Chinatown is a thriving Chinese community and a living historical testament---honoring 160 years of Chinese in America.  Moreover, Chinatown’s history is a means for its survival and vibrancy.  Throughout the world, people have an instinctive fondness for historical sites, but historical “authenticity”, true to given time and place, is an essential goal to protect Chinatown for posterity.  San Francisco’s Chinatown is an architectural and cultural gem and it is not even protected as a landmark Historic District.

Chinatown Could Easily Have Disappeared
Many Chinatowns in the US have waned or vanished for social and economic reasons.  Many urban Chinatown’s today, such as Manhattan and Boston, are battling escalating land values and encroaching financial districts.  Marysville, California was once the second largest Chinatown in California.  Locke, California is one of few Chinatowns protected as a designated Historic District on the National Register of Historic Places, as well as a National Historic Landmark.  In San Francisco, early Chinese pioneers were resilient and stalwart in preserving their community.  Warding off powerful economic forces, Chinese-Americans organized, garnered political/ foreign support, emphasized Chinatown’s tourism strengths and revenue-generating potential and reinvented the neighborhood as a new Oriental City of exotic culture and “veritable fairy palaces”.  Chinatown’s preservation is as much a testament to a civil rights struggle, as to perseverance and cultural strength. 

Chinatown Gradually Being Nibbled Away
Chinatown remains a cultural hub for Chinese Americans, a gateway for recent immigrants, a regional tourist attraction, a marketplace, a generator of diverse small businesses, a link to community services and home to Chinese-Americans, families, foreign-born and elderly.  But gradually, over time, nearly imperceptible because of its slow progression, Chinatown’s uniqueness and history is vanishing.  Chinatown’s distinguishing architecture and exotic impact are being supplanted by a rush to modernization and clichéd commercialism.

For its time, Chinatown’s forbears created structures of high quality, a unique, cohesive imagery difficult to replicate today: Portsmouth Square, Old St. Mary’s Church, St. Mary’s Square, Sing Chong Bazaar, Sing Fat Bazaar, Chinatown YWCA/ YMCA, Cameron House, Tien Hou Temple, Old Chinese Hospital, Great Star Theatre, Nam Kue Chinese School, Chinatown Telephone Exchange Building, Chinese Six Companies, Benevolent Associations and a myriad of contributing architecture.  Gone are historic memories spanning decades:  Movie marquees, neon lights (like the once bright Golden Star Radio sign on Clay St.), original storefronts, well-crafted storefronts (like the old Jackson Café), brick-paved streets (like Commercial St.), building lights (like Sing Chong Bazaar as seen on current postcards), store signs, picturesque painted signs, intimate scale, details, quality materials and original fabric.

If these authentic structures and artifacts are further taken away or compromised, San Francisco’s Chinatown will look no different than other so-called “Chinatowns”.  If stripped of its genuine historic fabric, Chinatown will superficially “look Chinese”, just like the competing Asian marketplaces out in the neighborhoods which have resulted from San Francisco’s shifting demographics.  Without the protection of official Historic District status, the City’s original Chinatown could lose its unique character and attractiveness.

Development Pressures 
The same economic forces of 1906 exist today.  Large developments and capital projects inflate land values; next, land use changes, zoning changes, property sales and massive transformations follow.  These economic forces have led to the demise of other Chinatowns and Chinese neighborhoods in urban America.  Without the legal protections of an Historic District, the symbolic heartbeat of Chinese in America may well alter beyond recognition.

Grant Avenue is the Hub
In a past not so long ago, for many decades, Chinatown’s Grant Avenue was a dynamic hub of the American Chinese community.  People came from afar to replenish their stocks of unique Chinese foods and goods.  The hustle and bustle, sights and sounds of Chinese commerce and community interaction mixed with live chickens, ducks, rabbits and fish swimming in window tanks along the sidewalk.  Chinatown was a village.  To an outsider and visitor, Chinatown displayed a cultural authenticity.

Over time, that village dispersed---to Stockton Street, Clement Street, Irving Street, Daly City, Oakland, San Jose and farther afield---as Chinese enculturalization and opportunities expanded.  But the historical symbolism of Grant Avenue remains.  It needs to be preserved.

Renewed effort for historic preservation would bring a timely focus, energizing the traditional north-south axis of Chinatown.  Chinatown is the hub linking Downtown, the Financial District, the Broadway Corridor, North Beach, Nob Hill, Russian Hill and the waterfront.  The neighborhood is a regional destination magnet and crossroads, whose success can spur nearby community and historical revitalization.  Soon a new Historic Preservation Commission will be seated, according to the voters’ wishes in November 2008.  We need to press for designation of an Historic District which will retain and restore the urban design and neighborhood pattern of our City’s original Chinatown.

San Francisco’s Chinatown, America’s first Chinatown encompassing the largest Chinese population outside of Asia, was founded by descendants from China’s Pearl River Delta.  In 1848, at the start of the Gold Rush and the birth of the City of San Francisco, the first 780 Chinese immigrants began a journey that has continued to the present day.  The spirit of that cultural journey and interchange must be institutionalized in the architectural and urban design prescriptions that we enact today.  We need an officially recognized Chinatown  Historic District.

Arboretum’s New Greenhouse Should Be Green

Strybing Arboretum at the San Francisco Botanical Garden desperately needs to build a new facility to replace the decaying greenhouses that are so unsuitably located in a damp, shaded swale near Lincoln Way,  However, why create new problems as you resolve old ones? 
Strolling at the proposed site today, you’ll find an intact native landscape. Native grasses cover portions of the southern hilltop and coyote brush, ceanothus, coffeeberry, and toyon are found on the north slope.  But portions of the proposed buildings and access roadway would cover parts of this natural area and affect even the little pond below that is home to endangered frogs
This sunny spot, above the present greenhouses and the redwood forest, has been called “ideal” for the facility; that is true for just the greenhouse itself. But expanding the greenhouse function and adding a Children’s Education Center here, too, would infringe on this natural area and violate both the Golden Gate Park Master Plan and the Garden’s Own Master Plan.  To reach the facility, a new 20-foot wide, 450-foot roadway would be built and bisect the western end of the arboretum.
No site is ideal if it is not accessible. Making the greenhouse a public attraction and creating a Children’s Education Center far from public transportation means that idling school buses will use the proposed roadway while waiting to transport the children from this remote part of the Garden.  Far better to have the Children’s Education Center placed near the front entrance of the Garden, where excellent public transportation close to 9th Avenue is available, and close to where the Master Plan recommends renewal of the demonstration gardens, which would be a great teaching tool.
Neither pedestrian circulation nor vehicle circulation has been well thought out in this plan. At the very least, the buildings could be placed nearer Martin Luther King Drive, thus greatly reducing the length of the roadway required for Fire Department access.

Fences are proposed to safeguard the arboretum’s rare plants but are not needed to surround the entire facility.  Yet all visitors, including children brought to the Education Center, would have to walk along an extensive length of new chain-link fence and then cross the new roadway.
To move forward with this design would require amendments to both Master Plans and a full Environmental Impact Report. This process can be an opportunity for the Garden to reassess and improve its plan. But what is the sense of having Master Plans, about which the public were informed and testified, if at the first opportunity the Plans are violated?  For these current plans, there has been virtually no public notification.  The Garden can, and should, do much better.

Campaigning for Obama
Alec Bash, former city planner, gives us an inside look

What does working on a major political campaign actually involve?  Despite having spent five years as a full-time volunteer leading DemocracyAction, a San Francisco Democratic  club focused solely on national issues and elections, my first meeting with 50 Obama volunteers last June introduced me to the most diverse group of political activists I’d ever seen. I stepped up as the San Francisco Voter Registration Coordinator.

Voter Registration involves “tabling”, setting up ironing boards or renting booths at street fairs, park festivals and other busy locations. We’d solicit passersby to register to vote, sign up volunteers, and offer campaign items like buttons, bumper stickers and signs for donations to buy more such supplies. I organized about 50 tabling events using Obama for America’s groundbreaking my.barackobama.com website, and had hundreds of volunteers. Obama campaign supplies were a huge draw at our tables. Our big fringe benefit—the street fairs like Fillmore Jazz and Haight Street, the park festivals like Outside Lands and the Blues Festival, and September’s Sunday Streets closures on the waterfront were fun, and people couldn’t have been more enthusiastic!

Our 939 Market Street offices opened in September as a unified campaign office with California Democratic Party and San Francisco Democratic Party support.  We established our own San Francisco for Obama/Obama for America group. We’d been busily phone banking to New Mexico and Nevada long before the Market Street offices opened!  Through the graces of  SF Obama Team Coordinator Anhoni Patel and her San Francisco Station offices, 939 Market became our major phone bank site—we made 70,000 calls on Election Day alone to get out the vote in battleground states, following the clock across the country, finally ending with Alaska after our own polls had closed.

People streamed into our 939 offices, where we also registered them to vote, recruited volunteers, solicited donations and made Obama supplies available.  Keeping supplies in stock became a major effort. I continually bought more, using the donations to cover the costs while buying larger and larger quantities (first 5,000 bumper stickers, then 10,000, finally 25,000!). We also helped supply fundraisers, ours were often the only supplies to be found in the Bay Area. Volunteer Howard Grayson helped me keep this all going, along with Obama Office Manager Jessica Williams who’d scheduled volunteers to help staff the Obama tables and desks.

I found several other counties and volunteer groups to share in my large supply orders, spanning from Santa Clara to Mono Counties. Working with volunteer designer Libby Klitsch, I ordered a couple thousand T-shirts to use as walking billboards with Obama San Francisco, Join Our Team –SFObama.com. These T’s flew out the door—and most important, came back in on people again and again.

By September, we’d collected enough donations to send buttons, bumper stickers and signs for Obama volunteers in Reno. By the week before the election, I’d sent out about 50,000 items to battleground states Nevada, Ohio and Florida, having collected about $100,000 in small dollar donations to keep the supplies flowing. We registered close to 4000 people to vote, while signing up several thousand volunteers. I also organized a $22,000 fundraiser in September, one of so many throughout the Bay Area.

Victory and the Inauguration
For those not traveling to DC, the most helpful place to watch the inauguration was the Emerge Inaugural Breakfast in San Francisco, a benefit for Emerge www.emergeamerica.org. Emerge inspires and trains women to run for office, with the goal to increase the number of Democratic women in public office. The Republicans have many such groups across the country.  Emerge is now in eight states, California, Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona, Oregon,  Wisconsin, Maine and Massachusetts, and we need more.

Riding in on MUNI Metro that morning, a friendly woohoo! from another volunteer welcomed us as we boarded the J-Church, I in my Obama San Francisco T.  At the City Club, packed, and standing room only, we watched Dubya finally walk down the US Capitol steps, looking vaguely clueless to what will most likely be a sorry place in history; it was a relief and vindication of all our efforts since he took us into war in March 2003.

Then Obama, with a stiff upper lip and somber demeanor, descended those same steps, heralded by “Ladies and Gentlemen, the President Elect of the United States, Barack H. Obama”. The TV cut to the National Mall and the millions of hands waving and the cheering, and tears jumped out of our eyes.

More followed with Senator Dianne Feinstein’s “…future generations will mark this morning as the turning point for real and necessary change in our nation. They will look back and remember that this was the moment when the dream that once echoed across history, from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, finally reached the walls of the White House.”

We all stood for the swearing in, with more tears as “I, Barack Hussein Obama…” took the oath. The speech was all I’d hoped he’d say and more, brilliant as the man, perfect for the times, a call to service in a new era of responsibility; and “reject(ing) as false the choice between our safety and our ideals…. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience's sake.” The cameras mercifully did not pan to get a reaction shot from Bush.

Rev. Dr. Joseph Lowery prayed for help to "work for that day when black will not be asked to get in back, when brown can stick around ... when yellow will be mellow ... when the red man can get ahead, man; and when white will embrace what is right." This campaign was about so many different people all reaching for their ideals, and now hope is on the way…just a few challenges to get out of the way first. Aretha Franklin's "My Country 'Tis of Thee" brought out more long-buried emotions, because it felt as if our country was ours again. A new beginning for us all!