Ping Yuen
Ping Yuen and North Ping Yuen form a four-building public housing complex in the north end of Chinatown, San Francisco along Pacific Avenue. In total, there are 434 apartments. The three Pings on the south side of Pacific were dedicated in 1951, and the North Ping Yuen building followed a decade later in 1961. Some of the largest murals in Chinatown are painted on Ping Yuen, which are prominent landmark buildings taller than the typical two- or three-story Chinatown buildings that date back to the early 1900s.
The formal effort to build Ping Yuen started in 1939 after Chinatown was called "the worst in the world"; it was the first public housing project completed in the neighborhood, and unlike the typical single room occupancy housing of Chinatown, featured private bathrooms and kitchens for each apartment when the first building opened in 1951. Like most buildings in Chinatown, it was designed by western architects with Chinese thematic elements.
Although it was touted as potentially drawing more tourists to the area, it soon became known as a dangerous place, with the July 4 shooting over fireworks sales that occurred at Ping Yuen leading to the Golden Dragon massacre of 1977. The murder of Julia Wong in 1978 inspired residents to go on a rent strike, led by future mayor Ed Lee, for improvements to building maintenance and security. Ownership of Ping Yuen passed from the city to the Chinatown Community Development Center in 2016, which is continuing to work with residents' associations to improve conditions.
History
In 1893, the San Francisco Call confidently bragged that according to an agent from the United States Department of Labor, there were no slums in the city. Although Chinatown was mentioned as a notable exception, the "unsavory, unsightly quarter" was thought to be "rapidly growing smaller and may finally reach the vanishing point" as immigration had been throttled by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. By 1896, banks had stopped lending money to Chinatown residents, and the San Francisco plague of 1900–1904 dealt another blow to the population. The San Jose Herald described Chinatown as "a foul, spreading ulcer in the center of San Francisco" and encouraged its complete removal, even though a medical investigator hired by the Call concluded "there is not the remotest danger of contagion in San Francisco if the proper radical measures recommended are carried out.... You must not make an excuse to clean the spot because there is plague here, but you must act solely on the ground that the district is in a filthy condition". By 1904, parts of Chinatown were being demolished to improve sanitation.However, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire destroyed immigration records, resulting in the immigration of paper sons and daughters: many Chinese American residents of San Francisco claimed to have been born in the city to gain citizenship under the Fourteenth Amendment; their offspring would then be citizens as well. Numerous emigrants from China purchased papers attesting they had an American citizen as a parent. At the same time, Chinatown was rebuilt but remained geographically limited by restrictive racial covenants that prevented Chinese residents from purchasing or renting outside its boundaries; the transformation from what used to be a largely bachelor society of Chinese laborers through the immigration of women and the growth of families, combined with the hard borders of Chinatown, meant the population and density grew steadily through the early 20th century.
Development and construction
Local activists in Chinatown petitioned Congress to pass the Housing Act of 1937, hoping to build interest in better housing for their neighborhood, but since that act empowered city officials to select project sites, the San Francisco Housing Authority continued to ignore requests from Chinese Americans. However, starting in 1938, support from prominent officials began to build, and a location was proposed in Hunters Point, although that site was unacceptable due to its distance and poor transit connections. An even more prominent supporter would soon emerge: Following her visit to San Francisco and Chinatown in March 1938 and another guided tour in April 1939, conducted by Dr. Theodore C. Lee and members of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt was given a report entitled "Living Conditions in Chinatown" in July 1939, which detailed the challenges to everyday life in Chinatown and led her to push for funds to improve housing in the area. The report said that Chinatown was "a slum, a confined area largely unfit for human habitation... comparable to the worst in the world." The San Francisco Junior Chamber of Commerce announced they would perform an independent study, which was published in October 1939 and largely confirmed the earlier report's findings.At the time, Chinatown had the highest rates of tuberculosis in San Francisco, and one of the arguments used to advocate for the new housing was again to prevent the spread of the disease by alleviating crowded conditions in Chinatown, which had been a target of public health officials in the city since the 1870s. President Roosevelt signed the Chinatown Housing Bill on October 30, 1939, providing almost $1.4 million to build new housing for Chinatown.
Although federal funding had been approved, the unnamed project was unable to proceed, as the cost of land exceeded guidelines; the San Francisco Board of Supervisors passed Resolution No. 852 on March 4, 1940, pledging to support the nascent project with $75,000 in local funds. This was approximately of the projected amount in excess of the guidelines; the United States Housing Authority had previously agreed to cover the remainder. Dr. Theodore C. Lee, a dentist practicing in Chinatown and head of the Chinese American Citizens Alliance, worked to secure support for the housing project and was selected to the Chinese Advisory Committee which helped in the development of the project. In February 1941, a brief news item gave notice the $1.5 million project had been approved. In its annual report that year, the SFHA stated they had 70% of the land under option.
The name Ping Yuen for the new three-building project was announced on January 15, 1942, by Albert J. Evers, Executive Director of the SFHA. Ping Yuen was derived from the Chinese translation of "Pacific Terrace" and had been chosen in consultation with the local Chinese Advisory Committee. The Housing Authority commission stipulated that the Chinese characters would be used to decorate the buildings. At that point, the project was estimated to cost and was planned to add 232 units of subsidized family housing. It was billed as the first Chinese public housing development. However, after the United States joined World War II, further development was limited to necessary projects, and further work on Ping Yuen was suspended for the duration of the war, after the site had been acquired and plans were completed.
By March 1945, the SFHA announced that Ping Yuen would be "one of the first projects slum buildings in Chinatown". Federal approval for Ping Yuen was granted in December 1949 as the first project west of Chicago to proceed under the Housing Act of 1949. The first contract was let immediately to Angus McLeod to demolish the existing buildings on the site; one of the buildings to be demolished, at Grant and Pacific, was the Yerba Buena Building, originally completed in 1846. By that time, the three-building project was scheduled to complete on November 28, 1951, at a cost of $3.4 million. Bidding for the construction contract was opened in late May 1950, and the construction contract was awarded to Theodore G. Meyer and Sons in early August. Central Ping Yuen was the first building to be completed and was dedicated in a ceremony held on October 21, 1951. East and West Ping Yuen followed and were completed by 1956.
When Ping Yuen opened, it also included the North East Health Center, a community health clinic operated by the San Francisco Department of Public Health. NEHC was at 799 Pacific on the ground floor of Central Ping Yuen, serving the Chinatown, Russian Hill, and North Beach neighborhoods. The clinic moved one block northwest to a new building at the eastern portal of the Broadway Tunnel and was renamed the Chinatown-North Beach Health Center in 1970. Anna Yuke Lee, the wife of Dr. Theodore C. Lee, was the first manager of Ping Yuen.
A site was chosen for an expansion by 1956, tentatively named Ping Yuen Annex, but the cost to acquire the land exceeded the allowable formula for the number of housing units that would be built. The Annex project was expanded and ground was broken on February 2, 1960, during Chinese New Year festivities in a ceremony attended by Mayor George Christopher and Miss Chinatown USA Carole Ng. The Annex would add 194 units at an estimated cost of $2.3 million; the prime contractor for the Annex was Cahill. North Ping Yuen was dedicated on October 29, 1961.
Demand for housing at the Pings was high; by June 1968, the SFHA indicated that 778 families classified as 'other' races were on the wait list for an open apartment. Additional low-income/senior housing was approved in 1977 as the Mei Lun Yuen project by the San Francisco Planning Commission, to be built near the corner of Stockton and Sacramento. The project had been in planning since at least 1974.
Crime
Shortly after completion, Ping Yuen was touted as "a development that is now an added attraction to this colorful section of the City." However, it soon gained a notorious reputation as dangerous place, with inadequate lighting and security.A shootout at Ping Yuen between rival youth gangs on July 4, 1977, over the sale of illegal fireworks left one Joe Boy dead and two wounded. One of those wounded, Melvin Yu, was one of the three gunmen who participated in the Golden Dragon massacre two months later on September 4.
The next year, during the night of August 23, 1978, Julia Wong, a 19-year old resident of North Ping Yuen, was raped and murdered. Returning from her shift late at night, she was attacked in a darkened stairway; Wong had been forced to use the stairway because the elevators were not working. The killer threw Wong off a balcony to the courtyard below, but she survived, so he dragged her back up and threw her off again. After Wong was killed, the SFHA installed a vandalproof panel in the elevator she would have used, but refused to similarly upgrade any of the other elevators.