The Relocation Question

Image credit: David Rumsey Map Collection, David Rumsey Map Center, Stanford Libraries.

Long before the 1906 Earthquake, white city officials had dreamt of relocating San Francisco’s Chinatown and redeveloping the area’s prime real estate in the center of downtown. In part, that desire was fueled by Chinatown’s widespread reputation as a congested, impoverished neighborhood and vice district.

A “Vice District”

In 1885, City Hall had prepared a municipal report on Chinatown, intending to demonstrate that the neighborhood was a danger to the city. Having carefully mapped out every brothel, gambling parlor and opium den, the report began:

Your Committee were at that time impressed with the fact that the general aspect of the streets and habitations was filthy in the extreme, and so long as they remained in that condition, so long would they stand as a constant menace to the welfare of society as a slumbering pest, likely to generate and spread disease should the city be visited by an epidemic in any virulent form. Your Committee are still of the opinion that it constitutes a continued source of danger of this character, and probably always will, so long as it is inhabited by people of the Mongolian race.

The map included in the Board of Supervisors report shows Chinatown, bordered by California, Stockton, Broadway, and Kearny Streets. Gambling dens are color-coded in pink, opium dens are yellow, and prostitution hubs* are either blue or green, and Chinese temples, or “Joss houses” are blocked in red. In 1885, at the height of the anti-Chinese hysteria in California, this map and the inflammatory report that it was part of was used to turn public opinion against the Chinese American population in the city. Image credit: David Rumsey Map Collection, David Rumsey Map Center, Stanford Libraries.

Plague Outbreak

Chinatown’s reputation in San Francisco was not helped when, in March 1900, the first suspected bubonic plague victim in the U.S. died in one of Chinatown’s tightly-packed buildings. Anti-Chinese sentiment already running strong in the city, Chinatown bore the brunt of the city’s ill-informed health and safety measures: nearly 20,000 Chinatown residents were quarantined in the neighborhood, severely hurting business and livelihoods, homes were ransacked, and buildings were burned in a purported attempt to sanitize the area.

The Burnham Plan

Two years before the 1906 earthquake and fires, San Francisco’s then-mayor James Phelan hired one of the country’s most famous architects of the time to draw up sketches for a new downtown San Francisco. The architect, Daniel Burnham, was a proponent of an urban planning movement known as “city beautiful,” which reimagined dirty, congested cities as orderly, unified, and aesthetically pleasing urban spaces. Burnham's plan for San Francisco proposed to change the city completely. He produced a 184-page report, replete with 30 photographs and 23 maps envisioning broad new boulevards and circular trafficways, parks, and municipal facilities. Had the plan been enacted, it would have also completely eradicated Chinatown.

Burnham’s plan reorganized San Francisco’s urban arteries and street patterns, envisioning broad avenues and central meeting points. Image Credit: David Rumsey Map Collection, David Rumsey Map Center, Stanford Libraries.

Opportunity in the Ashes

The combination of the 1885 city hall report, the 1900 plague, and the 1905 Burnham Plan explains why, after Chinatown was completely destroyed by the 1906 earthquake and fires, many saw it as serendipity. Within six days of the earthquake, city hall formed the “Committee on the Relocation of Chinatown,” which quickly adopted a plan to move Chinatown to Hunter’s Point.