San Francisco's Chinatown is the oldest Chinatown in North America and one of "the largest Chinese communities outside Asia". Established in the 1840s, it is a center of Chinese culture and activity in North America, offering many venues for the arts, film, music, photography and literature. Throughout this sprawling and densely populated area are gift and herbal shops, Chinese theatres, joss houses (temples), pagoda roofs, dragon parades, and well over 300 restaurants, making it a self-sustaining "city-within-a-city". In contrast to many mixed-Asian communities today, San Francisco's Chinatown retains its Chinese ethnic identity even after 160 years—it is the largest Chinese community of its kind in the United States. It is a major tourist attraction — drawing more visitors annually than the Golden Gate Bridge.
Location and sub-areas
Chinatown has been traditionally defined by the neighborhoods of North Beach, and Telegraph Hill areas as bound by Bush Street, Taylor Street, Bay Street, and the water.
Officially, Chinatown is located in downtown San Francisco, and overlaps five Postal ZIP Codes. It is within an area of roughly 1 mile long by 1.34 miles wide. There was a smaller, pre-1950's boundary, the current demarcation is roughly Kearny Street and The City's Financial District in the East, Union Street and North Beach in the North all the way to its Northernmost point from the intersection of Jones Street and Lombard Street in Russian Hill to Lombard Street and Grant Avenue (都板街) in Telegraph Hill. It is here where important community fixtures are located, such as Yick Wo Elementary School, and City College of San Francisco's Chinatown-North Beach Campus. The Southeast is bounded by Bush Street with Union Square. It stretches as far westward to Larkin Street in Nob Hill. It is here on the Larkin-Hyde-Leavenworth corridors that businesses and organizations cater to low-income Asian immigrants. This part of the neighborhood is centered around the Chinatown Community Development Center on Larkin and Pine Streets (1303 Larkin St.), and the Chinatown Youth Center on nearby Post and Larkin Streets (1038 Post St.). In this area that Chinatown's Southernmost boundary is defined by a stretch of Eddy Street between Polk Street and Jones. Within Chinatown there are two major thoroughfares. One is Grant Avenue (都板街), with the Dragon gate (aka "Chinatown Gate" on some maps) on the corner of Bush Street and Grant Avenue; St. Mary's Square with a statue of Dr. Sun Yat-Sen; a war memorial to Chinese war veterans; and stores, restaurants and mini-malls that cater mainly to tourists. The other, Stockton Street (市德頓街), is frequented less often by tourists, and it presents an authentic Chinese look and feel, reminiscent of Hong Kong, with its produce and fish markets, stores, and restaurants. Chinatown has smaller side streets and alleyways providing character.
A major focal point in Chinatown is Portsmouth Square. Due to its being one of the few open spaces in Chinatown, Portsmouth Square bustles with activity such as Tai Chi and old men playing Chinese chess. A replica of the Goddess of Democracy used in the Tiananmen Square protest was built in 1999 by Thomas Marsh, and stands in the square. It is made of bronze and weighs approximately 600 lb (270 kg). In recent years, other Chinatown areas have been established within the city of San Francisco proper, including the Richmond and Sunset districts. These areas have been settled largely by Chinese from Southeast Asia. There are also many suburban Chinese communities in the San Francisco Bay Area, especially in Silicon Valley, such as Cupertino, Fremont, and Milpitas, where Taiwanese Americans are dominant. Despite these developments, many continue to commute in from these outer neighborhoods and cities to shop in Chinatown, causing gridlock on roads and delays in public transit, especially on weekends. To address this problem, the local public transit agency, Muni, is proposing to extend the city's subway network to the neighborhood via the new Central Subway.
History
San Francisco's Chinatown was the port of entry for early Taishanese and Zhongshanese Chinese immigrants from the southern Guangdong province of China from the 1850s to the 1900s. The area was the one geographical region deeded by the city government and private property owners which allowed Chinese persons to inherit and inhabit dwellings within the city. The majority of these Chinese shopkeepers, restaurant owners, and hired workers in San Francisco Chinatown were predominantly Taishanese and male. Many Chinese found jobs working for large companies seeking a source of cheap labor, most famously as part of the Central Pacific on the Transcontinental Railroad. Other early immigrants worked as mine workers or independent prospectors hoping to strike it rich during the 1849 Gold Rush. With national unemployment in the wake of the Panic of 1873, racial tensions in the city boiled over into full blown race riots. In response to the violence, the Consolidated Chinese Benevolent Association or the Chinese Six Companies, which evolved out of the labor recruiting organizations for different areas of Guangdong, was created as a means of providing the community with a unified voice. The heads of these companies were the leaders of the Chinese merchants, who represented the Chinese community in front of the business community as a whole and the city government. The anti-immigrant sentiment became law as the United States Government passed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 – the first immigration restriction law aimed at a single ethnic group. This law, along with other immigration restriction laws such as the Geary Act, greatly reduced the numbers of Chinese allowed into the country and the city, and in theory limited Chinese immigration to single males only. Exceptions were in fact granted to the families of wealthy merchants, but the law was still effective enough to reduce the population of the neighborhood to an all time low in the 1920s. The exclusion act was repealed during World War II under the Magnuson Act in recognition of the important role of China as an ally in the war, although tight quotas still applied. Not unlike much of San Francisco, a period of criminality ensued in some tongs on the produce of smuggling, gambling and prostitution, and by the early 1880s, the population had adopted the term Tong war to describe periods of violence in Chinatown, the San Francisco Police Department had established its so-called Chinatown Squad. One of the more successful sergeants, Jack Manion, was appointed in 1921 and served for two decades. The squad was finally disbanded in August 1955 by Police Chief George Healey, upon the request of the influential Chinese World newspaper, which had editorialized that the squad was an "affront to Americans of Chinese descent". The neighborhood was completely destroyed in the 1906 earthquake that leveled most of the city. During the city's rebuilding process, certain city planners and real-estate developers had hatched plans to move Chinatown to the Hunters Point neighborhood at the southern edge of the city, even further south in Daly City; and the neighborhood wt. Their plans failed as the Chinese, particularly with the efforts of Consolidated Chinese Six companies, the Chinese government, and American commercial interests reclaimed would then be absorbed into the financial district the neighborhood and convinced the city government to relent. Part of their efforts in doing so was to plan and rebuild the neighborhood as a western friendly tourist attraction. The rebuilt area that is seen today, resembles such plans. Many early Chinese immigrants to San Francisco and beyond were processed at Angel Island, now a state park, in the San Francisco Bay. Unlike Ellis Island in the East where prospective European immigrants might be held for up to a week, Angel Island typically detained Chinese immigrants for months while they were interrogated closely to validate their papers. The detention facility has been renovated in 2005 and 2006 under a federal grant.
The repeal of the Exclusion act and the other immigration restriction
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