Chinatown was a Chinese ethnic enclave located on Tulane Avenue in New Orleans, Louisiana from the 1880s to the 1930s. From 1867 to 1871, following the American Civil War and the collapse of the slave-based economy of the Old South, local planters imported hundreds of Cantonese contract laborers from Cuba, California, and directly from China as cheap labor. By the mid-1870s, most of the Chinese immigrant laborers had left their plantations and moved to the large urban centers, seeking higher pay and better working conditions. The Chinese came to work in factories, dominate the hand-wash industry in New Orleans, import tea and luxury goods to New Orleans, and export Southern cotton and Gulf of Mexico shrimp to other Chinatowns and China itself. By the 1880s, the Chinese merchants had established a "Chinatown" on Tulane Avenue, and a "Chinese Presbyterian Mission" was established to convert the Chinese to Christianity. They opened businesses such as dry goods groceries, import/export companies, apothecaries, restaurants, laundries, and the meeting halls of several Chinese associations. In 1937, the federal government and Works Progress Administration (WPA) decided to clear Chinatown and the surrounding ethnic neighborhoods to make room for economic development and new investment in Downtown New Orleans. A few Chinese businesses continued to exist in the French Quarter during the 1940s, but the Bourbon Street Chinatown died out after just three decades. By the late 1970s, the younger, more educated, and more affluent Chinese-Americans of New Orleans moved to the city's suburbs, including the Eastbank of Jefferson Parish. Today, the On Leong Merchants Association at 530 Bourbon Street remains the last landmark of the former Chinatown.
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