Frommer's San Francisco 2012 - Matthew Poole [131]
The gateway at Grant Avenue and Bush Street marks the entry to Chinatown. The heart of the neighborhood is Portsmouth Square, where you’ll find locals playing board games or just sitting quietly.
On the newly beautified and renovated Waverly Place, a street where the Chinese celebratory colors of red, yellow, and green are much in evidence, you’ll find three Chinese temples: Jeng Sen (Buddhist and Taoist) at no. 146, Tien Hou (Buddhist) at no. 125, and Norras (Buddhist) at no. 109. If you enter, do so quietly so that you do not disturb those in prayer.
A block west of Grant Avenue, Stockton Street, from 1000 to 1200, is the community’s main shopping street, lined with grocers, fishmongers, tea sellers, herbalists, noodle parlors, and restaurants. Here, too, is the Buddhist Kong Chow Temple, at no. 855, above the Chinatown post office. Explore at your leisure. A Chinatown walking tour is outlined in chapter 7. Visit www.sanfranciscochinatown.com for more info.
This City’s for the Birds!
If you’re walking around San Francisco—especially Telegraph Hill or Russian Hill—and you suddenly hear lots of loud squawking and screeching overhead, look up. You’re most likely witnessing a fly-by of the city’s famous green flock of wild parrots. These are the scions of a colony that started out as a few wayward house pets—mostly cherry-headed conures, which are indigenous to South America—who found each other, and bred. Years later they’ve become hundreds strong, traveling in chatty packs through the city (with a few parakeets along for the ride), and stopping to rest on tree branches and delight residents who have come to consider them part of the family. To learn just how special these birds are to the city, check out the book The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill, or see the heartwarming movie of the same name.
The wild parrots of Telegraph Hill.
Japantown
More than 12,000 citizens of Japanese descent (1.5% of the city’s population) live in San Francisco, or Soko, as the Japanese who first emigrated here often called it. Initially, they settled in Chinatown and SoMa, along Stevenson and Jessie streets from Fourth to Seventh streets. After the earthquake in 1906, SoMa became a light industrial and warehouse area, and the largest Japanese concentration took root in the Western Addition between Van Ness Avenue and Fillmore Street, the site of today’s Japantown, now over 100 years old. By 1940, it covered 30 blocks.
In 1913, the Alien Land Law was passed, depriving Japanese Americans of the right to buy land. From 1924 to 1952, the United States banned Japanese immigration. During World War II, the U.S. government froze Japanese bank accounts, interned community leaders, and removed 112,000 Japanese Americans—two-thirds of them citizens—to camps in California, Utah, and Idaho. Japantown was emptied of Japanese people, and war workers took their place. Upon their release in 1945, the Japanese found their old neighborhood occupied. Most of them resettled in the Richmond and Sunset districts; some returned to Japantown, but it had shrunk to a mere 6 or so blocks. Today, the community’s notable sights include the Buddhist Church of San Francisco, 1881 Pine St. (at Octavia St.), www.bcsfweb.org; the Konko Church of San Francisco, 1909 Bush St. (at Laguna St.); the Sokoji–Soto Zen Buddhist Temple, 1691 Laguna St. (at Sutter St.); Nihonmachi Mall, 1700 block of Buchanan Street between Sutter and Post streets, which contains two steel fountains by Ruth Asawa; and the Japan Center, a Japanese-oriented shopping mall occupying 3 square blocks bounded by Post, Geary, Laguna, and Fillmore streets. At its center stands the five-tiered Peace Pagoda, designed by world-famous Japanese architect Yoshiro Taniguchi “to convey the friendship and goodwill of the Japanese to the people of the United States.” Surrounding the pagoda, through a network of arcades,