Grant Avenue carries you along the oldest street in the original American grid of Yerba Buena, spine of Chinatown ever since. Grant Avenue — the street you are on — was the first street laid out in the original American grid of Yerba Buena, the tiny settlement that became San Francisco. Chinese merchants established themselves here in the 1850s, and the street has been the spine of Chinatown ever since.
After the 1906 earthquake destroyed nearly every building in the neighborhood, city officials proposed relocating Chinatown away from this valuable land near downtown. The Chinese community organized politically, hired an architect to design new buildings in a deliberately exotic Orientalist style that they calculated would appeal to tourists, and rebuilt so quickly that the relocation plan collapsed. The strategy worked: the pagoda rooflines and lantern streetlights you see were designed not by Chinese architects working from tradition, but by the community deliberately creating an image that the outside world would find picturesque.
Behind that picturesque facade are some of the most densely inhabited blocks in the United States, where multiple generations share apartments, where six tongs — mutual aid associations organized originally by county of origin in China — govern community affairs, and where Cantonese is still the primary language of the street.