Chinatown Tours Faked Opium Dens

During the Gilded Age, "slumming" became a tourist craze in New York, with wealthy patrons paying guides for nighttime tours of Chinatown to witness urban poverty and vice. Demand for sensational sights grew so strong that guides staged them: a man named Chuck Connors employed Chinese actors to fake addiction and drug-induced stupor inside an opium den, while staged knife fights and distant gunfire added to the illusion. Visitors then returned home believing they had witnessed authentic life in Chinatown.

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