Cool Gray City of Love

by Gary Kamiya

  Burnham famously said, “Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realized.” He was true to his word. His plan called for the entire city to be remade to look, as one architect commented, “like Paris, with hills.” At the heart of his vision was a series of Parisian rond-points (roundabouts) and open spaces, with wide radial and diagonal streets cutting through the 19th-century grid. A Roman-inspired civic center at Van Ness and Market would form the city’s center, from which would radiate nine wide boulevards. Following Burnham’s precept that every citizen should be within walking distance of a park, the area around Lake Merced, in the southwestern corner of the city, would be transformed into a vast public green space, even bigger than Golden Gate Park. The Panhandle would be extended all the way to the civic center. The streets on Nob and Russian Hills would be taken off the grid and rebuilt to follow the circular contours of the hills. Telegraph Hill was to be crowned with a templelike structure, with Italianate villas ringing its base. As for Twin Peaks, it would be crowned with a majestic “Athenaeum” consisting of “courts, terraces and colonnaded shelters,” the latter “arranged after the manner of the great Poecile of the Villa Hadrian.” In the center of the Athenaeum, “the moral and geographical center of the city” overlooking the Pacific, would stand a “colossal figure symbolical of San Francisco.”

  Some of Burnham’s ideas, like Baron Haussmann’s for Paris, were too grandiose for their site. His Greco-Roman plan for Telegraph Hill, as former San Francisco city planning director James McCarthy noted in his introduction to the facsimile reprint of the 1906 plan, would have destroyed “the tight little medieval Italian hill town that we cherish today.” Others might not have translated well to the automobile age: His grand boulevards might have turned into ugly ring roads. And Burnham—who was later criticized by Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright for excessive fealty to classicism—ignored the city’s rich architectural history, evinced in the shingled redwood cabin Polk built for him, as well as its Victorian and Spanish colonial heritage.

  But many of Burnham’s ideas were decades ahead of their time. For example, he proposed combining small backyards in residential areas to form a chain of parks, 25 years before such a plan was implemented in Sunnyside Gardens in Queens. His proposal for one-way streets was also prescient—and not adopted in San Francisco until 1942. His still more visionary call for the city’s downtown to be closed to traffic has yet to be adopted.

  In September 1905, Burnham presented his vision to an enthusiastic audience at the St. Francis Hotel on Union Square. Burnham’s plan wowed the city, and the Board of Supervisors commissioned a fancy $3,000 book illustrating the plan. Copies of it were sitting in City Hall on April 18, 1906, when the San Andreas Fault slipped and buried them, along with much of San Francisco.

  At first, it appeared that the catastrophe was a divine intervention on Burnham’s behalf. The sudden disappearance of the old city made his Olympian plan seem feasible. But resistance from business interests, a political scandal, the opposition of the San Francisco Chronicle, and the need to rebuild immediately doomed Burnham’s dream. The only major part of his plan that was largely realized was the Civic Center, a spacious group of elegant Beaux-Arts buildings that is widely considered America’s finest ensemble of public buildings outside Washington, D.C.

  But the ideals of the City Beautiful movement and the Beaux-Arts style did not die with Burnham’s plan. They shaped and guided the architects who rebuilt downtown. Those architects embraced the École’s classical aesthetic, but they were equally concerned with making buildings that worked—ones with good light, adequate retail space, and so on. Design extravagances were always subordinated to functional considerations, which is why few of the downtown buildings possess the majesty of the Civic Center. Yet they are quietly creative in their design and in their details, and built to last.

  The happy results of this dignified, modest aesthetic are still apparent on Grant Avenue, where many leading retail stores previously located a block east on Kearny Street moved after the fire. Take the Shreve Building and the Head Building, at Grant and Post. The two tallest buildings on the street, both built by William Curlett, they face each other on opposite sides of Post. The Shreve Building was built in 1905 and rebuilt after the fire, the Head Building in 1909. Both are fine three-part vertical blocks with unobtrusive Renaissance/baroque ornamentation. The Shreve is clad in luxurious Colusa sandstone, the Head in the terra-cotta favored in downtown buildings after the great fire, in which stone facings performed poorly. But what makes these buildings noteworthy is the way they function in tandem. Exactly the same height, they simultaneously form an imposing gate to Union Square, the city’s urban heart one block west, and denote the heart of the shopping district on Grant, in a perfect location halfway between Market Street and the Chinatown Gate.

  A similar matched set of buildings anchors Grant’s beginning at Market Street. On the west side of Grant stands the Security Pacific National Bank, built in 1910 by Bliss and Faville. A variant of a classical temple, it is based on a design that is extremely hard to screw up, the Roman Pantheon. Facing it on the east side of Grant is the Wells Fargo Bank, also built in 1910, by Clinton Day (who built one of San Francisco’s most beloved buildings, the City of Paris—torn down in 1980 and replaced by an inappropriate Philip Johnson pile). Also a modified Roman temple design, its elegant curved front on Market Street demonstrates the eclectic flexibility of the Beaux-Arts style. Across O’Farrell Street from both banks is another first-rate 1910 building, the Phelan, built by Curlett. Like most of the post-fire buildings in downtown, the flatiron Phelan has a “commercial” lower section used for window displays and an “architectural” upper section—an intelligent way of reconciling the needs of Mammon and beauty. This trio of buildings lends gravitas to an important Market Street gore.

  Most of the post-fire buildings in the area are relatively conservative, but a few are daring. Close to the Chinatown Gate, the Pacific Telephone and Telegraph Building (Coxhead and Coxhead, 1908) tweaks the classical idiom with enlarged details, distorted elements and peculiar finesses, like the weird and wonderful entrance arch. Across Grant from the Shreve Building is the richly detailed 1908 Hastings Building by Meyer and O’Brien, whose sculptured female heads looking down from the top story lend it a piquant baroque air.

  There are dozens more fine buildings like these, on Grant, Post, Sutter, and adjoining streets. Few of them are masterpieces like Willis Polk’s stunning glass-curtained 1918 Hallidie Building or Albert Pissis’s 1892 Hibernia Bank Building, which now languishes on the blighted first block of Jones Street near a methadone clinic, but was regarded by Pissis’s contemporaries as the finest building in the city. In a way, though, that’s precisely the point. They are proof that professionalism, when it is guided by a superior design aesthetic and informed by a shared urban vision, can produce beautiful buildings whose sum is more than their individual parts.

  So the next time I’m Christmas shopping at Grant and Post, with the carols drifting down above the hurrying crowds, I will look for something besides the window displays. I will look for a past world that still lives, in buildings embodying a civic vision that has not lost its power to inspire. Quietly but eloquently, those buildings proclaim their message of harmony, restraint, and grace. Angels we have heard on high, indeed.

  Chapter 37

  Trying to Find Chinatown

  Tien Hou Temple, 125 Waverly Place

  My earliest memory of San Francisco is of a visit to Chinatown with my parents at night. A phantasmagorical kaleidoscope of glittering lights, exotic buildings with winged roofs, hordes of mysterious people packing the narrow streets—I felt like I had been transported to a parallel universe where a perpetual night was perpetually illuminated.

  Childhood visions don’t die; they become ghosts. And somewhere that dream Chinatown still haunts me, a platonic original that seems more real than the actual one. For me, everything
that is unknown and alluring and intricate and deep and wondrous about cities, especially cities at night, goes back to that flickering neon memory.

  It was, of course, all an illusion. As I grew up, I realized that the otherworldly Chinatown of my memory was a parlor trick, conjured up with strings of 100-watt bulbs. Concealed beneath Chinatown’s romantic veneer was a very unromantic slum, where thousands of impoverished people were squeezed into decaying tenements. By day, the City of Magical Night looked pretty dreadful.

  But that judgment, too, turned out to be an illusion. In fact, it was a bigger illusion than my childish belief in a fairy-tale Chinatown. For the paradoxical truth is that Chinatown’s fake surfaces are authentic in their own strange way. And still more paradoxically, those glittering facades can even be seen as appropriate symbols of a neighborhood whose inhabitants have transcended the constraints of poverty. It may not be in the way that I imagined, but Chinatown is indeed a magical place.

  The Chinese who began arriving in 1848 were drawn to San Francisco for the same reason all the other 49ers were: the desire to get rich. Also like most other 49ers, they did not intend to stay.

  The first Chinese immigrants, relatively few in number, were welcomed. In 1850, Mayor John W. Geary invited the “China boys,” as they were called, to march in the funeral procession for President Zachary Taylor. In a ceremony in Portsmouth Square, a justice said, “You stand among us in all respects as equals.” The governor urged that they be given land grants, and naturalization was offered.

  The China boys sent a warm response to the mayor. But they did not want to become U.S. citizens, even though doing so meant they would not have to pay the tax imposed on foreign miners. They had no interest in becoming Americans. They were, in sociological parlance, “sojourners”: They were just passing through.

  There were a number of reasons why the Chinese did not regard the United States as their home. As Erica Y. Z. Pan points out in The Impact of the 1906 Earthquake on San Francisco’s Chinatown, the Chinese government opposed emigration: To live abroad for a long time or to become a citizen of another country was treasonous, and families of émigrés could be executed. The émigrés had left their families behind because they planned to return. Of equal importance, there was an enormous cultural rift between the Chinese and the Americans—one created by both parties. As Pan writes, “They had come to make money, not to obtain citizenship. Their homes would always be in China where their ancestors had lived. It was their belief that once a Chinese acquired citizenship in the U.S., he became a lost son to China. More important was the conviction that China was a more civilized country than the United States. There was no incentive to acquaint themselves with a ‘barbarian’ culture or language.”

  American racism and hostility exacerbated Chinese separatism. In the gold mines and in San Francisco, where the Chinese had begun to settle around Portsmouth Square after one of the disastrous fires destroyed the area, the Yankees made it clear that the only use they had for the Chinese was as cheap labor. And soon, they rejected even that.

  The initial trickle of Chinese immigrants, almost all of them Cantonese from the Pearl River Delta in Guangdong Province, soon became a flood. By 1853, 4,000 had arrived and Chinatown, centered on Sacramento and Dupont (Grant), was considered a separate district. The Chinese took the jobs white men would not take, like doing laundry, and would work for much lower wages. By the late 1860s, Chinatown was a large retail, service, and entertainment district that contained almost two-thirds of the Chinese in San Francisco.

  Anti-Chinese sentiment exploded in the dark decade of the 1870s. Attacks on Chinese miners and the completion of the transcontinental railroad led thousands of unemployed Chinese to return to San Francisco, where they encountered angry whites who had been thrown out of work by the depression of 1873. By this time, the Chinese dominated the shoemaking and sewing industries and had gained a virtual monopoly on clothing manufacturing and cigar making. (In the 1870s, the first union labels in the United States appeared on cigar boxes to distinguish cigars made by the Cigar Makers’ Union from those made by Chinese.) The Chinese became scapegoats, their worst tormentors the Irish working class. Attacks upon Chinese, especially those outside Chinatown, forced those who had moved into other neighborhoods back inside. For a Chinese to venture west of the quarter’s unofficial western border on Powell Street was to risk being set upon by hoodlums (the word, of uncertain etymology, originated in San Francisco).

  White San Franciscans feared that the Chinese were taking over the city. In 1869 Dr. Li Po Tai began buying real estate, the first Chinese to do so. False rumors soon spread that the Chinese owned one-tenth of the city. In 1878 the Sunday Chronicle reported that the “Mongolian Octopus … has fastened its tentacles from Sacramento to Jackson on Dupont.” The alarmed legislature passed a law in 1878 forbidding aliens debarred from citizenship to acquire title to real estate. As a result, at the time of the 1906 earthquake and fire, only 39 owners of property in Chinatown were Chinese. The majority of landlords were absentee white owners who charged their tenants double the normal rent.

  For the overwhelmingly male population packed into the 12 blocks of Chinatown (for a long time almost all the women were prostitutes who had been shipped to America against their will), the neighborhood provided a refuge, an island of China in an alien land. It was, in effect, a ghetto—but it was a ghetto created by both external racism and internal inclination. As Pan notes, “It was a blessing for most Chinese who could not read English to have a corner of their own that resembled their hometown. Nevertheless, the congregation of this alien body was also their curse, for the place was too different from the rest of the city. It was an un-Americanized colony with its own colors, which seemed to stand in open mockery of the melting pot. Small wonder that many white San Franciscans resented its presence.” Comments like “We hate the Negro because they are citizens. We hate the yellow dogs because they will not be” were widespread in the 19th century.

  But as the Chinese put down roots in San Francisco, their attitudes toward America began to change. Increasingly, they began to feel that this country where they had spent so much of their lives was their home. Assimilation was spurred by Christian missions, and by the fact that many Chinese worked as domestic servants for white San Franciscans, who came to value and respect them. The desire to avoid persecution may also have played a role. Many Chinese were now willing to be naturalized.

  Anti-Chinese violence reached its peak with the sandlot-orator-instigated riots of 1877, when more than 500 men stormed Chinatown from two directions and were beaten back by two phalanxes of police, one on Pine and one on Broadway. Five years later the notorious Chinese Exclusion Act was passed, which essentially froze Chinese immigration for decades.

  If the Chinese were viewed with suspicion and contempt, Chinatown was seen as a menace to health and morality—“the shame of the city.” It was dirty, overcrowded, and filled with brothels, opium dens, and gambling parlors. White San Franciscans did nothing to ameliorate these conditions, but they nonetheless cited them as a reason to tear down Chinatown or to move it as far away as possible.

  The movement to get rid of Chinatown began as soon as there was a Chinatown. In 1882, a city supervisor proposed that the Chinese be moved to government reservations or else be “separated under police guard in a tent city near the city cemetery.” Another group proposed to send all the Chinese back to China in a flotilla of ships. The nadir of these efforts took place in 1890, when the city suddenly declared Chinatown a hazard to public health and ordered its residents to move to a special site far away from the city, on pain of arrest. Federal courts, which consistently struck down San Francisco’s attempts to force the Chinese out of town, declared the ordinance unconstitutional.

  Not surprisingly, the very vices that so outraged white San Francisco proved irresistible to tourists. The more journalists, politicians, and moralists wrote outraged screeds about the district’s brothels, opium dens, white slavery, (no
nexistent) underground tunnels, gambling cellars, and hatchet men, the more tourists flocked into Chinatown, panting to see the unspeakable depravity for themselves.

  Then came the 1906 fire. As they surveyed the smoking rubble of what had once been Chinatown (which was immediately looted by soldiers and citizens), the city fathers thought they had a golden opportunity to get rid of the despised quarter once and for all. “San Francisco may be freed from the standing menace of Chinatown,” wrote the Merchants’ Association Review. The Oakland Monthly editorialized, “Fire has reclaimed to civilization and cleanliness the Chinese ghetto, and no Chinatown will be permitted in the borders of the city.” The Chinese were segregated and so poorly treated in San Francisco’s refugee camps that President Roosevelt, facing diplomatic fallout, chided the city for its shoddy treatment of them.

  Anti-Chinese sentiment made strange bedfellows. Mayor Eugene Schmitz and his crony, political boss Abe Ruef, were the archenemies of former mayor and City Beautiful proponent James Phelan, but they all agreed that the Chinese had to go. (Phelan’s anti-Chinese and anti-Japanese bigotry is an ugly blot on his otherwise stellar civic record.)

  Even before the quake, industrialist John Partridge had proposed building an “Oriental City” to replace Chinatown at San Francisco’s longtime dumping ground, Hunters Point. Now Schmitz, Ruef, and Phelan came up with the same idea. The city convened a Subcommittee for the Permanent Relocation of Chinatown, headed by Ruef, with Phelan a member. But when Ruef and Phelan tried to push through the relocation to the slaughterhouse district, they ran into immediate resistance.

  Chinatown notables, who hitherto had prudently avoided any direct confrontation with the white establishment, initially remained silent. But empowered by an awareness of legal rights and political and economic power they had not previously known they possessed, they stood up for themselves for the first time. At a meeting on May 10, they said Hunters Point was too far away and they wanted to rebuild in the place they had always lived. Knowing that officials feared the loss of the revenue they generated, they warned the subcommittee that if they were not allowed to return to Chinatown, they would permanently move to Oakland, where most of them had ended up after leaving the refugee camps.