by Gary Kamiya
The all-powerful Six Companies, familial (surname-based) and district-based fraternal associations that essentially ran Chinatown, forgot their past quarreling and worked together to ensure the neighborhood’s return. They realized that anti-Chinese attitudes would actually work in their favor: If they rebuilt Chinatown quickly, whites would not live there and “that way Chinatown would be easier to hold,” as a Chinese newspaper pointed out. Their second trump card was white greed. Chinese merchants quickly began signing long leases at high rents from the white landlords who owned most of Chinatown.
In the face of unified and unwavering Chinese resistance, the San Francisco establishment admitted defeat. In June, after 25 committee meetings, Ruef asked for his committee to be dismissed. Phelan admitted that “legally the city had no right to prevent the Chinatown property owners to rebuild upon their own premises.”
Reconstruction in Chinatown began almost immediately. By June 10, 12 businesses had opened in temporary structures. It took only two years to rebuild the entire quarter, a year ahead of the rest of the city.
The Chinatown that arose from the ashes of the old was greatly improved. Streets were widened, alleys were terminated or run through, and new buildings were fireproof, sanitary, and well ventilated. But the most striking change was to its appearance.
The original Chinatown consisted of drab Western-style buildings. They were later painted in bright colors with a few added Oriental motifs, but otherwise they were conventional. The post-quake Chinatown, by contrast, reveled in its exoticism, flaunted its otherness. And to achieve the desired look, its white architects, working with Chinese merchants, invented a “Chinese” vernacular that had never existed.
Knowing that their community had almost been erased, the Chinese aimed to placate the city by replacing the bad old Chinatown with a new, cleaned-up “Oriental City.” More important, they, along with all the other stakeholders in Chinatown, realized that making Chinatown look more “Chinese” would attract tourists. As models, they had three recent proposals: the self-contained Chinese city proposed for Hunters Point, a planned Chinatown in San Mateo that was to consist of imitation Chinese houses, and a Japanese plan to buy up property in South Park, where a number of Japanese were already living, and create a Japanese colony called “the Young Tokio.” None of these came to fruition, but they helped inspire the design for the new Chinatown.
As architect and historian Philip P. Choy notes in The Architecture of San Francisco Chinatown, the white architects searching for a “Sino-architectural vernacular” knew only about “pagodas and temples with turned-up eaves and massive curved roofs, forms and expressions that were already centuries old.” And they had to create this “Chinese” look using Western construction techniques. The buildings they created used forms that in Chinese architecture are structural elements, like pagodas and complex roof supports, in a purely decorative way. They turned iron fire escapes into pseudo-balconies decorated with Chinese motifs like the “Double Happiness” character, and employed neoclassical design elements like loggias, corbels, coffer soffits, and dentils to simulate Chinese architecture. It was, in effect, a Potemkin Village.
Waverly Place is ground zero for this early-20th-century ethnic-themed Disneyland. One of the oldest streets in the city—formerly known as Pike Street, it was home to a brothel run by the notorious Belle Cora as well as her famous Chinese counterpart, Ah Toy—Waverly on its west side features an unbroken line of “Oriental” buildings that creates a magical effect. As Choy notes, “the illusion created is a masterful design solution, unique and indigenous, for it is neither East nor West. Rather, it is decidedly San Francisco.”
Deception is an odd quality to be the foundation of a legendary neighborhood. Deception for the purposes of attracting tourists and placating a hostile white establishment seems even more dubious. And so Chinatown poses a semiotic riddle, one that goes all the way down to its essence. Standing on Waverly and looking up at the Tien Hou Temple and the buildings that adjoin it, should one see them as “authentic” or not? Is Chinatown a fake?
On one level, it obviously is. Chinatown’s buildings are obviously not “authentic,” if by that we mean organically connected to indigenous Chinese architecture. But they are authentic in a deeper sense.
Partly this is simply because they are old. Even the cheesiest and most artificial historical object becomes authentic once it gets old enough. But it goes beyond that. For the new Chinatown was authentic the moment it was created. It was never really Disneyland—or if it was Disneyland, Disneyland was reality. Chinatown was an organic expression of the desires of its inhabitants, an accurate reflection of a subculture at a given moment in historical time. The Chinese were a mercantile people, and the tourist-friendly fairyland they created reflected that. In a deeper sense, it reflected their in-between status as foreigners who were turning into Americans. Chinatown’s appearance captures one critical moment in the long process by which an immigrant group, once outsiders and subjected to bigotry, intolerance, and violence, becomes a part of America. Paradoxically, the buildings created to fetishize Chinese-ness can be seen as the concrete embodiment of the melting pot.
As Pan argues, the 1906 catastrophe helped catalyze the integration of the Chinese into San Francisco in a number of ways. First, it began to change the attitudes of white San Franciscans. San Franciscans had always prided themselves on their tolerance and cosmopolitanism, and when President Roosevelt chided them for their mistreatment of the Chinese in the refugee camps, they were ashamed. The courage of the Chinese who helped clear the streets of rubble, and the loyalty of the Chinese domestics who risked their lives to save their families’ children, impressed white San Franciscans. After the new Chinatown was built, a magazine apologized for past sins: “We have unwittingly perhaps held up to the public gaze for too long the more sensational phases of Chinese life. We have concentrated our vision over much on the differences between their lives and ours … and thus the racial gulf that separates the yellow and white peoples of the earth becomes increasingly widened instead of being bridged.”
But the cataclysm also changed the attitudes of the Chinese. For the first time, they had spoken up on their own behalf. They had skin in the American game. And in the aftermath of the disaster that destroyed their neighborhood, they acknowledged their own share of responsibility for its problems.
After 1906, Chinese community leaders set out to clean up Chinatown’s vices. They cracked down on idol worshipping, white slavery, the opium dens, and the gambling parlors. True, the anti-vice campaign was mostly driven by self-interest, just as the creation of an “Oriental City” was. But profound changes nonetheless followed both developments. Marketing is all-American, and the act of marketing their Chinese-ness to Americans made the Chinese more American. They became more deeply integrated into society, more open to Western ideas. Some began to cut their queues. As Pan sums it up, “They were moving toward the mainstream of American culture, even as they held on to their old Chinatown home.”
But even if Chinatown’s architecture is authentic in some sense, it also feels disturbingly like a false front, lipstick on a pig. Those never-never-land buildings may have been conjured up by the Chinese themselves, but their exotic facades conceal grinding poverty. Within Chinatown’s 16-block area are packed 18,000 to 20,000 people, making it the second most densely populated part of the United States, after New York City’s Chinatown. And these impoverished people are jammed into crumbling, century-old SROs with communal bathrooms and kitchens, or equally decrepit apartments.
I have been inside those tenements. My wife and I once went on a house-buying tour of one. It was a ramshackle, rotting building on Himmelmann Place, off Pacific above inner Chinatown, that had been divided into about 10 apartments, each one a small room crammed with people. Some of the tiny spaces were divided by sheets. In one room, a child of about 12 was doing his homework sitting on a top bunk bed, his head bent because the ceiling was so low.
This is how most of the people in Chinatown live. It’s a slum with Orientalist architecture. It is a living museum, and the main attraction for the tourists who gawk through it is its “exotic” impoverished inhabitants. It’s hard not to think that a visit to Chinatown is just a genteel form of slumming.
But there are slums and then there are slums. For cultural reasons, the Chinese have been able to rise above poverty and overcrowding. Chinatown has virtually no crime, and most of its inhabitants either choose to live there or put up with living there as part of a cost-benefit calculation. The head of that kid on the bunk bed was touching the ceiling, but he was doing his homework. Once you dig deeper into Chinatown, you realize that it serves a vital function for its inhabitants. And, most critically, there is no way to fundamentally alter it without destroying it.
Cindy Wu is the community planning manager for the Chinatown Community Development Center, a nonprofit agency whose mission for 35 years has been to improve the lives of Chinatown’s residents. The CCDC has acquired and rehabbed 2,300 units of affordable housing in Chinatown and runs a variety of social services programs for its residents. “The main group of people living in Chinatown are seniors aging in place,” Wu said. “There’s a disproportionate number of them, more than anywhere else in the city. They live in SROs—40 percent of the housing in Chinatown is SROs. It’s suitable for these seniors. It suits their lifestyle. It gives them independence. They can walk to the store, see their friends.” Families living in SROs, most of them low-income immigrants for whom Chinatown is their first stop, and single working people make up the rest of the population.
The critical question facing Chinatown, Wu said, is what to do about its housing. “It’s aging housing stock, most built after the quake. It’s in poor condition, but it’s affordable. The issue we face is how to upgrade this housing stock, make it seismically safe and healthy, while also maintaining affordability.”
The key players in this process are the owners of the buildings. And this is where it gets interesting. Wu said that most of the landlords are the family associations, the surname-based fraternal groups with ancient roots in Chinese culture, that have dominated Chinatown for most of its history. The rentals work by word of mouth, and tenants who share the surname have an advantage in getting in, Wu said. “These are the people we work with,” she said of the landlords. “But it’s not easy, because they’re like trusts. There isn’t one person you’re dealing with, and each family association has its own structures and politics. Also, according to what we hear, they’ve owned these buildings outright for a long time. So they don’t need to make mortgage payments. They’re all different—some are more proactive about maintaining their buildings, others are not.”
The CCDC does drop-in counseling for tenants and receives complaints about substandard housing or illegal practices like denial of kitchen access. But Wu said the CCDC worked proactively with the family associations and the city building inspectors to improve the buildings: “We don’t just call the inspectors. We don’t want to lose the unit.” What this means is that except in the case of egregious violations—and many of those no doubt exist as well—the CCDC and the city allow the status quo to prevail. At best, their efforts are a case of two steps forward, one step back.
I learned for myself that the city has no intention of cracking down on Chinatown. Soon after I became an involuntary slumlord, I called the city building department, fearing that I might be legally liable for housing so many people in a single building. The inspector I talked to laughed. “Maximum occupancy laws? I’ve never heard of them being enforced in San Francisco,” he said. Left unsaid was the obvious fact that if the city enforced its codes strictly, it would have to close down Chinatown.
And if Chinatown went away, so would its residents. Wu said the average SRO rents for about $500 a month, although new rentals are going for $600 or $700 and some are as high as $1,000. In a building being demolished to make way for the new Central Subway, Wu said, some tenants were paying in the $200s—this in a city where mediocre one-bedroom apartments can rent for $3,000.
These rock-bottom rents make it impossible to fundamentally alter Chinatown. It isn’t feasible to add much housing stock in such a tiny, crowded area, nor does the city or anyone else have the limitless funds that would be needed to buy up the tenements, remodel them, and return their tenants to them at the same rents. (It should be noted that many of the Chinese landlords do not seem to be driven by greed—or if they are, they’re penny wise and pound foolish. They’d make much more money getting rid of their impoverished tenants, gutting the buildings, and selling them or renting them at market rates. Wu said that so far, with the exception of one building on Washington Street, that has not happened.)
The conundrum facing the CCDC, the city, and all the stakeholders in Chinatown is that the status quo—maintaining a crowded slum in the heart of the city—is unpalatable, yet the alternative would be much worse.
What keeps Chinatown alive, Wu said, is immigration. “And immigration isn’t ending. We still get new immigrants coming to Chinatown. I don’t want to sound too sappy, but they’re beginning their American dream. They come to Chinatown, then after a few years they move to the Excelsior or Visitacion Valley. Chinatown helps them get started. With all the social services here, it gives them the tools. There’s no crime, and the small businesses are doing fine. I don’t mean to be nostalgic about Chinatown, and I wasn’t here in the old days, but it serves a very important purpose.”
In any case, the only alternative would be to reenact the city’s most disastrous planning decision: the razing of the “blighted” Western Addition in the name of “urban renewal.” “I’ve heard calls for high-rise buildings to be built in Chinatown that would create a more mixed income range,” Wu said. “But anytime you do demolition and relocation, you lose lots of people. Fifty to 60 percent tenant retention is considered a success, and that’s unacceptable. The cost of new construction in the city is such that if you build a two-bedroom condo, it costs $500,000. If you put those condos in, you’re going to displace a lot of people. That kind of displacement is what we’re trying to prevent. Demolish and rebuild doesn’t work. So we are left with rehabbing the existing buildings.”
The bottom line is that for all of its problems, Chinatown is still one of the most dynamic neighborhoods in the United States.
“My family came over from mainland China in the early 1980s,” Sarah He told me. He is the operations director for the Chinese Progressive Association, another Chinatown nonprofit whose mission is to improve living conditions and develop local leadership from the ground up. “I was nine when we came. We lived on the edge of Chinatown in a studio on Bush, right near the Chinatown Gate. My mom was a seamstress, and my dad worked in a Chinese barbecue shop. There were four of us in 400 square feet, including the kitchen and bathroom. After five years we moved to the Excelsior District. My uncle had a house there.
“I had major culture shock in the Excelsior. All of a sudden I had a backyard to play in, but no stores and no tourists. It was a long way to Chinatown, but we made our way back every weekend—we figured out the buses. My parents went back for the food and the sense of community. It was like they were coming home. My mom was still working in Chinatown, but my dad was starting to drive and get work around San Francisco.
“My parents still live in the Excelsior. They saved up enough money to buy a house 10 years ago at Cambridge and Silver, near McClaren Park. They shop on San Bruno Street. There’s a Chinese community there that’s getting more vibrant. I now live in Daly City. But I feel a strong connection to my old neighborhood.”
There are tens of thousands of stories like Sarah He’s in Chinatown, and across San Francisco and the Bay Area.
So it all came full circle. That intoxicating vision of Chinatown I had as a child, that dream landscape lit by lanterns, turned out to be real in a deeper sense than I could have imagined. The city, whose primary revenue stream is tourism, did not have to fee
l guilty about wanting to preserve Chinatown. Yes, Chinatown has serious problems that need to be addressed. Yes, it is a ghetto. But it is a ghetto that works. For once, what’s good for the Chamber of Commerce also turns out to be good for the poorest San Franciscans.
Chinatown is a living demonstration that crowded and squalid conditions cannot defeat determined and hardworking people. In that sense, its 16 blocks contain nothing less than the entire American immigrant experience, played out anew with each generation. That experience has not been easy. Like many other immigrants, more than most, the Chinese have faced racism and prejudice. But, also like other immigrants, they have overcome them to make a better life for their children. By night, the streets of Chinatown are magical; by day, they are crowded and dirty. But to walk them, by day or by night, is to walk the history of America.
Chapter 38
Deserted Cities of the Heart
The Great Highway and Balboa, former site of
Playland at the Beach, and many other locations
Like all cities, San Francisco is constantly changing. Some of those changes have been salutary—the creation of a magnificent park at Crissy Field, the destruction of the Embarcadero Freeway, the installation of public street seating—but many more have been dreadful. What follows is an unsweet list of 16 things that have disappeared forever from San Francisco, leaving it a much lamer place than it was before.
