Japantown Atlas - Central California - Fresno Chinatown

Fresno's Chinatown Japanese American Businesses of 1940

Notes:
This map shows Fresno's Chinatown as it appeared in 1940. As noted, the map is drawn primarily from the 1918 Sanborn maps, so includes more horse-and-buggy era landmarks than might have appeared in 1940. I updated a couple landmarks (Okonogi Sanitarium and adjacent dwellings) from 1948 but have not cross-checked the whole map. Some modern landmarks are shown in red.

This map shows the area from Fresno Street south to Ventura Street, and from Hwy 99 east to the Southern Pacific RR tracks. The SP Depot is at the right edge of the map; Fresno's faded downtown begins just past it. Follow Mono Street east and you'll bump into the new baseball stadium. Hwy. 99 took a big bite out of the neighborhood and cut off the suburbs to the west (thankfully there are a fair number of bridges); The Danish Creamery now extends across several blocks, and the city has been actively tearing down abandoned, buildings. So the neighborhood is rather cut up compared to this idyllic view, but there is still enough standing to get a sense of place. The edges are, in some respects, in better shape than the center.

West Fresno landmarks are shown on the Fresno map.

The original map measures 11x17. It's shown here as two abutting JPEGs (spliced down Kern Street). If you have trouble printing this web page on your home printer, you might try swiping each half of the JPEG to your computer's desktop and printing those files individually. Also available as a PDF.