Tahoe Quarterly

An Era Reclaimed

by Ellen Hopkins

For decades, residents and visitors alike largely overlooked the time-wearied building by the bridge on Southeast River Street, site of the former Chinese Herb Shop. Few cared to explore beneath its incongruent rooflines and flaking paint. But had they peeled away the layers, they would have found chapter after chapter of Truckee’s storied—and sometimes sordid—past.

Between 1874 and 1878, the wooden shanties of Truckee’s original Chinatown were torched at least ten times. The last fire, in October 1878, burned Chinatown to the ground. As its residents considered rebuilding, the vigilante group “601” issued an order for all Chinese to leave Truckee within a week.

   Instead, the Chinese armed themselves. Afraid of a bloodbath, a few sympathetic citizens helped relocate the immigrants across the river, today’s Southeast River Street. Front and center of what became known as the East Ward was the Chinese Herb Shop. It sold herbs, fresh vegetables and, if legend is to be believed, women in red and black tar opium.

   The stout, little structure was meant to withstand fire, with brick walls 17 inches thick and doors made of steel. Some two feet of dirt covered the attic floor—both insulating the ceiling and protecting it from flames. This all proved foresighted, for when yet another fire devastated the East Ward, the Chinese Herb Shop remained standing. The Chinese were finally driven from Truckee in 1886; the building and its tales of basement prostitution and opium pipes were left behind.

   Over the ensuing years, the Chinese Herb Shop site was used as a soda works, brewery, bottling company, sign shop and garage. Each incarnation resulted in a structural alteration or addition, including a concrete building, quite unlike the original building—thus, the hodgepodge of rooflines, foundations and sidings discovered by current owner John McManus. McManus is responsible for renovating many of Truckee’s old buildings, including the Truckee Mercantile, Robertson Building and one of Jibboom’s Street’s tin garages, for which he was recognized in the 2007 Tahoe Quarterly Mountain Home issue. He had owned the Chinese Herb Shop for 25 years before restoring the valuable riverfront property.

   “John McManus’s vision was to create a viable commercial property,” says Denyelle Nishimori, associate planner for the Town of Truckee. “But rather than demolish the original Chinese Herb Shop, he chose to restore it to a period of significance.”

   Nishimori was an integral part of the team that accomplished that goal, along with builder Steve Isbell; structural engineer Steve Walton; and project professional Jennifer Lees, who was responsible for much of the design, under Truckee architect Dale Cox.

   “This was, hands down, a real collaboration, and it took many to accomplish it,” says Lees. “Something like this doesn’t come along every day. From the first, we were all very excited, because this was a project with both historic and social significance.”

   The group settled on 1920 as a restoration point, a time when the herb shop housed a Coca-Cola bottling plant. It seemed a more appropriate place to begin than the 1880s.

   “With any historic restoration, a major goal is to disturb the property as little as possible,” says Lees. “But often, you don’t know exactly what you’ll find until you start peeling off layers. With all the additions, this was a real puzzle—what parts of the building actually qualified as ‘historic’?”

   The site’s concrete block structure, which was constructed circa 1960, was separated from the historic building; McManus chose to give that building a separate facelift. Meanwhile, next door, the detailed work continued. “One of the sections in back was on an unstable foundation,” says Lees. “We couldn’t tear it down, so Steve Walton designed a unique footing system to keep it standing.”