LA's Old Chinatown Ponders a Future With Wal-Mart On the surface, a big Wal-Mart store might seem out of place in the midst of the old-fashioned curio shops, the little dim sum eateries and the colorful lanterns and pagodas that make up one of the oldest Chinatowns in the United States. But then so does the Catholic church that offers Sunday Masses in Croation. Or the one that performs them in Italian. Not to mention the imposing statue of French hero Joan of Arc that stands just a stone's throw from the one of modern China's founding father, Sun Yat-Sen. When Wal-Mart announced plans earlier this year to open one of its outlets on the fringes of Old Chinatown, alarm bells went off in some quarters. The local city councilman pushed successfully for a moratorium on opening large stores in downtown, although Wal-Mart got around that by pulling its permits before the ordinance took effect. Several business owners, meanwhile, expressed concerns that Wal-Mart, known for its cheap prices on everything from tires to toys, would put them out of business and lead to the destruction of the area's ambience. Overlooked in much of the debate was that Chinatown wasn't always Chinatown. Over the years, it has also been Frenchtown and Little Italy, and a portion of it was once home to a Croation community. Evidence of the latter is 102-year-old St. Anthony's Croatian Catholic Church, located just up the hill from where the Wal-Mart would go. More recently, Chinatown's population has seen an increase in Hispanics, who now make up about a quarter of the square-mile area's 11,000 residents. It's a square mile that displays the city's famous diversity and multicultural history to a remarkable degree, says Los Angeles writer Lisa See, who has drawn extensively from her own family's Chinatown history for such books as "On Gold Mountain" and the 2009 best seller "Shanghai Girls." "We as a city, I think, don't pay much attention to that history or that diversity, but once you cover it up it's gone for good," added See, acknowledging she frets about the impact a generic Wal-Mart will have on the culturally rich area where she spent hours as a child playing in her family's store. Wal-Mart spokesman Steve Restivo says the store won't be one of those gigantic supercenters the company is famous for but a much smaller "neighborhood market" about one-fifth the size. Those markets typically sell groceries, fresh produce and such other items as pharmaceuticals, deli foods, stationery and dry goods. He noted the store, scheduled to open next year, is going into a building that has been vacant for years. The Chinatown location was selected, Restivo said, after Wal-Mart determined the area was lacking in stores that sell fresh food. Whatever the store's impact on Chinatown, it won't mark the first time downtown's Chinese community has been reshaped or reinvented. Old Chinatown, as it's now known, was actually New Chinatown when it welcomed the public on June 25, 1938, with a gala party attended by, among many others, Hollywood's first Chinese-American movie star, Anna Mae Wong. Often overlooked in accounts of that opening day, however, was that New Chinatown was built from the ground up to replace OId Chinatown, which was razed to make room for another LA landmark, historic Union Station.