A Self-Guided Chinatown Walking Tour
San Francisco · 5 Stops · approx. ½ mile · 2–3 hours
This tour was born out of a longer piece about the Great Star Theater, the last remaining Chinese theater in any Chinatown in the United States. Chinatown is the most densely visited neighborhood in San Francisco, but most of its visitors stay on Grant Avenue. This walk takes you in a rough square starting on one side of Chinatown, at the Great Star Theater, then around streets that are quieter, more local, and stacked with history that the souvenir shops don’t tell you about. At one point you’ll land smack in the middle of Grant Street where you can veer off to do a little souvenir shopping.
The five stops span 170 years of San Francisco history. Tap that link for the Google map. Most of these stops have been here longer than the Golden Gate Bridge.
This tour was created as a companion to the Wild Radish essay on the Great Star Theater. The theater is currently facing a funding gap. Please consider buying a ticket or donating at greatstartheater.org.
BEFORE YOU GO
Start time: 11:00 AM
Best days: Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, or Sunday
Avoid: Mondays (City View closed) and Thursdays (Tin How Temple closed)
Cash: Required at nearly every stop. ATMs are plentiful throughout Chinatown.
Accessibility: Tin How Temple (Stop 2) requires climbing four flights of stairs and is not wheelchair accessible. The rest of the walk is mostly flat.
Shop early: Chinatown shops tend to close around 4:00 PM. If you want extra time to wander and shop, start an hour earlier.
Stop 1 GREAT STAR THEATER
636 Jackson Street, between Kearny and Grant
The star of the tour. You won’t miss the eye-catching facade with pagoda details, deco block and aqua tile fascia, neon signage, and a 1960s-era marquee. This is the last remaining Chinese theater in any Chinatown in the United States, open since 1925, and it is still very much alive.
Check the program board and consider coming back for a show. The calendar runs from Cantonese opera to cabaret to the Candlelight concert series. Across the street, Z&Y Restaurant is worth a dinner reservation before an evening performance. Be forewarned: it’s spicy.
The theater is currently facing a funding gap. Consider buying a ticket or making a donation.
11:00 AM · 30 minutes · 636 Jackson St · Check schedule online · Donation appreciated
Stop 2 WAVERLY PLACE & TIN HOW TEMPLE
125 Waverly Place, between Washington and Clay
As you walk from Jackson toward Waverly, you’ll pass under red lanterns strung above the alleyways. Follow them wherever they lead. They mark streets worth seeing. They symbolize love, hope, and prosperity, and they’re another reason to return after dark.
Waverly Place is one block west of Grant Avenue and a world apart from it. It’s quieter, more local, lined with painted iron balconies in red and green and gold. Sun Yat-sen lived on this block during his years in exile. Walk its full length and look up.
Tin How Temple is mid-block, at the top of four flights of stairs. If you’re lucky, you’ll hear Cantonese opera singers rehearsing on the second floor as you climb. At the top, the air is thick with incense. There will be an attendant and a donation box.
The temple is dedicated to Mazu, or “maternal ancestor”, the sea goddess and protector of seafarers, deified form of a Fujianese woman named Lin Mo who lived in the tenth century CE. She is thought to roam the seas with two generals, protecting those who pray to her.
The temple has been in this location or nearby on Waverly since at least 1852, founded for Chinese immigrants arriving by ship and departing across the Pacific. It is the oldest institution on this tour by just four years.
For $2 you receive a bundle of incense to light at the oil lamp and offer at each altar, one stick at a time. Swirl the bundle so the smoke rises. You start and end on the balcony. Take in the view. For $3 you can also receive a packet of lucky tea or a folded paper lotus.
11:35 AM · 25 minutes · 125 Waverly Place · Open Tue/Wed/Fri until 2 PM · Mon/Sat/Sun until 3 PM · Closed Thursdays · $2 incense donation · another $1 for tea packet or paper lotus · No photography · Not wheelchair accessible
Stop 3 MOW LEE SHING KEE & CO.
774 Commercial Street, between Kearny and Grant
Mow Lee has been on Commercial Street since 1856 which makes it the oldest continuously operating business in San Francisco’s Chinatown, and one of the oldest in the city. It is a narrow, fragrant shop selling dried goods, preserved foods, and Chinese sausage (lap cheong). It looks the way it has for a very long while.
Pick up a length of lap cheong to take home. You’ll need three links for a proper pot of sticky rice with sausage, but Mow Lee sells them two at a time, so you’ll end up with four. That’s fine. (The recipe is in the Mow Lee post at Wild Radish.
Before you leave the block, look east. Commercial Street gives you a straight-on view of the Ferry Building clock tower. It’s one of only two streets in the city where you can see it this way. The other is Market Street.
12:05 PM · 20 minutes · 774 Commercial St · Open daily 9 AM–5 PM · Cash only
Stop 4 NOW TO EAT — WALKING OR SITTING, IT’S YOUR CHOICE
Eastern Bakery or City View Restaurant
Option A: Walking · Eastern Bakery
720 Grant Avenue at Commercial
You’ll smell Eastern Bakery before you see it: that warm, sweet drift of lotus paste, roasted peanuts, and toasted pastry pulling you toward the hand-lettered signage that has barely changed since 1924. It is the oldest Chinese bakery in the United States. A busker playing erhu, the traditional two-stringed Chinese fiddle, sometimes sets up nearby. Orlando, the owner, might be the one to serve you. He speaks English, Chinese, and Spanish and is as friendly as advertised.
Eastern is best known for mooncakes, made on the premises and available year-round. This is a rarity, since most bakeries only carry them at the Mid-Autumn Festival. They also do a pineapple bun they’ll warm for you: extra sweet, extra crunchy. Take it and keep walking. There is lots of shopping around here. Get yourself a wok from the Wok Shop next door. I especially love wandering around Old Shanghai about a block away at 645 Grant Ave.
12:30 PM · 10–15 minutes · 720 Grant Ave · Open daily 11 AM–4 PM · Cash or Zelle · Popular items sell out by mid-afternoon
Option B: Sitting · City View Restaurant
33 Walter U Lum Place (off Kearny at Clay)
Dim sum is a traditional Cantonese dining experience consisting of sharable plates of dumplings, buns, and small dishes, ordered as you go. City View is one of the best places to do it in this neighborhood. They relocated from Commercial Street in 2023 and moved from cart service to made-to-order, which means everything comes from the kitchen fresh.
City View sits directly across from Portsmouth Square, San Francisco’s first public plaza, established in 1835 when California was still under Mexican rule and the city was still called Yerba Buena. The American flag was raised here in 1846, the square was renamed after the ship that carried the Americans over, and shortly after, Yerba Buena became San Francisco. It’s a good spot to eat and let that history settle.
12:30 PM · ~60 minutes · 33 Walter U Lum Place · Tue–Fri 11 AM–2 PM · Sat–Sun 10:30 AM–2:30 PM · Closed Mondays · Arrive by 12:30 PM on weekdays
Stop 5 LI PO COCKTAIL LOUNGE
916 Grant Avenue, between Washington and Jackson
The red lacquered doors are set into a frame of fake rock, which tells you what kind of place this is: unpretentious, kooky, and a little theatrical — from a bygone era when Chinese culture was Anglicized and blown out for the sake of entertainment. Li Po has been on Grant Avenue since 1937, a survivor of the Chinese nightclub scene that surged during World War II when GIs flooded San Francisco before shipping out to the Pacific, and quietly outlasted every other club on the strip.
Inside: a wraparound bar, faded red leather booths, a golden Buddha, Chinese lanterns. The neon hexagonal sign out front appeared briefly in the 1947 film The Lady from Shanghai and was restored in 2018. According to Trina Robbins, author of Forbidden City: The Golden Age of Chinese Nightclubs, Li Po is the only club from that era that still looks exactly as it did when it opened.
The bar is named for Li Bai, one of the great poets of the Tang Dynasty, a man famous for his love of wine and moonlight. It is said he drowned trying to embrace the reflection of the moon on the water. Order the Chinese Mai Tai. Stop at one, trust me. Years ago patrons played Liar’s Dice at the bar. It was loud and fun. I haven’t the nerve to ask if they still do. Maybe you can try.
2:00 PM · Stay as long as you like · 916 Grant Ave · Opens daily at 2 PM · Cash only
That’s it for the tour. I hope you enjoy it!
This tour was created as a companion to the Wild Radish essay on the Great Star Theater. Please consider buying a ticket or donating at greatstartheater.org.
This is a reprint from my Substack.
107 Franconia
Elegy for Another Earthquake Shack
A few weeks after Jane Cryan died, San Francisco Planning approved a demolition permit for a tiny, faded cotton candy pink house on Franconia Street in Bernal Heights. The paperwork calls it a former refugee shack, built in 1906 or 1907. In the 120 years since, it has been added onto so many times that almost nothing of the original redwood box is visible anymore. Two bedrooms, one bath, 781 sqft, it sold for $885k in 2022. Soon it will come down and a new, modern 3-story house will go up in its place. The planning department could not justify preserving the shack because, as with most of the shacks dispersed throughout San Francisco, it had been so significantly altered over time.
Before there was a shack or even a street, the land at the bottom of Bernal Hill was creek and marsh, and then by the 1860s a small farming village grew up along the creek, thirty or so houses drawing water from upstream. The creek got tucked underground sometime around the turn of the 20th century, running now beneath what became Army then Cesar Chavez Street. The village gave way to a park in 1894, Bernal Park (renamed Precita Park in 1973).
Then, in 1906, San Francisco’s earthquake and great fire displaced thousands of families. The government set up refugee camps in parkland throughout the city. For about a year, Bernal Park held Camp 23 where something like 250 small redwood cottages provided temporary housing. Families who’d lost everything in the fire paid two dollars a month toward owning one outright. When the camp closed in 1907, horse teams hauled the cottages across the city to lots that had been empty a season earlier. That’s likely how one of those cottages came to rest on the ground that would become 107 Franconia.
Over time the one-room shelter on Franconia became, slowly, an ordinary house: a kitchen extension, a room added here, a bathroom, until it looked like other houses that were filling in the neighborhood. You can see time passing in the patchwork of exterior siding that includes wood in some parts, asbestos in some, and metal in others.
This isn’t a story about a building losing its history but about people building a life on top of very little over time as resources increased, life needs evolved, and elements broke down. The shack would do so much more than it was originally intended to do. This aspect challenges the historic nature of the building itself, but it also adds an important facet to the story of San Francisco and its people, of hope and ingenuity.
Jane Cryan spent decades making sure the city didn’t forget these little redwood boxes existed at all. Most of them, though, were never meant to hold still. They were altered and augmented to be lived in and grown past by people with evolving needs and creativity and resourcefulness. The redwood box at 107 Franconia is one of those, a story told not just by cataclysm and desolation, but of life lived over time through generations of families. We can’t preserve the building but we can preserve the story it leaves behind.
This is a reprint from my Substack.
Wild Radish
What’s in a Name
Throughout San Francisco, in April, the same flower bursts simultaneously wildly and delicately: four petals, pale and gentle like watercolors, white sliding into lilac, lilac into pale yellow. In spite of this flower’s prevalence, it’s not often mentioned or pointed out. Most people don’t know what it’s called. I know it as wild radish.
The plant is not from here. Similar to the bright yellow mustard that overtakes the same terrain that came with the Spanish, its seed turning up in the adobe bricks of the missions. But this one came later, also without invitation, riding in sacks of grain in the mid-1800s. It’s not native but it’s as ubiquitous as the California poppy, which is unfortunate in that they both compete for the same ground.
Each wants the same thing, the radish and the poppy: broken ground. Both specialize in the disturbed edge: roadsides, empty lots, graded slopes, places where something was torn up and left open. Where they both take hold the competition for light and water tightens, and the poppy thins out. In that narrow sense the emblem of California is losing ground to a plant that came off the trains and boats.
That is mostly the subject of this account. Arrival, competition, and the stubborn coexistence that happens on disturbed ground. It’s not from the perspective of the poppy. It can try but its baseline is an interloper’s point of view. The account is named for that side of the relationship because that is the truth of it. This is the perspective of an interloper who is stubbornly coexisting with everything that was here before. This particular stubbornness isn’t about who gets what, however. It’s the daily act of trying to surface all aspects of the relationship, ugly and beautiful, and hold them thoughtfully, hopefully, and peacefully.
This is a reprint from my Substack.
Jane Cryan, 1942-2026
Protector of Hope and Earthquake Shacks
On Wednesday, June 24, 2026, I sat in my car, in the fog, looking at what might be two 1906 earthquake shacks pushed together under one roof. The very next day, Jane Cryan died. I didn’t know yet. Woody LaBounty, who’d known her since they crawled under Outer Sunset houses together, checking rafters for checkerboard framing, posted the news the following week.
“Might” be, because the shacks are unverified. Unlike the certified shacks peppered throughout the city, this location has never been formally verified; only photographed and flagged as likely, on the strength of its low double gable and the telltale 14-by-18 footprint of a Type B relief cottage, times two. The shacks may be exactly what they should look like, but they’ve never been made to prove it.
After California’s statehood the Mexican rancho that made up much of the southern part of San Francisco was carved up and sold off in pieces. The piece under Lobos Street became, in 1867, the Railroad Homestead Association tract: a speculative grid of streets platted alongside the new San Francisco and San Jose Railroad, sold off in shares to investors who’d never seen the land. Italian, Irish, and German families farmed dairy and vegetables here for decades. This was Ocean View before it was a neighborhood: a farm village at the end of a rail line, a short ride from the city though the farmers preferred horse and wagon.
Then came April 1906. The earthquake and fires left more than two hundred thousand homeless, and the Relief Corporation answered with 5,610 small green cottages thrown up fast in camps across the city. Refugees paid two dollars a month toward a fifty-dollar purchase price, on one condition: once paid off, the shack had to be hauled by horses to a permanent lot. That is how a farm village at a rail stop became one of the places those cottages landed for good, joined two and three at a time into real houses, the way the structure on Lobos may have been joined.
It’s a unique kind of story for this part of the city’s history: residents dead set on staying in San Francisco, dragging green cottages behind them.
Jane Cryan gave much of her life to buildings like this one. She came to San Francisco on a postcard invitation from Jack Kerouac, a jazz pianist looking for a home for herself and her grand piano, and in 1982 signed a lease the same evening she saw a cottage in the Outer Sunset with peeling paint and a feral cat with kittens in the yard. Soon, an elderly neighbor told her she was living in a couple of relief houses cobbled together. She’d lived in the city for years and never once heard of the 1906 shacks. That sentence sent her into the newspaper archives, and out of them came the Society for the Preservation and Appreciation of San Francisco’s 1906 Refugee Shacks, founded in 1983, and a survey that eventually turned up something like seventy surviving shack sites citywide.
Today the count is closer to thirty. Her own cottage became San Francisco Landmark No. 171, a victory that came with the bitter requirement that she vacate it so her landlord could sell the property unencumbered. She called it the people’s landmark anyway, because working people had lived in shacks like it first. And former renters, this was their opportunity for ownership and stability in a boom and bust town that knew instability well. The shacks were more than a simple structure, they represented hope.
I live near Cryan’s landmark cottage and remember so clearly the cheery light yellow paint, the bright colorful dahlias, and the multitude of hummingbird feeders lined along the front. Walking past her home was like walking along a living rainbow buzzing with color, light, and winged activity. Her cottage is the reason I first learned about the shacks. I even once thought another nearby home could be one, too, only to learn it couldn’t due to the lack of checkerboard rafters. Oh well.
She spent her last years in Wisconsin, priced out of the city she’d given two decades to, still trying to find a publisher for the manuscript she called Hope Chest. Too exacting about her own words to compromise with an editor, by her own account. It remains unpublished. It is nonetheless the primary source behind the city’s official planning documents on the building type. In the end she handed it all over to LaBounty who now possesses the large and important weight of carrying her perspective forward.
I didn’t know any of this sitting in my car on Lobos, other than suspecting that I might be staring at two shacks cobbled together into a home on a street platted for a railroad speculation scheme, in a neighborhood that had long been farms, then a landing place for people who’d lost everything else. That’s usually how it goes here in San Francisco. You don’t go looking for the history. You sit in the fog for some other reason and it turns out to be right there in front of you.
Rest in Peace, Jane Cryan.
This is a reprint from my Substack.
June 17, 2026
Engine House No. 33 and the long, layered history of Oceanview
San Francisco Historic Preservation Commission · Regular Meeting
On Wednesday June 24, 2025, I was sitting in my car in front of two presumed earthquake shacks in Oceanview when Jane Cryan died. Though I didn’t know it yet. Cryan was a jazz pianist who came to San Francisco after receiving a postcard invitation from Jack Kerouac. In 1982 she signed a lease on a tiny peeling cottage in the Sunset right near my own home. The cottage, according to her, was a disaster and at the same time everything she had ever wanted. A month later she discovered she was living in three earthquake refugee shacks cobbled together. That discovery made her the city’s foremost champion of their preservation. She spent the rest of her life crawling under houses with a flashlight, identifying checkerboard framing in rafters, arguing with developers and city officials, and making sure someone was paying attention. That day of her passing, I was sitting outside two of the buildings she had devoted her life to saving. I just didn’t yet know the connection.
I struggled writing this article. My initial intent was only to share about the freshly landmarked Engine House No. 33. However, my next instinct was to zoom out and try to understand this part of the city that I knew so little about. I had never even set foot in this part of town until the week after San Francisco’s Historic Preservation Committee voted on the landmark status of a Victorian era firehouse. I decided to go to the place where the landmark stood and found so much more. I learned of Jane Cryan’s passing during the following hearing on July 1 when Woody LaBounty, president of SF Heritage, made a public comment about Jane’s passing. That moment reminded me that 1) San Francisco is a magical place; 2) there’s a purpose to my instinct for paying closer attention.
To better understand the situation of Engine House No. 33 I started by standing on a hill overlooking the neighborhood and taking it all in, then zoomed in closer where I unexpectedly found myself sitting in my car, wishing for a taco truck to open, and realizing that two earthquake shacks were within feet of me. This is when it hit me. There was a lot to learn about this place. In many ways the place reflects the long human history of California itself, from at least 5,000 years ago until today, July 4, exactly 250 years after our independence and, simultaneously, Spain’s establishment in what is now called San Francisco. So this article has taken a life of its own, extended by the Oceanview’s many layers and incarnations.
Lay of the Land — Oceanview from Brooks Park
While this next landmark is in San Francisco’s Oceanview neighborhood, Brooks Park is not. It’s in Merced Heights at the top of one of San Francisco’s fifty hills, the one that is southwestern-most. I’m standing in Brooks Park at the top of this hill so I can get an idea of the terrain, specifically where Oceanview fits in, somewhere between Visitacion Valley and Lake Merced in a valley running along the southern edge of San Francisco. It’s foggy on this June day so I can’t see as far as the ocean in one direction and the bay in the other, but I know they’re there. I can hear the freeway below and then the BART train’s metallic hum as it zooms by. I try to imagine how this slope must have appeared over 250 years ago before its gradual yet dramatic evolution.
I previously only knew about Oceanview because it’s in the name of the M Ocean View line. I used to ride the L Taraval to and from Parkside, and at West Portal the streetcars would split with the L heading west along Ulloa and the M going south down West Portal Avenue, into a neighborhood I had never visited and never thought to. Then in June 2026 the Historic Preservation Commission voted to designate old Engine House No. 33 a landmark and I had a reason to go.
Engine House No. 33 — A Historical Landmark
Engine House No. 33 is on Broad Street, three blocks from where the neighborhood’s original downtown used to be, when Oceanview was a village. It was built in 1896 by the city architect Charles R. Wilson in the Classical Revival style. It’s constructed of California old growth redwood with ceilings twenty feet high and a hose drying tower over sixty feet tall. According to lore, it was built to protect a women’s college planned for the area. However, the college was never built. The firehouse operated regardless and, in fact, Engine House No. 33 was the very last fire company in San Francisco to give up its horses, holding out against motorization while every other company in the city converted. The firehouse was decommissioned in 1977 and sold at public auction. It is a private home now.
A Faded Downtown
Today you’ll find the landmark firehouse surrounded by homes from predominately WWII era with older structures, the Victorians and Edwardians, peppered throughout. Along Broad, which features the M Ocean View streetcar line, there is a thumbnail of a business district but no sense of a downtown. One can easily assume this area was simply infill sprawl from surrounding districts. Most San Francisco districts are like this: a grid of homes with a commercial corridor or two (or more). So that observation is partially correct but there are many layers to this humble place, some almost completely obscured.
For instance, around the corner, on what is now a traffic interchange where Alemany meets 280, there used to be a plaza with a public water fountain. Going back to Gold Rush times. The fountain was both place-maker and horse watering station. There was a train depot, the anchor for this plaza, along the Southern Pacific Railroad taking travelers between San Francisco and San Jose following the old Spanish road. Streets fanned out like spokes around the station. Businesses such as the Diamond Saloon, Pesce’s Grocery, and Canada’s Barber Shop operated in this hub. There was a police station and a public school. The five-points intersection of Plymouth, Sagamore, San Jose, Sickles, and the Southern Pacific railroad line was so dangerous that locals named it Death’s Crossing. But it was a hub nonetheless.
You can’t see any of this anymore mostly because the Southern Pacific rerouted its mainline in 1904 and then ceased stopping here. Then Alemany Boulevard came through in 1926 on a different railroad’s right-of-way and the fountain came down and the plaza disappeared under asphalt. What’s left from those old times is a cluster of Victorians peppered throughout the blocks around the firehouse, harkening to the village that assembled here and then lost its anchor.
The First People — 3000 BCE to 1776 CE
A California poppy doesn’t transplant. It throws its seeds explosively from a dry capsule, high up into the air from the parent plant, and the seeds lie in the soil waiting for disturbance like a grading, a fire, or patch of bare ground where the light gets in. For thousands of years poppies on the sandy slope threw their descendants long before the place was called Oceanview. Each disturbance called them in. Each generation threw its seeds into whatever came next. They’d migrate to other parts carried by wind or wildlife or collected and sowed by the people who lived here for thousands of years before.
Yelamu people, the Ramaytush- Ohlone-speakers whose territory encompassed the San Francisco peninsula, would have moved seasonally through this landscape for thousands of years. Some of their settlements clustered near the bay shore to the east and to the west at what is now called Lake Merced. Between those water bodies they must have traveled along routes that followed the low ground, the gullies, the base of the ridge where seasonal water ran, terrain that is now Geneva Avenue, Brotherhood Way, Ocean Avenue. The Association of Ramaytush Ohlone is mapping those routes now. What we have in the meantime are the logical lines: water, grade, and resources. These paths were probably established first by migrating wildlife, then found by the people who knew them for so long, then industrialized, and then paved over.
The First Rupture: European Intervention — 1776
The Spanish arrived exactly 250 years ago as of this writing and everything changed. The Yelamu were forced into labor for the mission and their land was converted to cattle grazing on the open hillsides. In 1845 the Mexican government granted the land to José de Jesús Noé, the last alcalde (mayor) of Yerba Buena (soon to be San Francisco), who continued to run cattle for the hide-and-tallow trade, the daily work done by vaqueros who were mostly former mission slaves. The American takeover ended the rancho system and by 1867 the land was described as almost worthless. Worthless to whom the assessor did not say. The poppies were still coming up in the disturbed ground where the cattle had grazed, but now accompanied by the bright yellow mustard that made their way from Europe in the shoes and hides of interlopers.
In 1856, a state assemblyman named Horace Hawes drew a line across the tip of the San Francisco peninsula to consolidate city and county governments and contain the political corruption that was rife at the time. The line was drawn the only way you draw a line across “empty land”: straight, because there was nothing to negotiate over. Oceanview ended up just barely on the San Francisco side of it, not because anyone wanted it there, but because the border ran just north of a roadhouse at the intersection of Mission and San Jose known as the Top of the Hill in what is now Daly City. Called the Abbey House, owner and political boss Chris Lilly wanted his establishment in a county where San Francisco law couldn't reach it.
The Railroad and Homesteads — 1865-1905
Soon thereafter in the 1860s, the Southern Pacific came through and the speculators followed, platting streets and filing homestead maps for a neighborhood they were certain would materialize. It didn’t, not really, not for decades. Instead came the farmers: Italian, Irish, and German immigrants who had figured out early in the Gold Rush that a hungry city needed vegetables and dairy. They rented the sandy soils below the Merced Heights ridge and hauled produce downtown by horse wagon. The 1880 census lists seventeen farmers and dairymen on what was then the Ocean House Road and the old San Jose Road, none given specific addresses because the settlement was so sparse. They showed up as names in a ledger and attached to a direction.
An 1869 map shows the Oceanview’s early homestead plots with Orizaba serving as the western border. The other side of that border shows the plots to be established by a different development firm in what would be a different neighborhood. The seam at Orizaba is still visible today with dead-ends, offset blocks, and streets that don't quite meet. It is the physical record of two competing speculative ventures filed three years apart. Those western plots would sit mostly empty for another seventy years. The terrain worked against it: steeper grades, rockier outcrops, a drainage gully running southwest that made the low lots seasonally wet and unattractive.
The firehouse arrived in 1896 into all of this: the sometimes green, sometimes golden hills, the empty lots that remained wildflower meadows, frog ponds, barns, farm wagons, and the village assembling around the railroad like grid island. Robert T. Browne was the commanding officer and his crew consisted of hosemen, drivers, and engineers. They had a grueling 24/7 schedule and lived at the house 6 days of the week. Some had homes nearby but most lived at the house. Their dorm was on the second floor while the horses dwelled below behind the engine. Their inaugural assignment was the first instance of a San Francisco fire crew giving mutual aid outside the city limits when they took care of a munitions fire in Colma.
The Village Loses Its Core — 1904-1907
The firehouse had been standing for eight years when Southern Pacific broke ground on the Bayshore Cutoff in 1904. The new route would go along the bay shore, through five tunnels, saving miles, minutes, and headaches compared to the original route that came through Oceanview. The original line had always been an operational pain: too steep, too winding, requiring helper engines to haul trains over the grades west of San Bruno Mountain. The railroad had been planning an alternative since at least 1892. The village had built itself around a railroad that had never fully committed to it.
Without the trains the village emptied over the coming years. The electric streetcar lines pulled development north and east. The saloons, the grocery, and the barber shop lost their reason to exist. What remained was the firehouse on Broad Street, still protecting a neighborhood the railroad had now abandoned, waiting for whatever came next. Developers had been promising a respectable suburban neighborhood since the 1880s: wide streets, long rectangular blocks, the grid that the Railroad Homestead Association laid out in 1867. And that’s what remained.
The final blow would come in 1926 when the city paved Alemany Boulevard on the old Ocean Shore Railroad right-of-way, a diagonal roadbed left by a failed coastal line that had run from 12th and Mission through Oceanview to the Pacific and never made a profit. The railroad stopped operations in 1920, beaten by the automobile, and left its graded roadbed cutting diagonally across the old plaza for six years before the city decided to pave it. The new boulevard was named for Archbishop Joseph Sadoc Alemany, San Francisco’s first archbishop. Its diagonal cut went directly through the plaza that had been the geographic center of the village, across the convergence of streets, through the space where the fountain had stood.
The Next Rupture: the Big One — 1906
In the midst of Oceanview’s looming challenge came an even bigger one in the form of San Francisco’s next inflection point. On April 18, 1906, an earthquake struck and the fires that followed burned for three days. Much of the city lay in ruins. Two hundred and fifty thousand people were left homeless. The army built over 5,000 small cottages for the families who couldn’t afford to decamp, painted green to blend into the public parks and open spaces where the camps were set up. Residents could eventually buy their cottages for fifty dollars and would move them to cheap lots in the western and southern parts of the city. These families were renters prior to the quake. Now they were homeowners. Horse-drawn wagons hauled those green cottages into Oceanview for weeks.
In the larger story of the 1906 earthquake, Oceanview is a rare thing: not a dispersal story but an arrival story. Cheap lots that nobody had wanted, that the homestead associations had platted and failed to sell and the railroad had abandoned, became the foundation of a neighborhood. Like a sea of poppies making their homes in disturbed ground, San Francisco families found their own place to take root. Two certified earthquake cottages still stand on Niantic Street, a stub of a road now hemmed in between Alemany Boulevard and the 280 freeway. Others on Lobos Street, near a taco truck that operates on weekends behind Minnie and Lovie Ward Recreation Center. Many of the cottages have been absorbed into the houses built around them, renovated past recognition in most cases, but occasionally identifiable by the checkerboard framing in the rafters.
Aftershocks: Another Post-Quake Boom, then a Bust — 1910s, 20s, and 30s
Two electric streetcar lines crossed the Oceanview corridor, decades apart and on different trajectories. In some ways, patterned after the competing developments separated by Orizaba. The first was San Francisco's oldest electric line called the San Francisco and San Mateo Electric Railway, which opened in 1892 running from the Ferry Building down through the Mission and south along San Jose Avenue, all the way to the cemeteries in Colma and eventually to downtown San Mateo. The line changed hands repeatedly through receivership and consolidation, and kept running through two wars and a Depression. Buses replaced it in 1945, part of the car-centric postwar conversion that dismantled most of San Francisco's streetcar network.
The streetcar line would contribute to a boom along San Jose Avenue. Edwardian era homes purchased or built by another wave of earthquake refugees popped up amid the fields and earthquake shacks. These new residents could hop on the streetcar for their daily downtown commutes. House by house, the neighborhood filled in unevenly, each block a record of whoever arrived when and what they could afford. A carpenter on Broad Street, a plumber on Capitol Avenue, a furniture salesman on Lakeview. The houses were practical: flat facades, bay windows angled toward the light, modest millwork, a room for a boarder if times got tight. By the time Alemany Boulevard cut through the old plaza in 1926 and erased the last trace of the railroad village, the neighborhood that had been promised for sixty years was finally actually there.
Coincidentally it was at this time that my great-grandfather-in-law made a home on his own plot on Lakeview Avenue near where it ends at San Jose Avenue. He had been renting in the Mission, working as a salesman for a furniture factory in South of Market, when the earthquake displaced him. He bounced between addresses before buying on the eastern slope of the ridgeline at the edge of Oceanview mere steps from the streetcar line. He built a modest Edwardian cottage on a corner lot with three bedrooms, pitched roof, wood frame, a bay window angled toward the view. He stayed the rest of his life. The house is still there.
While the southern stretch of Oceanview found itself fading into a new car-centric thoroughfare and the northeastern portion experienced its boom, the western end would hang on to its rural nature a bit longer. This fits a pattern that runs across the entire western half of San Francisco. The city's development had always moved east to west, slowed by sand dunes, fog, poor drainage, and the sheer distance from downtown. West of Orizaba, the terrain compounded the problem: the steep southwest face of the ridge defeated the surveyors who had drawn streets over it in the 1860s, some of those streets taking eighty years to become anything other than lines on a map. Below the ridge a gully ran seasonally west toward Lake Merced, poor drainage making the low lots unattractive to builders. Even federal Depression-era subsidies wouldn’t cover the expense of building on the steepest parts of the ridge.
The Twin Peaks Tunnel opened in 1918, boring two miles under the hills that had challenged westward expansion since the city’s founding. The tunnel’s immediate benefit went to the neighborhoods clustered around its West Portal entrance: the high end residence parks of St. Francis Wood and Forest Hill, West Portal itself. Seven years later, in 1925, the M Ocean View streetcar line extended that promise another mile and a half, running south from West Portal out through open farmland along 19th Avenue to Broad and Plymouth. It was infrastructure built for a neighborhood that existed mainly on paper. But for at least three more decades this side of Orizaba would remain sparse. Ridership stayed low through the Depression and in August 1939 Muni replaced the streetcars with buses. The line was restored in 1944 when the wartime population finally surged westward and a transit merger gave it the volume of riders it needed.
The Brookses Arrive — 1936
It was during this time that Jesse and Helen Brooks bought the rocky peak of that southwestern-most hilltop (fourteen city lots to be exact) because, as Helen put it, it was out in the country. Her primary view would be that sparsely developed, nameless neighborhood west of Orizaba. The ridgeline was interchangeably called Pansy Hill, Poppy Hill, and Kite Hill by the locals. Those locals would frequent the area in the spring and summer seasons to pick wildflowers. Here, high above surrounding lands, the couple built a country home that was designed by Helen’s architect brother. Jesse ran Brooks Stationery and Records on Irving Street near 20th Avenue. Helen had the property terraced with stone walls and worked the land for thirty years where she maintained native plants, a vegetable garden, beehives, chickens, dogs, even a deer who occasionally hopped the fence. She gave plants and seeds to anyone who asked.
I try to imagine what she saw in the land below. There’d be open fields filled with wildflowers. Victorian era buildings peppered throughout. The shacks would be there and the Edwardians. On the other side, the curving roads and charming detached homes of the residential parks. Over time, more and more homes would fill in. Children would play in the open fields, screeching and shouting as they do. On clear days she’d see all the way to the ocean on one side to the bay on the other. On overcast days she’d see what I saw: a marine layer with a denser blanket of fog in the low lying areas. The tall Monterey Cypress trees on top of the hill would capture any moisture and drip it into the soil for the surrounding plants, cultivated and wild. In the mornings the poppies would be curled up in a twist and by midday, fog or sun, they’d unfurl their petals and shine vibrant orange and even sometimes white.
War and Urban Renewal — 1940s, 50s, and 60s
War and ships brought the M streetcar back to Oceanview. San Francisco’s shipyards, Hunters Point chief among them with between 17,000 and 18,500 workers at peak, helped make the Bay Area the nation’s premier shipbuilding center during World War II, responsible for thirty percent of American wartime shipping. Workers poured in from across the country, and the Bay Area’s population grew by more than fifty percent between 1940 and 1950. The city’s transit systems, straining under the load, merged in 1946, and the newly consolidated Muni restored full streetcar service through the Twin Peaks Tunnel to Oceanview.
What came after the war was not what any resident had planned for. The San Francisco Redevelopment Agency designated the Western Addition as blighted in the late 1950s and displaced an estimated 13,000 people, most of them African American who came to build the ships, for urban renewal. Families scattered to wherever they could find housing they could afford. Oceanview, once again, was one of those places. It was affordable because the same disinvestment that had made it the city’s southern frontier since 1856 had kept property values low, and because white working class families were leaving for suburbs whose FHA loans explicitly excluded Black buyers. It was not generosity. It was abandonment turned opportunity, and the families who came made something of it. By 1960, nearly 60% of Oceanview’s residents were African American. The neighborhood became a working class Black neighborhood.
The local residents started calling it Lakeview. Lore suggests the name migrated from Adolph Sutro’s 1890 development on the western slope of the Merced Heights ridge. He called it Lakeview for the spring-fed pond on Geneva Avenue way over on the eastern side of the ridge, the one locals called Lake Geneva, that fed Islais Creek on its way to the bay. But by this time the pond was long gone, filled in and paved over. The African American community that arrived in the 1950s and 60s took the name and made it their own.
In the 1960s the city built Interstate 280 on the abandoned right-of-way of the railroad that had built Oceanview a century before. The tracks had been pulled for wartime scrap metal in 1942. The corridor sat empty for two decades and then the bulldozers came and paved it. The freeway followed the ghost of the railroad so precisely that BART, when it opened in 1973, ran parallel to I-280 through the very same corridor using the same basic line through the same basic landscape. While the route was the same, the impact to the neighborhood was quite different. The noise, grit, and sheer energy of millions of cars rushing past at high speeds would significantly alter what was previously a quiet, removed neighborhood.
By now the Brookses were ready to retire, this time further south to La Honda in San Mateo County. Civilization was closing in with so many houses popping up the slope and along the ridge and the constant hum of the freeway below. The city purchased the hilltop from them in 1966 for $70,000, well below other offers and independent appraisals, after threatening eminent domain. The house was never opened as a community center as the neighborhood had hoped. Vandals set it on fire. Then again and again. After the third fire the city bulldozed what remained. When I walked the park in June the old stone terrace walls remained, the outline of a life that had been there. What also remained were the poppies, defiant in the muted light, rooted in the rocky crags and bits of disturbed earth. The rocks and stone walls would keep the plant life warm in the chilly San Francisco summer air.
A Rupture of a Different Sort: The Crack Epidemic
By the 1980s the neighborhood the shipyard workers had built was in trouble. Crack cocaine arrived in San Francisco’s Black neighborhoods around 1985, following the same pattern it followed in cities across the country: cheap, fast, and devastating to communities that had already been systematically denied investment, jobs, and services. In Oceanview, as in Bayview and the Western Addition, the crack trade moved into the spaces that disinvestment had left open. Unemployment was high. The schools were underfunded. The streets below the ridge that had been lined with owner-occupied homes began to feel less safe. Brooks Park became a site of drug dealing and violence. At least two bodies were found on the hill. And in the slope below, people who had bought their homes in the 1950s and raised their children here watched the neighborhood they had built, against the odds, on land nobody else had wanted, being hollowed out from the inside.
The same years that saw crack cocaine tearing through the neighborhood also produced something else. Oceanview became a hub for Mobb music, the Bay Area’s homegrown strain of gangsta rap. Like poppies boldly springing from disturbed ground, young men from the blocks around Randolph articulated in music what they were living. An M.C. named Cougnut, from the 200 block of Lakeview, had a gravelly voice that was intimidating and a boldness that made him walk up to other rappers and get directly in their faces. His group I.M.P., the Ill Mannered Posse, started in 1989 and released their album, “Ill Mannered Playas” in 1993. The album featured the track, “Frisco” that was peppered with references to the neighborhood, its problems, and the artists’ defiance against the forces that were against them.
Cougnut is considered the first San Francisco rapper to make an impact throughout the whole Bay Area. Dregs One, another local rapper and a hip-hop ambassador, put it plainly: there might not be a hip-hop scene in San Francisco if not for Cougnut. His contemporary Cellski grew up on Randolph Street, started selling tapes from the trunk of his car at thirteen, earned $6,000 in his first year, and appeared on over one hundred releases. The Oceanview produced something that cast its seeds across the whole Bay helping evolve what Bay Area music and all of hip-hop could be.
Oceanview’s Continued Evolution — 2000 Onward
The violence continued and something had to give. Eventually the community that had built Oceanview had enough and fought back. They did it slowly, person by person, block by block. Minnie and Lovie Ward had already been organizing for years through Neighbors in Action, pushing for rebuilt schools, youth programs, and a viable recreation center. By the early 2000s the serious violence had receded. A new library opened at 345 Randolph Street in June 2000. The recreation center was rebuilt and renamed for Minnie and Lovie Ward after they died in the mid-aughts. And then the prices rose. The stability the community had fought for made the neighborhood attractive again, and the neighborhood that had been affordable because no one wanted it became desirable, at least to some. The area is now majority Asian American. There’s an H Mart on Alemany.
Who knows how long that stability will sustain and what Oceanview will become in its next evolution? For thousands of years there was stability. Fields. Ponds. Gullies. Then a rupture. Then visibility. And visibility in San Francisco consistently has a way of becoming a real estate proposition. Then another rupture followed by another wave of new residents. Then another and another. But the neighborhood has defied prediction before. It became something nobody planned for. The land at the edge of the city, that was taken then dismissed and abandoned and rediscovered, has its own way of determining its own character. The poppy doesn’t ask permission. It finds the disturbed ground and it just comes back.
This is a reprint from my Substack.
Sources
Western Neighborhoods Project (the vast majority of my research was here)
San Francisco Planning Department
Association of Ramaytush Ohlone
A History of the Great Star Theater
We Return To Chinatown
In my last post I talked about Mow Lee, now a Legacy San Francisco business that has operated continuously for 170 years, (and is also included in the walking tour). Among those who first arrived from the outside world in the mid-1800s were the earliest Chinese immigrants, a community that became large enough to establish itself as a place the newspapers were quickly calling “Little China”.
The First Theater on the Block — 1868
The ground at 626 Jackson had already hosted theater before the Great Star was a gleam in anyone’s eye, over 50 years before it would open. In 1868, a two-story brick building went up on the north side of Jackson Street between Dupont (now Grant) and Kearny, costing $40,000 and funded by local Chinese investors. It opened as the Royal Chinese Theatre, and it could hold roughly 1,200 people, with over 2,000 sometimes squeezed in on popular nights. The performers were opera singers, acrobats, and circus artists, entertaining the community with lavish productions.
By 1874, a rival, the New Chinese Theatre, had opened directly across the street, reportedly costing $50,000 and backed by a different faction of Chinatown’s merchant elite. The competition between the two houses reflected deeper rivalries within the community. Power and egos were at stake.
The Performances
The repertoire was overwhelmingly Cantonese opera, the dominant theatrical form of Guangdong province from which most immigrants came. The plays drew from a vast well: Cantonese opera has a repertoire of some 11,000 operas written over 700 years, emphasizing acrobats and martial artists alongside the sung dramas.
The specific plays documented on Jackson Street in this era were historical epics and warrior cycles: sweeping, multi-hour stories rooted in Chinese dynastic history. One title that period sources singled out as so popular it was considered obligatory for tourists was The Return of Sit Pin Quai, a warrior saga about a general returning from decades of war to find his wife remarried, drawn from the Tang dynasty.
Warring Factions
The two houses facing each other across Jackson Street were not simply commercial competitors. Rather, they were proxies for the Sam Yup and See Yup companies, rival clan associations within Chinatown’s Six Companies that controlled employment, housing, and credit for their members. Controlling a theater meant controlling one of the neighborhood’s most visible and profitable institutions. These ingrained rivalries only intensified after the New Chinese opened in 1874 and within a few years, riots between the factions had become a recurring pattern.
Picture it: two packed houses facing each other across Jackson Street on any given night of the week, each with 80–90 performers, charging 75 cents admission, and backed by a different clan network whose members would have felt the other house’s success as a direct economic and political threat. Loyalty to one theater or another wasn’t casual. Rather, it ran through family, employment, housing, and credit. When something went wrong inside or between the houses, they took it outside.
Riots of a Different Sort — 1877
In July 1877, a three-day riot swept through San Francisco, this one against Chinese immigrants, waged by the city’s majority Irish population. The economy was faltering and Chinese people were the scapegoats. Four people died, and more than $100,000 worth of property belonging to Chinese residents was destroyed. A mob stormed the nearby docks of the steamship lines that transported Chinese workers, then rampaged through Chinatown. Order was eventually restored but the anti-Chinese sentiment continued.
Out of the violence emerged a movement. Denis Kearney, an Irish immigrant freight hauler who proved to be a compelling street orator, had initially helped quell the riots, then reversed course entirely within months, taking control of the newly formed Workingmen’s Party of California. His rallying cry was four words: “The Chinese must go.” He warned that San Francisco would burn if conditions did not improve and called on his followers to arm themselves. The Workingmen’s Party went on to win almost every elected seat in San Francisco and successfully pushed anti-Chinese sentiment both locally and statewide. Soon enough, this hatred reached the halls of federal power with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.
The Price of Exclusion — 1882
Eventually Chinatown’s theaters faded, not because of San Francisco’s standard mass inflection point, the 1906 earthquake and fire, but due to the Chinese Exclusion Act that was born from racist fear mongering. It was the first nationality- and race-based immigration restriction in American history making it nearly impossible for newcomers to arrive from China.
Opera performers occupied a legal gray zone that immigration officials were rarely inclined to interpret generously, and the few who were admitted operated under a surveillance system: permits that required renewal twice a year, bonds posted by the theaters, and government approval for transfers between houses. Troupes that disbanded couldn’t be refreshed. Stars couldn’t cross the Pacific without risking detention at Angel Island. Repertoires stagnated and companies dissolved.
Chinatown’s Rebirth by Fire — 1906
Then came the earthquake and fire. Both theaters, like almost all of Chinatown, were destroyed. The city’s Anglo establishment saw an opportunity to push the Chinese to the margins, proposing a relocation to the far edges of town. The community stood their ground and within years Chinatown had rebuilt itself on the same blocks and this time with an architectural layer reminiscent of their homeland across the Pacific Ocean, a visual calling card to the outside world, one we can still observe today. The theater tradition on Jackson Street was not finished, either. But without the ability to bring fresh troupes from China, rebuilding the cultural machinery was a different and harder problem than rebuilding the physical environment.
The Theaters’ Resurgence by Policy — 1921
In the 1910s and into the 1920s, Chinatown’s merchant class worked through cross-border joint ventures to revive some fluidity of movement for performers along the Pacific coast, stitching together a fragile network between San Francisco, Vancouver, and other cities. Then a court ruling in 1921 clarified that Chinese opera performers could qualify for entry under existing exemptions in the Exclusion laws. The pipeline, long choked, reopened, and Jackson Street would not wait long for its resurgence.
The Great China Theater Opens — 1925
On April 5, 1925, the building that would eventually become the Great Star Theater opened its doors at 636 Jackson Street as the Great China Theater. It had more than 500 seats, a traditional proscenium stage, and an atmosphere that would be familiar to anyone who watched Cantonese opera in the century prior: loud, social, and communal. Though performances could run five hours or more, patrons chatted, snacked, and read newspapers in their seats. The opera house was not a place for hushed reverence but a living room for a community that had endured in an unwelcoming place.
A Dragon is Born — 1940
In 1940, a projection booth was installed in the theater and films joined the program alongside opera. That same year, a Cantonese opera company from Hong Kong was performing on the Great China’s stage, led by a singer named Lee Hoi-chuen. His wife Grace was pregnant. On November 27, 1940, in the Year of the Dragon, in the hour of the Dragon, at a hospital just blocks from Jackson Street, Grace gave birth to a son named Lee Jun Fan. The world would come to know him as Bruce Lee.
The infant made his first screen appearance at three months old in a Cantonese film called Golden Gate Girl, shot partly in San Francisco. The family returned to Hong Kong shortly after. Decades later, after Bruce Lee had become a global phenomenon, his films would play regularly on the very screen where his father had sung opera.
Kung Fu, Shaw Brothers, and the Big Dark — 1960s to 1998
Through the 1950s and into the early 1960s, the Great China remained the last active Chinese opera house in the United States. But opera audiences were aging and waning, and the theater had to adapt. At some point around that time it was renamed the Great Star.
In 1970, the programming pivoted toward kung fu cinema. This turned out to be impeccable timing. Bruce Lee’s films were crossing from Hong Kong to American screens and causing a sensation. The Great Star was ready.
Later in that decade, Hong Kong entertainment mogul Run Run Shaw purchased the theater, one of just six American venues he acquired to distribute his Shaw Brothers productions in their original Cantonese and Mandarin. For nearly thirty years, the Great Star ran first-run Hong Kong action films at a pace of roughly one per week. Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, Jet Li, and Chow Yun-Fat all appeared on that screen for an audience of Chinatown residents who could watch them in their own language.
When Run Run Shaw retired and the operation wound down in the late 1990s, the theater went dark. By 1998–1999, the doors were closed. The building sat dormant for more than fifteen years.
Reopening and Reinvention — 2015 to the Present
In 2015, magician and performer Paul Nathan reopened the doors, and for a few years the Great Star ran an eclectic, eccentric program of cabaret, circus, film screenings, and burlesque, drawing new audiences into a building that felt like a time capsule.
The current chapter began in 2020–2021, when husband-and-wife team Roger Pincombe and Alice Chu, software engineers at Salesforce who had their first date at the theater in 2017, signed a ten-year lease and founded a nonprofit to restore and operate the venue. They even reupholstered all 400-plus red seats while preserving their original frames. The Great Star officially reopened in June 2021 with a ribbon-cutting, a lion dance, and fireworks. I personally attended a show a couple years ago and was taken by the classic Chinatown exterior, the immaculate condition of the theater, and the high quality of entertainment and stage production.
Today the theater maintains an eclectic calendar: Cantonese opera on special occasions, contemporary theater, film screenings, comedy, cabaret, cultural showcases, and up-and-coming local artists. It is, as Alice Chu described it, “a place where people can feel connected in real life.” It’s a space where you have to put down your phone and be present. It is also, as of this writing, the last remaining Chinese theater in any Chinatown in the United States.
Stand on the sidewalk at 636 Jackson Street and consider what the ground underneath has held. The Great Star Theater is neither a relic nor a tourist attraction dressed up as history. It is a living, breathing institution that has contributed to the city’s vibrancy for over 100 years. Please consider attending a performance or making a donation to keep that vibrancy going!
This is a reprint of my post on Substack.
June 3, 2026
San Francisco Historic Preservation Commission · Regular Meeting
The commission meets in Room 400 at City Hall in a small auditorium with tall ceilings and beautiful light. Twelve items on the agenda Wednesday, most of them moving quickly through staff presentations and votes. But two of them kept pulling me back into the city as it was, in the years before much of it existed.
Mow Lee Shing Kee & Company · Legacy Business Registry
San Francisco’s Chinatown, the first and now most vital of its kind, was already dense and under pressure in the 1850’s, its earliest days. Chinese people had been arriving to the Port of San Francisco since the 1849 Gold Rush, many remaining in San Francisco as merchants and artisans or returning from the goldfield, settling into the blocks around Sacramento and Dupont (now Grant) Streets.
At the start of the Gold Rush, this area was steps from the actual waterfront, but by 1856 it was already several blocks away. The bay had been filled in incrementally with ships and wharfs that were abandoned where they sat, then built over, pushing the water east block by block. That’s the year Mow Lee Shing Kee & Company opened at 745 Sacramento Street, bringing ingredients from the homeland to California.
Mow Lee first imported and distributed Cantonese preserved meats from Hong Kong then started making them in-house, decade after decade. Sausages, bacon, dried fowl, all delicacies for adding rich flavor to dishes like fried rice and clay pot. To this day, 170 years later, sausages hang in the open as they always have; the scent of dried meats and rice wine permeate the air. My mouth waters just thinking about it so I’m inspired to share this recipe for sticky rice with Chinese sausage, and even more inspired to make it myself.
Before you head out the door to pick up some Mow Lee house sausage, you’ll need their new address. While the original location survived the 1868 earthquake, the 1877 anti-Chinese riots, and the 1882 Exclusion Act, it would not survive the devastation of the 1906 earthquake and Great Fire. So they relocated and, for nearly another half century, did business at 730 Grant Avenue. Then somewhere around 1950 they moved to their current location, a narrow, nondescript storefront at 774 Commercial Street, where they’ve operated 364 days a year for over 75 years.
In total, that’s 170 years and 7 generations of nearly continuous operation. Naturally, the commission voted in favor of adding Mow Lee to the Legacy Business Registry.
What is the Legacy Business Registry?
San Francisco's Legacy Business Program, administered by the Office of Small Business, recognizes businesses that have operated in the city for 30 or more years, contributed to the character of their neighborhood or community, and committed to maintaining the physical features or traditions that define them.
To qualify, a business must be nominated by the Mayor or a member of the Board of Supervisors, submit a written application, receive an advisory recommendation from the Historic Preservation Commission, and win final approval from the Small Business Commission. Inclusion on the registry comes with recognition and promotional support. This is the city's formal acknowledgment that certain businesses are cultural assets worth keeping.
San Francisco launched the program in 2015, the first of its kind in the country. More than two dozen cities have since started their own.
Fernando Nelson Residence · Landmark Designation
When Fernando Nelson arrived in San Francisco from New York in 1876, sixteen years old, the slopes below Twin Peaks were mostly empty. A few dairy farms. Unpaved hillsides. The Mexican rancho land that had been subdivided and sold off after the Mexican American War. Irish, German, and Scandinavian families starting to move in, but slowly. There was no easy way downtown.
The Market Street Railway brought cable cars to Castro Street in 1887, and then the whole hillside started filling in.Nelson was already building houses in San Francisco. He and his sons would build nearly 4,000 houses from 1876 through WWII. Starting near the waterfront on 3rd Street, he followed the transit lines westward, bought lots, subdivided them, and carried his menu on an index card in his pocket: two floor plans, one on each side. Customers picked one and he built it.
For each development, he’d build himself a house where he could showcase his skills and craftsmanship, run his workshop, and store building materials. His 701 Castro house was the first example of this method. After purchasing some lots around Castro Street in the village of Eureka Valley, he built his own house on the corner of Castro and 20th Streets. In the Queen Anne style, the house has a rounded corner tower with witch’s hat finial, fish scale shingles in the gables, and a stained glass entry window.
The house was originally built slightly uphill at what is now 709 Castro. By 1950 the owners had moved it downhill to the corner where it stands today. Nelson originally kept a workhorse in the basement. The horse helped him saw. Neighborhood children pulled the nails out of old barrels for him. Nelson also collected cars, hence the row of 6 garages along the ground floor.
Nelson was one of the original car nuts and eventually became the first president of the San Francisco Motor Club. Months after the 1906 earthquake and Great Fire, Nelson drove from San Francisco to Los Angeles in a road challenge, breaking the record at 18 hours and 13 minutes. I wonder if the cataclysm propelled him to be daring again. The U.S. military had confiscated his lumber for temporary housing. He had nothing to build with. He was a financial risk taker, but this was also a guy who trekked to San Francisco when he was just 16 year old. A couple years later he and his crew broke the record again at 17 hours and 13 minutes.
Nelson and his sons would go on to build up much of San Francisco’s villages with houses and flats until his passing in 1953. The commission voted in favor of designating 701 Castro Street as a historic landmark building.
The next hearing is June 17th.
This is a reprint of my post on Substack.
Welcome to Wild Radish
Almost thirty years ago, shortly after I moved to San Francisco, I audited a class at SF State called San Francisco: Biography of a City. The word that should stand out is biography. Not history. Biography. The idea that the city is a living, breathing thing, a life still being lived, that its past isn’t behind it but still all around it.
The course helped me see this city through its many layers of time, not just in the classroom, but also in my day-to-day. In the decades since, my life in San Francisco has been ornamented by seemingly mundane moments unraveling into snapshots of time. In this city, time is not simply clockwork. It’s not linear. We don’t move through it; it moves through us. You can experience this phenomenon yourself by looking anywhere and observing its many layers in that singular glance.
Sometimes the layers are apparent. Other times, less so or not at all. That’s what it’s like being here, time moving through us all at once whether we are conscious or not. There is a simultaneous thrill and sadness to this feeling, on consciously observing and detecting while also never really knowing. I tried to find a word to describe this dichotomy but as far as I know it doesn’t exist, so I’ll just leave it at that.
This is my chance to share in this phenomenon with you, to unravel these glances and their layers, known and obscured. The shop that’s been on the same corner since before the automobile. The mid-block Victorian that seems more rudimentary compared to those around it. The neighborhood that was once a sand dune dotted with decommissioned trolley cars. The street that bends nonsensically (not that one, or even the other one). The old buckling stained glass transom, dingy with neglect. The creek that wiggles under the Wiggle.
Now I’m starting a consulting practice that works with the city’s planning process, and as part of learning its ins and outs I’ll be observing hearings at the San Francisco Historic Preservation Commission: the body that meets the first and third Wednesday of most months in Room 400 at City Hall. This body decides what gets landmarked and recognized, what’s worth keeping alive and visible. Every item on the agenda is a door into something older and deeper. I’ll cover the hearings here, but I’ll also follow the history wherever it goes, past and present.
I hope you’ll come along.