Portland's Chinatown Gate
Icon of enchantment or discrimination?
Hillyer tells the history behind the Chinatown gate. She talks about how Chinatown was originally located 5 or 10 blocks south of its current location and how city organizers took advantage of the wreckage of old Chinatown in the 1894 flood and moved it north of Burnside to its current location.
As Told By...
Reiko Hillyer, PhD
Assistant Professor with Term
Lewis and Clark College
Since 2006, Reiko has taught in the history department at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon, where she was awarded Teacher of the Year in 2009. Reiko teaches courses in modern United States history, African American History, the Civil War, women’s history, and the history of the American landscape. Reiko received her B. A. from Yale University and her doctorate at Columbia University. Reiko’s current book project, Designing Dixie: Landscape, Tourism, and Memory in the New South, explores northern tourism to the South in the era following the Civil War and examines the role that tourism played in fostering reconciliation between North and South. Formerly a high school history teacher and guide for Big Onion Walking Tours in New York City, Reiko is a lifelong New Yorker who is almost adjusted to the calm of Portland.
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