Reconstruction of Tim Pang's Restaurant
- jtecco
- 13 minutes ago
- 5 min read
On a cold November day, a little boy was found outside Suwon’s South Gate. The records are unclear about the exact location of the South Gate, though it is believed to refer to Paldalmun Gate. Between fragmented records and the uneven traces of memory, it has been difficult to fully recover that little boy’s story. That little boy was me.
Suwon, a city just south of Seoul in Gyeonggi-do, is rich with history. It is also a place shaped by destruction, rebuilding, and resilience across more than 600 years. Hwaseong Fortress, which was heavily damaged during the Korean War, was able to be reconstructed because detailed records survived. Those records made restoration possible. But historic spaces are not sustained by documents alone. They also hold the lives, memories, and experiences of the people who moved through them.
That tension between what the archive preserves and what it leaves out matters because it is often where the fuller human story lives. It is in that intersection that history becomes more human and more honest. When we treat memory as a form of knowledge, history is no longer shaped only by institutions or scholars, but in partnership with the people who have lived it.
That way of thinking has shaped how I approach my work in Cincinnati. Here, the archive has often flattened significant spaces into little more than addresses, fragments, and scattered mentions. That is especially true of Tim Pang’s restaurant, which stood at the edge of the West End from the 1920s into the late 1950s. More than a business, it was a human space. Yet the historical record has not fully held onto the lives, relationships, and community meaning that once gathered there.
What remains in the archive is thin. The 1928 Williams’ City Directory lists Tim Pang at 514 W. Sixth Street, and city directories continue to place him there into the late 1950s. The archive gives him presence in Cincinnati, but not his humanity. It preserves an address, not the fuller life that moved through that space. It does not tell us who gathered there, what the restaurant meant to the neighborhood, or how Tim Pang’s presence may have been remembered beyond the limits of the written record. That is where memory, place, and community history begin to matter.
Even so, the archival record occasionally opens a slightly wider view. The first fuller glimpse of Tim Pang’s life appears in the 1930 Census. There, he is listed as married with two children. At the time of the census, he was 54 years old, which suggests he was born around 1875 or 1876 in California. The census also identifies him as a proprietor in the restaurant industry, giving a little more shape to the life behind the directory listing. These details may seem small, but they matter. They remind us that Tim Pang was not simply the name attached to an address or a business, but a husband, a father, and a working man whose life was rooted in family, labor, and place. Still, the census only offers a narrow frame. It tells us that he had a family, but not what their daily life looked like, what hopes or burdens they carried, or how they made a life at the edge of the West End.
It was through that same search for a fuller human story that another layer of Tim Pang’s history came into view. I cannot research in isolation. It is often others' invitations that expand my view. My wife introduced an important new dimension to my research on Tim Pang when she forwarded me a listing for Tim Pang’s restaurant in the Negro Motorist Green Book. That finding reframed the newspaper advertisements I had been seeing. Between 1950 and 1956, Pang placed help-wanted ads in the Cincinnati Enquirer and the Cincinnati Post that explicitly recruited “colored” dishwashers and waitresses. The Green Book listing placed those ads in a different light and suggested that Tim Pang’s was connected to Black mobility, labor, and leisure in ways I had not fully considered.
That connection became even more significant as I traced Tim Pang’s through the Green Book over time. Tim Pang's restaurant appeared in the 1946 edition of the Negro Motorist Green Book, the first issue published after wartime suspension. From there, I continued tracing the restaurant across Green Book listings between 1946 and 1959. In my initial findings, Tim Pang’s restaurant appears to have been one of roughly fifteen Chinese-owned restaurants included in the Green Book and, with listings across fourteen years, one of the most sustained presences among them. That continuity suggests that Tim Pang’s was not simply a Chinese restaurant in Cincinnati. It was also a place known within Black travel networks and Black public life.
The Green Book relied on a national network of postal workers to identify safe places for Black travelers. That detail expands how I think about Tim Pang’s restaurant. It raises the possibility that a neighborhood postal worker may have known the restaurant firsthand, visited it regularly, or learned through word of mouth that it was a safe place to recommend. These small nuances add texture to the historical absences and help us think more carefully about how knowledge of the restaurant moved through the community.
The possibilities grew with a fuller idea of Tim Pang; it even became more tangible in the newspapers. Weeding through hundreds of articles that referenced Tim and Pang, I came across a 1985 Cincinnati Post article by Gayle Harden-Renfro titled “Former patrons miss good times at club.” The article offered a community reminiscence of the famed jazz venue, the Cotton Club. Located in the Sterling Hotel at the corner of Sixth and Mound Street, it sat just over a block west of Tim Pang’s restaurant. Harden-Renfro wrote, “After the balls were over, the gang would pile into over-sized cars and go to Tim Pang’s for Chinese…” That passing reference matters. It suggests that Tim Pang’s was more than a business listed in directories and advertisements. It may have served as a social space within Cincinnati's wider Black nightlife geography. Read this way, the article complicates the flattened archival record and gives Tim Pang a fuller place in the city’s lived history.
Taken together, these traces point toward something larger. It is the glimmer of one memory that can help represent Tim Pang’s restaurant and so many other APIA sites. These places do not survive only through archival traces. Their histories also live in community memory, where they remain part of West End history and the neighborhood's lived spatial knowledge. Through the memories of the APIA community and adjacent communities, the co-creation of history can enrich and make Cincinnati’s historical narrative more inclusive.
Tim Pang’s was not only a Chinese restaurant. It was also a West End place. That matters because the history of the site may survive not only in business listings or newspaper mentions, but in the memories of the people who lived around it, passed by it, ate there, worked nearby, or carried it forward as part of neighborhood life.
What do you remember? What memories can you share? APIA Cincinnati spaces? What has stayed with you?
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