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Chinese Butcher and Grocery Shop, Chinatown, S. F.
San Francisco, [ca. 1887]. Albumen print, mounted on paperboard. 7.5” x 9.5” on larger mount. CONDITION: Very good, rich tonality, some wear to mount, short closed tear just to left of photographer’s credit. One of four known Taber photographs of Cheong (a.k.a Chong) Wo & Co.’s grocery and butcher shop, considered by some “the most famous Chinatown butcher shop of the pre-1906 community” (Chan). Showing a proud Wo standing in the doorway of his store, Taber’s photograph documents this thriving vegetable and meat market in San Francisco’s Chinatown just prior to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1892. Wo and an assistant look directly at the camera, surrounded by baskets, boxes, and bins of yams, potatoes, string beans, etc. Above them hang what are likely sides of pork and other meats. Two other workers appear in the wings, apparently unpracticed in the art of standing still for a photograph. Just visible at the top of the wooden pillar to the left of Wo is the store’s wooden sign, which presents only one Chinese character, “和.” A different photograph taken by Taber of the same store includes the market’s English-language sign, which, somewhat in the shadows and partially cut off, reads “Ong Wo & Co.” According to collector and lawyer Douglas S. Chan, the business was in fact Cheong Wo & Co. It “appeared in the 1882 Directory of Chinese Business Houses published by Wells Fargo Co.” and occupied 847 Dupont St, which was located “on the southwest corner of the intersection with Washington Street” (“Taber’s Theme”). Wo’s store apparently supplied white butchers with their meat and in 1888 faced several allegations of supplying unsanitary and diseased pork. One newspaper article from October, 1888 recalls Wo’s store receiving a “wagon of…a load of hogs. They were still steaming and warm, as the Chinese will not take them in any other condition.” But once inside the store, the reporter alleges that he found “some of the carcasses…thrown promiscuously on the filthy floor,” and he further alleges that there were “several where the traces of the rotten lungs of the animals were still clinging to their sides.” Apparently, Wo had told this reporter that his shipment of hogs “would be cut up…and hung up to season till…morning, when they will be called for by the white butchers who patronize him” (“Hog Lungs”). Another article from December of the same year alleges that Wo may have been buying diseased pork on the cheap: the reporter recalls the testimony of one “B. Mooney, employed as a detective,” who claimed he saw a “wagon deliver three hogs to Chong Wo. & Co., 847 Dupont Street…According to Mooney’s statements the hogs were unfit for use and smelled offensively. Nevertheless they were cut up and sold…Mooney also made a sworn statement that a number of white butchers had bought pork from Chinese” (“Diseased Pork”). Whether these allegations were true or not, Cheong Wo’s butcher and grocery store remained at 847 Dupont until the turn of the century, and then relocated to 712 Dupont around 1904. Photographer Isaiah Taber was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts in 1830. He sailed to California during the Gold Rush aboard the Friendship, then worked as a miner and rancher before taking up dentistry and photography. In the early 1860s he moved back east to Syracuse, N. Y. and set up a photo studio, then returned to San Francisco in about 1864, where he worked for other photographic firms before setting up his own studio in 1875. In 1881, Taber acquired the negatives of California photographer Carleton Watkins, who had gone bankrupt, thereby augmenting his stock of images—a boon to his business. Taber’s photographs of San Francisco’s Chinatown constitute some of the richest documentation of the district during the late nineteenth century. OCLC records no holdings; however, we have located one example at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and another in the Marilyn Blaisdell Photography Collection at the Bancroft Library. An evocative image of a noted and perhaps notorious Chinatown butcher and grocer. REFERENCES: Chan, Douglas S. “Taber’s Theme and Variation on a Dupont Street Butcher Shop” at Streetscape & Memory: Chinese Urban Pioneer Images online; “Hog Lungs: Tainted Meat Sold To Butchers and Restaurant Keepers,” The San Francisco Examiner, October 12, 1888; “Diseased Pork,” San Francisco Chronicle, December 20, 1888.
Item #9298
Price: $1,250.00
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