San Francisco Relocation Guide - Antevia

Chinatown, causing gridlock on roads and public transit, especially on weekends. To
address this problem, the local public transit agency, Muni, is proposing to extend the
city's subway network to the neighborhood via the new Central Subway.
History
The Street of Gamblers (Ross Alley) Arnold Genthe, 1898. The population was
predominantly male because U.S. policies at the time made it difficult for Chinese
women to enter the country.
San Francisco's Chinatown was the port of entry for early Taishanese and Zhongshanese
Chinese immigrants from the southern Guangdong province of China from the 1850s to
the 1900s. The majority of shopkeepers, restaurant owners, and hired workers in San
Francisco Chinatown were predominantly Taishanese and male. They had come as
laborers to build California's growing railway networks, most famously the
Transcontinental Railroad or as mine workers or independent prospectors hoping to strike
it rich during the 1849 Gold Rush. With massive national unemployment in the wake of
the Panic of 1873, racial tensions in the city boiled over into full blown race riots. In
response to this, the Chinese residents formed the Consolidated Chinese Benevolent
Association or the Chinese Six Companies, which evolved out of the labor recruiting
organizations for different areas of Guangdong. The xenophobia became law as the
United States Government passed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 – the first
immigration restriction law aimed at a single ethnic group. This law, along with other
immigration restriction laws such as the Geary Act, greatly reduced the numbers of
Chinese allowed into the country and the city, and in theory limited Chinese immigration
to single males only. Exceptions were in fact granted to the families of wealthy
merchants, but the law was still effective enough to reduce the population of the
neighborhood to an all time low in the 1920s. The exclusion act was repealed during
World War Two under the Magnuson Act in recognition of the important role of China as
an ally in the war, although tight quotas still applied.