Electrician in Chinatown, California

Chinatown mixes older commercial buildings with apartments above and newer infill. Mixed use metering and three phase service work both come up here more than in purely residential districts.

The Chinatown of today mostly dates from the late 1930s, after the original Chinatown was cleared to build Union Station. Central Plaza and the blocks around Broadway and Hill Street filled with two and three story commercial buildings, family associations and restaurants, often with apartments or offices upstairs. Low rise apartment buildings and older houses sit on the hillside streets toward Elysian Park, and since the 2000s several large mixed use and apartment projects have gone up near the Metro Gold Line, now the A Line, station.

Many of the older storefront buildings were wired for a shop downstairs and a few rooms above, then rewired in pieces as tenants changed. We find abandoned circuits from long gone businesses, house panels shared between commercial and residential space, and services that cannot support a modern restaurant kitchen. Building owners call when a restaurant or retail tenant needs more capacity, when upstairs units need to be separated from the commercial meter, or when an insurer or buyer asks for a current electrical evaluation.

What Chinatown properties usually need