Americans in Baltimore, a 1976 book by Leslie Chin.
The first Chinese-Americans were mostly bachelors because harsh federal immigration laws prevented them from bringing a wife to this country or marrying an American citizen, says Taunya Lovell Banks, a law professor at the University of Maryland School of Law who led a project to preserve the history of Baltimore's Chinatown.
"One wonders what Baltimore would have looked like without these immigration laws," Banks says. "It would have been a much more ethnically diverse city."
One of the early Chinese residents of Baltimore was Sun Yat-sen, a revolutionary and Nationalist who briefly headed China's first republic in the early 20th century. For several months in 1902, he organized his supporters across the globe from an office on Marion Street, according to a history compiled by Banks' students.
The buildings on Marion Street were demolished to make way for a department store, and Chinatown moved a few blocks north to its current Park Avenue location.
Restaurants that would become landmarks, such as the White Rice Inn and the China Inn, later called the China Doll, opened. Five of the founding families formed associations to help bring over relatives. Civic organizations were formed, some of which still have offices on the block, such as the Chinese Free Masons and the Om Leong Chinese Merchants Association.
Inside the Om Leong offices, a high staircase leads to a hallway lined with faded photos of banquets and award ceremonies. A hand-made dragon head sits on a small table, neon pink tongue lolling from its mouth, crazed eyes facing a blank wall.
