Walking San Francisco

On Washington Street, this bank building used to house the Chinese Telephone Exchange.

PARKING: Off-street parking is available on Vallejo St., between Powell and Stockton (1 block from the starting point for this walk).

San Francisco’s Chinatown is the oldest and second largest such district in the country, due mainly to the wave of Chinese immigrants drawn to “Gold Mountain” after the first shout of Eureka! ricocheted round the world. And like many Chinatowns, San Francisco’s has an air of inauthenticity. Many of the buildings here reflect naive American notions of what Eastern architecture ought to look like, with shop fronts resembling pagodas painted in spectacular, often garish colors. Even the lampposts, fire hydrants, and telephone booths have a kitschy faux-Chinese look to them. The neighborhood has made appearances in numerous movies and TV shows, ranging from the 1970s sitcom Phyllis to the film adaptation of Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club.

But there’s more to the gimmicky architecture than meets the eye. In the wake of the 1906 earthquake—which did not spare the city’s original Chinatown—men of overwhelming influence, including former mayor James Phelan, wanted to move the area to remote Hunters Point. Chinese businessmen preempted that campaign by rebuilding quickly with over-the-top, undeniably Chinese styles of architecture. Indeed, the abundance of clinker bricks (bricks that had literally begun to melt during the fire) in Chinatown is a by-product of this rushed pace. While these bricks would normally be thrown out, as they are hard to lay evenly, they were swiftly incorporated into reconstruction and lend a distinctive tone to many of Chinatown’s brick buildings. (They later became a trend in tony Arts and Crafts–style homes, but here they were a product of necessity.)

Thanks to speedy efforts at raising “Chinese” pagodas and temples, Chinatown stayed put, and to this day it remains one of San Francisco’s most vibrant and exciting neighborhoods. Its sidewalks are packed shoulder-to-shoulder with locals every day of the year, and all manner of goods literally spill out of the shops. At night, the district’s commercial streets become a relatively subdued and atmospheric constellation of neon. This walk follows the main thoroughfares, Stockton Street and Grant Avenue, with frequent detours through mysterious alleys and into clamorous dim sum parlors.

Walk Description

Definitely arrive for this walk with an empty stomach, as there are all sorts of tastes and treats to enjoy. Begin under the public artwork Language of the Birds, the flying books just outside of City Lights Bookstore. Note that the texts reflected on the ground are in Italian, English, and Chinese. This is because we’re at the crossroads of Chinatown and North Beach. Head up Broadway and turn left onto Stockton Street, the cultural heartbeat of the area. This is the district’s “real” side, unadorned and untouristy, and fulfilling most of the neighborhood’s day-to-day requirements. Along Stockton, household store aisles are choked with plastic buckets, Day-Glo brooms, teapots, soup bowls, meat cleavers, chopsticks, and tiny folding chairs for children. There are numerous jewelry shops, some with signs advertising gold bullion, and not quite as many hair salons. Bakeries sell moon cakes, wedding cakes, and little round balls filled with mung bean paste. Produce shops can hardly contain all that they offer: Asian pears, jujubes, lychees, longans, boiled peanuts, bok choy, water chestnuts, Chinese broccoli, yams, tangelos, and taro root. Some shops specialize in anything that has had the life dried out of it: dried shrimp, dried squid, dried oysters, countless varieties of dried mushrooms, and dried ginseng by the barrel. Roasted ducks and chickens hang in windows. Entire pigs, ghostly white, hang on meat hooks beyond side doors left wide open to the street. The shop at 1135 Stockton, between Pacific and Jackson, is a dim, damp hall that lures in its clientele with tanks filled with catatonic rockfish, tubs of live frogs that aren’t hopping away, and snails packed on ice. Farther in, glass cases display the internal organs of pigs and cows, and still deeper a little shop within the larger shop stocks chickens and pigeons kept in cages.

After crossing Jackson Street, look to your left for the yellow

Ming Lee Trading Inc. sign, and enter to satisfy all your Asian-snack needs. Head inside and downstairs for everything from lychee jelly cups and green-tea KitKats to crack seeds (dried fruits with the pits left in) and hot, spicy dried squid. Cash only!

Return to Stockton and keep heading south. A daytime visit to Chinatown should include a stop for dim sum, and

Good Mong Kok Bakery is an excellent place to grab some on the go. Don’t be intimidated by the long lines and sometimes grumpy staff; their pork buns and shrimp siu mai are well worth the wait. Stroll the next few blocks, and duck into shops that intrigue you. Stockton is also the street on which you’re most likely to be nudged out of an old lady’s way, so watch your step. Turn right at Clay. Half a block up, the

Chinese Historical Society of America operates a small museum (Wednesday–Sunday, 11 a.m.–4 p.m.) in a former YWCA building designed by renowned architect Julia Morgan. Exhibits focus on Chinese life in California from the gold rush to the present and provide a colorful depiction of life as well as good insight on the impact of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Admission at press time is $15 adults, $10 children and seniors.

The aisles of Ming Lee Trading Inc. are packed with tasty Asian snacks of every color and flavor.

Return to Stockton and turn right. The building at No. 843 is home of the

Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, also known as the Chinese Six Companies. Far more than a benevolent association or social aid club, the Six Companies is a conglomeration of community groups that started in the late 19th century, at a time when Chinatown society was severely constrained by laws limiting its movements within the broader society and continually disrupted by ongoing wars between rival criminal tongs (gangs). For a time the Six Companies was the most powerful Chinese American political organization in the United States, and it continues to be highly influential in San Francisco’s Chinese community.

Across the street, at No. 836, is Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall; note the portrait of the hall’s namesake prominently displayed above the building. (Sun Yat-sen helped establish the Republic of China and was appointed its first president in 1912.) Next door is the local Kuomintang (KMT) headquarters. The KMT, or Chinese Nationalist Party, vied with the Communist Party for control of mainland China from 1912 until 1949 and went on to dominate Taiwanese politics for most of the 20th century. The party has historically drawn wide support from San Francisco’s Chinese community.

Turn left onto Sacramento and head left again under the red lanterns to walk the two-block length of Waverly Place. On the corner of Sacramento, the

Clarion Music Center hosts performances and cultural events on everything from tea tastings to Chinese music and poetry. They also teach music lessons on a variety of modern and classic instruments, including the erhu, the two-stringed spike fiddle played so mournfully in some of the neighborhood’s alleys. The biggest culinary draw here is

Mister Jiu’s, an acclaimed Cantonese restaurant with a California twist; its black exterior belies the light-filled Michelin-starred dining room upstairs.

In the late 19th century, Waverly Place was lined with barbershops, and because the price of a trim was 15 cents, Waverly was nicknamed 15 Cent Street. (There’s still a solitary barber shop, called Li Ly’s Hair Salon, that charges $6 for a cut.) Waverly is a colorful street, with many painted balconies and decorative tiles on the facades of the buildings. Signs over the doorways indicate numerous family associations, and a smattering of Buddhist temples are hidden away on some of the top floors. One,

Tin How Temple, is open to visitors (10 a.m.–4 p.m.). It’s well worth the schlep up three flights of stairs for what feels like a privileged behind-the-scenes look into this otherwise private neighborhood. The oldest Taoist temple in America, the opulent red-and-gold shrine is frequently enveloped in wafts of smoky incense. The presentation is minimal but welcoming. Volunteers deliver a prepared narration to explain the altar and the joss sticks spiraling overhead, and donations are appreciated. And while pictures aren’t allowed in the temple, be sure to step out onto the balcony for a great view of the street from above.

Where Waverly meets Washington, turn left, cross the street, and head up Ross Alley, a mysterious passageway known in the 19th century as the Street of the Gamblers because so many gambling joints were located here. Down near the end of the block, beneath the nearly continuous canopy of fire escapes, slip into the

Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Company, where you can see how fortune cookies are made. The cast-iron machinery in the shop looks like it was built in the age of steam engines, and the workers who fold the still-hot cookies by hand, after first slipping the fortunes in, are quick and deft. Someone will stop and sell you a bag of fresh cookies if you like, but the staff are generally too busy to field questions. (For more information on the history of the fortune cookie, see Backstory.) At Jackson turn right and, at Grant Avenue, if you’re feeling peckish, turn left for a quick detour to the

Golden Gate Bakery for dan tat, a mouthwatering egg custard tart. Returning to Jackson, continue heading east to pass

Z & Y, one of Chinatown’s most esteemed restaurants. From the exterior, it doesn’t look all that different from many of the other eateries in the ’hood (save for the photos of visiting dignitaries ranging from former Chinese President Hu Jintao to culinary legend Alice Waters to Barack Obama). The main draw is the spicy Sichuan and Northern Chinese delicacies.

Head back a few feet to follow the narrow Wentworth Alley to Washington Street. Across the street and to your left is Portsmouth Square. While the square’s roots lie in Barbary Coast history (and are explored on the next walk, Jackson Square), today it’s commonly referred to as “Chinatown’s living room,” and you’re bound to see men with makeshift tables playing cards, chess, and checkers at all hours, seniors doing Tai Chi, and kids running amok with their families.

With the square to your back, head left to 743 Washington, where the

East West Bank occupies a building, constructed after the ’06 quake, that is worthy of a movie set. It was once the Chinese Telephone Exchange; in order to handle the complex mix of cultures and languages in Chinatown, the operators who worked the exchange were fluent in five Chinese dialects in addition to English. The building’s interior was remodeled to look more like a bank, but from the street it retains its pseudo-pagoda look.

For eight blocks Grant Avenue, Chinatown’s touristy main drag, is crammed with shops selling kitschy curios. Here you’ll find paper lanterns, calligraphy scrolls, silk pajamas, silk scarves, black canvas slippers, jade Buddhas, red-lacquered Buddhas, ceramic Buddhas, ceramic dragons, ceramic pigs emblazoned with floral patterns, bobble-headed cats that wave one paw, fancy kites, license plates and street signs with popular children’s names on them, pink conical hats, jewelry, antiques, elephant tusks intricately carved to look like miniature Shangri-las, T-shirts that say GOT DIM SUM?, shot glasses, swords, giant vases, discount luggage, dainty parasols, life-size statues of American Indians shooting bows and arrows, and life-size statues of horses rearing on hind legs, should you need anything like any of that. Needless to say, many of the shops are worth picking through.

The friendly and informed folks at

Red Blossom Tea Company are purveyors of fine teas and beautiful Yixing teapots, fashioned by hand in the Sung Dynasty style of a millennium ago. They offer a tasting flight of four teas for $35, should you want to learn more about teas and the rituals surrounding them.

On the corner of Grant Avenue and Commercial Street, the

Eastern Bakery is Chinatown’s oldest bakery. Since 1924 pineapple buns and sesame seed balls have been rubbing shoulders with apple turnovers in the pastry shelves, as the bakers have long tried to whet both Chinese and American appetites. But the real star is the homemade moon cakes, and you’d be well advised to stop in and try one. Next door, the Wok Shop is a veritable treasure trove of instruments for all your searing, stir-frying, steaming, and boiling needs.

On the next block,

Canton Bazaar stocks everything from chopsticks to sensual statues that are displayed behind a glass case. If you’re not interested in buying anything, you can at least step in to admire the lovely lacquered painting, two stories tall, that hangs in the south stairwell. The intersection of Grant and California is a pivotal crossroads in Chinatown, with several landmark buildings, including the first two fake pagodas to go up after the ’06 quake. The intersection is flanked by the exotic Sing Fat Building, at 717 California St., which went up in 1907, and the Sing Chong Building, at 601 Grant, which went up a year later. Also at this intersection stands

Old St. Mary’s, a quake survivor that dates all the way back to 1853. The oldest cathedral in California, the church was built by Chinese laborers using granite quarried in the old country. This old church has seen it all and was at one time nearly surrounded by houses of ill repute, which adds some weight to the sign below the clock, which quotes Ecclesiastes: SON, OBSERVE THE TIME AND FLY FROM EVIL.

Cross California, turn left, and make a quick right at Quincy Street, into St. Mary’s Square. The park is a hidden sanctuary amid the neighborhood’s hustle and bustle. At the center of the square, a statue of Sun Yat-sen is the work of sculptor Beniamino Bufano, who met and admired the Chinese leader. Sun Yat-sen was president of China for just six weeks in 1912, but during that time he banned foot binding and played a pivotal role in overthrowing the Manchu Dynasty. He likely stood at this spot many times, as he was a frequent traveler to San Francisco.

Crossing through the park, at Pine, turn right, which gets you back to Grant. Follow it all the way to the

Dragon Gate, at Bush Street, considered the only authentic Chinatown gate in North America. Built in 1970, with materials donated by Taiwan, the gate has a proper feng shui southern orientation and is flanked by two lions warding off evil spirits. The male lion, on the left, has his paw resting on a ball symbolizing the Chinese Empire, while the female lion, on the right, has her paw resting on a cub, representing offspring and fertility. Fashioned after ceremonial gates found in Chinese villages, the large main passage is intended for use by dignitaries, while the flanking smaller passageways are for commoners; exit in the way that you see fit.

While our walk takes us through a lot of Chinatown, the neighborhood warrants further exploration, so feel free to wander back through all the streets we haven’t hit on this tour.

Backstory: Donaldina Cameron, Chinatown’s Angry Angel

Where Sacramento meets Joice Alley sits the clinker-brick Cameron House, formerly the Presbyterian Mission House, named for missionary and social worker Donaldina Cameron. Originally from New Zealand, Cameron came to San Francisco in her early 20s to help teach sewing to young girls. Inspired by the Mission House’s founder, Margaret Culbertson, Cameron was soon tackling much larger issues than embroidery. In the late 1800s, girls as young as 9 years old were bought in China and sold into slavery and prostitution in San Francisco; once in America, they rarely lived more than five years at the hands of their captors.

Upon Culbertson’s death, Cameron made rescuing these girls her life’s mission. Freeing the children was dangerous work—child-protection laws didn’t exist, and the violent tongs (gangs) that ruled much of Chinatown were constantly threatening Cameron: brothel owners were found trying to dynamite the door of the Mission House open and sometimes left effigies of Cameron with a knife through her heart. Nevertheless, this hardy crusader remained undaunted. Tipped off by Chinese allies in the neighborhood, Cameron would scale ladders, climb over rooftops, and ferret out secret rooms behind trap doors where the girls were being kept, often with ax-wielding help from supporters in the Chinatown Police Squad. She was even known to spend the night in jail with girls to protect them. When the mission was rebuilt following the 1906 earthquake, Cameron designed elaborate underground rooms and tunnels to hide the girls during raids.

Cameron is credited with rescuing and educating thousands of girls over the course of nearly four decades. Despite her staunch Christian proselytizing to her wards, most historians agree that her true passion lay with saving lives. The tongs dubbed her Fahn Quai (“white devil”), but her girls lovingly called her Lo Mo (“old mother”). Today, Cameron House continues to offer a range of social services to the Chinese American community.