Snapshots of the Past

[San Francisco Chinatown, 1895-1900(?): man and boy working at outdoor laundry] – Historic Reproduction

[San Francisco Chinatown, 1895-1900(?): man and boy working at outdoor laundry] — historic photograph
[San Francisco Chinatown, 1895-1900(?): man and boy working at outdoor laundry]. Historic photograph from the San Francisco collection.

(Originally scanned by the Library of Congress. Each image is professionally and digitally cleaned of artifacts such as color bars and extra borders prior to printing.)

Description

A window into the past: [San Francisco Chinatown, 1895-1900(?): man and boy working at outdoor laundry], preserved in this historic photograph. Sourced directly from the Library of Congress, it represents an authentic piece of documented history.

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[San Francisco Chinatown, 1895-1900(?): man and boy working at outdoor laundry]

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Few things in this San Francisco set show ordinary labor as directly as an outdoor laundry in Chinatown, where a man and a boy work side by side in the open air. Laundries were among the most common businesses run by Chinese immigrants in the city, a livelihood that followed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which shut many workers out of other trades. The record dates the photograph only tentatively, to about 1895 to 1900, so the scene is best read as a glimpse of daily work in the neighborhood at the turn of the century. The pairing of an adult and a child at the washtubs is worth noticing, since family members often shared the labor of these small shops.

Medium1 photographic print.
Notes[1890-1900?]
SourceLibrary of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division
Original scan1,536 × 1,210 px · prints to 5 × 4 in at 300 dpi
ReferenceAMZ-SOTP-HPA-119624

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