Full transcript
The Gate
Start at Grant Avenue and Bush Street, under the Dragon Gate. Three portals, guardian lions, green tile roof. It was dedicated in 1970, designed by Melvin Lee, Joseph Yee and Clayton Lee. Walk through it and you are in the oldest Chinatown in North America, and one of the most densely populated neighborhoods in the United States. Grant Avenue used to be called Dupont Street, and in the eighteen hundreds it was the most notorious block on the West Coast. The name was changed after 1906, along with almost everything else here, and that change was not an accident.
The Decision
In April 1906, the earthquake and the fire that followed burned Chinatown to the ground. City officials saw an opportunity. This was prime real estate near the financial district, and there were serious plans to move the Chinese community out to Hunters Point, on the industrial edge of the city. The community fought back, and one of the people who led that fight was a merchant named Look Tin Eli. His argument was economic: move us and San Francisco loses the China trade to Oakland or Seattle. Then he did something cleverer. He hired a Scottish-American architect, T. Paterson Ross, and an engineer named Burgren — neither of whom had been to China — to rebuild his corner at Grant and California as an idealised Chinese fantasy. Pagoda roofs, curled eaves, dragon motifs, colour everywhere. The Sing Chong Building went up first, and the other merchants followed.
The Fairy Palaces
So the Chinatown you are walking through was deliberately designed to be visited. Look Tin Eli's own phrase for what they were building was veritable fairy palaces filled with the choicest treasures of the Orient. Underneath the pagoda tops, most of them are ordinary American commercial structures. The Chinese look was applied, on purpose, to make the neighborhood too valuable as an attraction to bulldoze. It worked. It is still working. But the real Chinatown is one street over. Turn off Grant onto Stockton Street, where the groceries and the fish markets and the herbalists are, and where people actually shop. Stockton is where the neighborhood lives. Grant is where it survived.