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Sustainable Preservation: California’s Statewide Historic Preservation Plan, 2013-2017

Preservation Success Story—Asian and Pacific Islander Preserve America
Communities in Los Angeles

In May 2011 the City of Los Angeles
Asian Pacific Islander Neighborhoods’
Cultural Heritage and Hospitality
Education and Training conference was
funded by a $250,000 Preserve America
Grant that five neighborhoods
collaborated to attain. The success of
that conference underscores the success
of those five neighborhoods, whose
Preserve America status has helped
them develop heritage tourism The gates of Chinatown with Los Angeles City
strategies, build partnerships, ferret out Hall in the background (Photo from the Carol M.
new funding sources, and network to Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress, Prints and
build new collaborations. Photographs Division)

Little Tokyo, Los Angeles’ first
Preserve America neighborhood, is
one of the first and largest Japanese
American urban communities to form
in the United States. The first
Buddhist Temple in Los Angeles,
built in 1925 by Japanese
immigrants, stands across the plaza
from the Japanese American National
Museum, the largest museum in the
country devoted to capturing the
experience of Japanese Americans.
The Koyasan Buddhist Temple in Little Tokyo (Photo
courtesy Toksave)

The Koreatown neighborhood of Los Angeles
dates to 1904, when the first Koreans arrived
in the city. Today, Koreatown encompasses
more than two square miles just west of
downtown Los Angeles, the highest
concentration of Koreans in the United
States. For more than 35 years, the Los
Angeles Korean Festival has drawn many
visitors, more than 350,000 in recent years.

Wilshire Park Place is a 1966 building in
Koreatown that is most well-known for
housing Radio Korea. (Photo courtesy
(continued on next page) Visitkoreatown.org)

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