Saturday, July 19, 2025

photos from the edge 15 - chinatown's living room

CHINATOWN'S LIVING ROOM
Photos by David Bacon



Without doubt, Portsmouth Square is the best-used public space in San Francisco, affectionately called "Chinatown's Living Room."  Soon it's getting a facelift.  The city took bids, is choosing projects, and begins renovation in the fall.

Maybe the benches are old, and could use more paint, even cushions for the bony elders who sit on them  or the exhausted workers who lie on them.  The swings and playground could use an uplift too, for the kids.  A new shelter might give people somewhere better to shelter out of the rain.  

The Arts Commission asked for proposals for an Art Wall in the shelter, which would give the town's brilliant muralists space for celebrating Chinatown's real history, especially its radical one.  After all, it's right across Kearny Street from the site of the International Hotel, the hardest fought eviction and housing struggle ever in San Francisco.

But there's a lot in Portsmouth Square that makes it feel like home, and the square's homies might not want to lose it.  The pile of plastic buckets and cardboard, for instance, waiting for cardplayers to set up another of the games that go on in every corner.  

Cities these days have an unfortunate practice of seeing people lying on benches as enemies, putting little obstructions on them to make stretching out as uncomfortable as possible.  People need those benches, though, real ones, and the park functions fine if they can actually rest on them.  Too many live on the sidewalk here and in lots of neighborhoods, tucked between trash cans.  A bench can be better, but really we need so much more

And if the city has to drain and rebuild the garage in Portsmouth Square's underground basement, which functions mostly for the convenience of people who don't live in Chinatown, it shouldn't shut down the park on top while it all happens.

So here's a small slice of Portsmouth Square, just a few of the many pictures I've taken there since I was an organizer for the Ladies Garment Workers long ago.  In those days I'd walk through on the way from Mission Street to our Garment Workers Center, my first serious camera in hand, starting to think that documenting the working class was as worthy an activity as convincing workers to go on strike.

And since you have to take BART to get there, if you live in the East Bay, here are a few commute pictures as well.

















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