King of the Opium Ring 1901 ad
Asians who found their way to the city opened restaurants, import shops, and laundries because white residents opposed the licensing of other occupations. To earn money, many Chinese residents hired themselves out as day laborers and domestic help. The earliest Chinese laundries operated in the Badlands, a crime-ridden neighborhood with Third and Wells Streets at its core. Asian gift shops sold silk, tea, dolls, sandals, clothing, party lanterns and porcelain dinnerware to upscale customers. Espenhain’s Dry Goods store sold 5,000 sacred Chinese lily bulbs for a nickel each, and the Currie brothers’ greenhouse at 27th and State sold Chinese primrose plants for a quarter. Gimbel’s department store sold a reported 20,000 Mah Jong game sets in 1923 alone. Consumer goods were popular; the people who sold them were not.
Milwaukeeans’ biggest fear was that opium, morphine, and cocaine were now in the city. The use of opium in the United States went back to the Civil War, when soldiers used it to ease pain and other ailments caused by bullets, cannonballs, swords and knives. Rather than present facts, newspapermen salaciously wrote that secret opium dens housed brothels and gambling rooms. The proprietors were portrayed as sinister figures dressed in black silk. Lurid descriptions of shaved heads, braided queues, and hooded eyes terrified readers. The papers overlooked that white men were caught in the dragnet every time an Asian vice parlor was raided. That opium had been harvested, trafficked, and consumed on earth for more than 5,000 years also went unreported.
In March 1889 a laundry at Fifth and Clybourn was raided, and John Hah Ding and Sam Yip Yaw were sentenced to 15 years at Waupun for criminal assault on two white teenagers. In the ensuing riots, many laundries were damaged, and windows were broken. The owners were marginalized as “chinks,” “celestials” and the “yellow peril.” A headline in the Daily Journal stated, “The Chinese Must Go.”
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Anti-Immigrant Melodrama
Public perceptions of Asians suffered further damage when the blood-and-thunder melodramas drew huge crowds to theaters. In February 1901, the Bijou presented King of the Opium Ring at 50-cents a seat. Ironically, the stars of the production were white.
The attacks on Chinese-owned businesses continued, and police officers showed little if any interest toward solving the crimes. The operators of a laundry at 17th and State prevented a burglary late one evening, and two masked men fled the scene empty-handed. One employee was beaten with a hammer and wrench before being thrown through the storefront’s plate glass window. He suffered a skull fracture and concussion. The attackers were never apprehended.
In another incident, two well-dressed men entered a laundry and told the owner, “Get in the back room, chink.” As the bandits grabbed $25 out of the cashbox, a huge flat iron was thrown from behind a curtain, striking one of the men. A police officer, Detective Briggs, answered the call. When he heard that one of the assailants carried a blue steel pistol, Briggs laughed and reportedly said, “Boy, you’ve been reading too many newspapers.”
Enter Charlie Toy
In 1903, Charles “Charlie” Toy, operator of a successful restaurant and Chinese import shop in Oshkosh, decided to move his business to North Plankinton Avenue in Milwaukee. His Shanghai restaurant was patronized by the chief of police, the fire chief and several aldermen. Even the cynical newspaper reporters took to Toy instantly and dined at the Shanghai at least once a week.
From his office behind the restaurant, Charlie ordered hundreds of crates of merchandise on credit and resold the contents to merchants in the Chicago and New York City Chinatowns. Within two years, he was the nation’s largest wholesaler of Chinese goods. Charlie’s net worth was $4 million in today’s currency when he built the beautiful Shanghai building that recalled the grand structures in his homeland. Green terra cotta tile, red Chinese characters, decorative lanterns and golden dragons at the roofline made for a striking addition to Second Street near Wisconsin Avenue. On opening day, the Toy Restaurant’s second floor dining room was packed from noon to midnight. Toy’s sons and grandsons operated the family’s restaurants for the next 100 years.
In addition to his many civic contributions, Charles Toy’s greatest gift to Milwaukee was the reversal of four decades of bigotry that had plagued the city’s Chinese population since the 19th century.
