San Francisco Relocation Guide - Antevia

The neighborhood was completely destroyed in the 1906 earthquake that leveled most of
the city. During the city's rebuilding process, racist city planners and real-estate
developers had hatched plans to move Chinatown to the Hunters Point neighborhood at
the southern edge of the city, even further south in Daly City, or even back to China; and
the neighborhood would then be absorbed into the financial district. Their plans failed as
the Chinese, particularly with the efforts of Consolidated Chinese Box companies, the
Chinese government, and American commercial interests reclaimed the neighborhood
and convinced the city government to relent. Part of their efforts in doing so was to plan
and rebuild the neighborhood as a western friendly tourist attraction. The rebuilt area that
is seen today, resembles such plans.[1]
Many early Chinese immigrants to San Francisco and beyond were processed at Angel
Island, now a state park, in the San Francisco Bay. Unlike Ellis Island in the East where
prospective European immigrants might be held for up to a week, Angel Island typically
detained Chinese immigrants for months while they were interrogated closely to
determine if they were really who their papers said they were. Several monuments and
memorials have been erected to those who made it through the questioning and those who
did not and were deported; and the entire detention facility has been renovated in 2005
and 2006 under a special federal grant.
The repeal of the Exclusion act and the other immigration restriction laws and the War
Brides Act, which allowed Chinese-American veterans to bring their families outside of
national quotas, led to a major population boom in the area during the 1950s. In the
1960s, the shifting of underutilized national immigration quotas brought in another huge
wave of immigrants mostly from Hong Kong, which changed San Francisco Chinatown
from predominantly Taishan-speaking to Cantonese-speaking. The end of the Vietnam
War brought a wave of Vietnamese refugees of Chinese descent, who put their own
stamp on San Francisco Chinatown.
There were many Chinese in Northern California living outside of San Francisco
Chinatown, but except for Oakland, they did not set up any special town with shopping
and restaurants. With the growth of the Chinese-American population and the increasing
difficulty of traveling into the congestion around downtown San Francisco, commercial
developments began in the outer neighborhoods of the Richmond District and Sunset
District and in other suburbs across the San Francisco Bay Area as well as newer
immigrants – such as Mandarin-speaking immigrants from Taiwan who have tended to
settled in suburban Milbrae, Cupertino, Milpitas, and Mountain View – avoiding San
Francisco as well as Oakland entirely. This suburbanization continues today.
In the summer of 1977, an ongoing rivalry between two Chinese American gangs erupted
in violence and bloodshed, culminating in a shooting spree at the Golden Dragon
Restaurant on Washington Street. Five persons were killed and 11 were wounded, and the
incident has become infamously known as the Golden Dragon massacre. The restaurant
still stands today and remains a popular dim sum restaurant for tourists.