Chinatown’s ‘living room’ to get makeover
Advocates, officials hash out revamp of Portsmouth Square
Chinatown’s Portsmouth Square is getting a $60 million revamp, and with it comes the question of what to do with public monuments that have long overshadowed local Asian history. After years of advocacy and debate by residents, activists and historians, San Francisco officials on Tuesday unveiled more details of their tentative plan for art in the city’s oldest park.
“The community came together to say we want to see our history reflected in ‘the living room of Chinatown,’ ” Amy Zhou told the Chronicle ahead of Tuesday’s meeting. Zhou, an urban planner at the Chinatown Community Development Center, an affordable housing provider based in Chinatown, was referencing a popular nickname for Portsmouth Square.
The meeting took place at City College of San Francisco’s Chinatown campus, where the San Francisco Recreation and Park Department, Planning Department and Arts Commission presented proposals alongside design consultancy firm Clearstory, which is working with the city on the new park’s public art design.
At stake for Zhou and a cadre of activists who have spent years calling for a redesign is community ownership over a space where dozens of Chinatown residents, many of whom live in cramped single-room occupancy apartments, spend hours each day.
“The current monuments and histories don’t tell the full story,” Jenny Leung, executive director of the Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco, told the Chronicle.
The city’s proposals are not set in stone but rather are an invitation for community feedback, city officials said Tuesday. They included possible recommendations to remove certain historical monuments that community members say do not reflect Asian-American history.
What could change
Among the monuments that the city proposed recommending for removal are a large bust of Scottish novelist Robert Louis Stevenson, the marker where the first American flag was raised in San Francisco during the U.S. conquest of California, and a plaque for Andrew Smith Hallidie, often regarded as the inventor of the city’s cable car system.
Meanwhile, the city proposed keeping the Goddess of Democracy monument, a bronze replica of a statue originally created during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests in Beijing.
The proposal also recommended keeping the park’s existing Zodiac playground sculpture.
Over the next few months, Clearstory will develop a master plan based on community feedback, company president Julie Vogel told the Chronicle, after which a design for sculptures, monuments and public art will be developed and finalized.
The city’s proposal also suggested amending rather than removing certain monuments. A tablet commemorating the park’s designation as a state registered landmark, called Landmark 119, might be amended because it doesn’t reflect the rich cultural history of Portsmouth Square, the planning department said Tuesday.
The public school monument might be redesigned to include the history of Chinese exclusion from education or Chinese American achievements in education.
A wall facing Kearny Street could be used to tell the story of civil rights activism in San Francisco Chinatown, from landmark court decisions to the story of the International Hotel mass eviction, city officials shared Tuesday.
A walkway might be inscribed with a historic timeline of milestones specific to the park, such as its historic use as a refugee camp after the 1906 earthquake or after the International Hotel evictions.
Renovation on the park will begin late this year and last 24 months, during which the park is to be closed because the site is small and located on a rooftop of a parking garage, said Recreation and Park Department spokesperson Tamara Barak Aparton.
She added that the construction schedule is dependent on when the Kearny Street pedestrian bridge will be demolished, a process that the city attorney’s office is negotiating with the Hilton Hotel, which is connected to the bridge.
The budget for public art in the renovation will be $604,000, according to the Recreation and Park Department.
History not well reflected
According to Leung, Portsmouth Square’s current incarnation foregrounds early American colonial history and erases the stories of communities of color, Chinese immigrants, and Asian Americans who lived in Chinatown and contributed to American civil rights history.
For instance, Leung questioned why one of the most prominent monuments in the park is a bust of Stevenson, who spent two short stints in San Francisco, from 1879 to 1880 and in 1888.
“Why aren’t we telling other stories that are more relevant?” Leung said.
Furthermore, no current public art in Portsmouth Square is by an Asian artist. The only bilingual signage or inscriptions in the park are restroom signs, Leung pointed out.
The Chinatown Arts & Cultural Coalition — comprised of the local nonprofits Chinese Culture Center, Chinatown Community Development Center, Manilatown Heritage Foundation and art group Edge on the Square — submitted its recommendations for the redesign to the city in August 2023.
The proposal called for commemorating iconic Chinese figures who were born in Chinatown, such as martial artist Bruce Lee or lesbian artist Bernice Bing, or the housing and eldercare activist movements within Chinatown.
Tuesday’s proposal by the city echoed the call for such artwork, alongside new public art on the corner of Washington Street and Walter U Lum Place.
The Chinatown coalition also suggested renaming Portsmouth Square to Flower Garden Corner, the English translation for the Cantonese name for the park, faa jyun gok, following the long history of Chinese immigrants coining their own names for Chinatown landmarks and streets.
Portsmouth Square was named in honor of the USS Portsmouth, which carried Capt. John Berrien Montgomery to the square, where he raised the first American flag in San Francisco in 1846. Montgomery later seized the city, then called Yerba Buena, during the Mexican-American war.
The coalition proposed monuments that would recognize Chinatown and Chinese immigrants’ role in civil rights history. One suggestion is to commemorate the first bilingual education program in San Francisco, one that remembers the role of Wong Kim Ark, a San Franciscan born in 1873 who was denied re-entry to the United States under the Chinese Exclusion Act.
Tuesday’s proposal by the city did not address the question of renaming, but Leung said she hopes it would be considered going forward.
Another idea proposed by the coalition was a monument that pays tribute to the landmark California Supreme Court case, Tape v. Hurley, which found that the exclusion of a Chinese American student from public school based on her ancestry was unlawful.
Tuesday’s meeting was the culmination of years-long efforts, which Leung and Zhou said were hard-fought. During initial meetings with the city in 2021 until early 2023, Zhou said she was discouraged and disappointed by the city’s approach.
At that time the conversation revolved around where the current monuments would be placed, with little discussion of whether they should remain or be redesigned, Leung said.
She commended the city’s efforts to engage the community since then, calling it a model that other communities of color could use to advocate for inclusion.
David Lei, a community historian engaged by the Chinatown coalition to provide historical expertise, said that the renovated park could do more to highlight what he called a forgotten multiracial history in California under the short-lived period of 19th century Mexican rule.
For instance, the first American child born on the San Francisco peninsula, in 1838, Lei said, was mixed race. Her family lived on the southwest corner of what is now Grant and Clay streets, in the heart of today’s Chinatown.
That history could be retold in a redesign of the monument to the first public school in California, opened in April 1848 on the southwest corner of Portsmouth Square, Lei said.
The land for the school was donated by William Leidesdorff, a Black and Jewish businessman who was one of the first biracial U.S. citizens in California and a founder of the city that became San Francisco, Lei said.
“We have so little Black history in the early years of San Francisco — that school should honor him,” Lei said.
The Chinatown coalition had initially wanted the monument to be removed, pointing out that Chinese people were excluded from attending public schools.
Taking ‘many forms’
But Lei said that under Mexican rule in the 19th century, Chinese people likely would have been welcomed to this public school. It wasn’t until 1852 that then-California Gov. John Bigler said that Chinese people could not be assimilated and measures needed to be adopted to “check this tide of Asiatic immigration.”
Ultimately, capturing Chinatown’s history in stone monuments will be difficult, Abby Chen, head of contemporary art at the Asian Art Museum, said at Tuesday’s meeting. A living monument to Chinese artists and activists, like a tree, might be the way to go, she suggested.
“I don’t feel like a cold statue, just like the old colonial figures, is necessarily the way to go,” Chen said. “Monuments take many forms.”