Today the only danger on this corner is being overrun by tourists exploring narrow, picturesque byways like Spofford Street and Old Chinatown Lane. But for decades, the alleys of Chinatown were haunted by vicious assassins, the ruthless paid foot soldiers of violent tongs, criminal Chinese gangs that specialized in extortion, gambling and prostitution.

These “highbinders” or “hatchet men” – so called because their favorite weapon was a hatchet with a shortened handle – would emerge from the shadows, split open the skulls of their victims and disappear into one of the innumerable alleys. And it was on the site now occupied by the Superior Trading Co., on the night of Jan. 23, 1897, that the most infamous of all tong murders took place: the assassination of Little Pete.

‘King of Chinatown’

“Little Pete,” whose real name was Fung Jing Toy (sometimes transliterated as Fong Ching), had risen from humble beginnings to become known as the “king of Chinatown.” Born in 1864 in Guangdong province, the southern region that was home to almost all of San Francisco’s early Chinese immigrants, he came to San Francisco at the age of 10.

His first job was as an errand boy for a Sacramento Street shoe factory. Smart and ambitious, he quickly became fluent in English and worked as an interpreter for the Sam Yup Co., one of the powerful Six Companies that controlled Chinatown.

Cultured, well-groomed and polite, Pete was well-liked by white San Franciscans, who saw him as “Mr. Chinatown.” But, as Richard Dillon notes in “The Hatchet Men,” his 1962 account of San Francisco’s Tong Wars, Pete had one character flaw: He was totally amoral. Dillon writes, “His story was Horatio Alger, Dupont Gai style, but with sinister overtones.” (“Dupont” was the old name for what is now Grant Avenue.)

Pete soon acquired a modest bankroll, which he used to start a shoe business, which he called “F.C. Peters and Co.” to attract Caucasians who would not buy shoes made by a Chinese company. This misleading name was the origin of his nickname: Whites who got the inside joke – “F.C.” stood for “Fong Ching” – started calling him “Little Pete.”

A fighting tong

The shoe business made him rich, but Pete was not satisfied. He opened several gambling dens and founded a fighting tong, whose foot soldiers were young toughs from the Chinatown underworld. In that vendetta-ridden quarter, it was inevitable that a rival tong would put a price on his head. But the smooth-talking magnate knew everything that happened in Chinatown, and hired the most feared “boo how doy” (“hatchet son”) in San Francisco, Lee Chuck, as his bodyguard. He also acquired two sets of chain mail, weighing 35 pounds each, which he and Lee Chuck began wearing.

Pete’s prudence paid off when Lee Chuck encountered Pete’s would-be assassin on the street, outdrew him and shot him dead. When Lee Chuck was charged with murder, Pete made one of only two mistakes he made in his life. He attempted to bribe the police into releasing him. Convicted of bribery after three trials, he was sent to Folsom Prison for five years.

Prison did not teach Pete the error of his ways. When he returned to San Francisco, he made another fortune in the slave-girl trade, successfully importing close to 100 soon-to-be-enslaved prostitutes by claiming they were going to work in the Chinese pavilion of the great Midwinter Fair of 1894. He also made vast sums at the track by bribing jockeys. Meanwhile, his connections with wealthy and powerful white San Franciscans grew even stronger.

A price on his head

But a $3,000 contract had been placed on Pete’s life. And his confidence, no doubt abetted by his status as a quasi-legitimate businessman, led to his second – and fatal – mistake.

Pete had hired a white bodyguard, C.H. Hunter, correctly reasoning that no highbinder would risk killing a white man. Pete lived upstairs from his shoe factory in a well-guarded building at 819 1/2 Washington St.

On that fateful January night, Little Pete sent Hunter to get a newspaper. When Hunter protested, Little Pete told him not to worry. Then he strolled through the ground floor of his factory, left the building and walked 30 feet east to a barbershop at 817 Washington, across from Ross Alley. (The street numbers were changed after the earthquake: otherwise, the murder site would be next to the legendary, now-defunct noodle house Sam Wo.)

Two paid tong assassins had been stalking Little Pete, and this was their chance. As Little Pete sat in a chair, they rushed in and fired four times at point-blank range, killing him instantly. They ran out. Police followed two suspects who were seen running into 123 Waverly Place, a few yards away, but no conclusive evidence was presented and the crime was never solved.

The tong wars continued to rage after Little Pete’s death. Undeterred by raids carried out by the Chinatown “flying squad,” in which policemen would burst into various tong headquarters, smash all the furniture and literally kick the occupants downstairs into the street, the highbinders grew more and more brazen: One assassin gunned down a cymbalist on stage at the Chinese theater on Washington before a packed house, none of whom would testify. Fear was so widespread that the population of Chinatown dropped dramatically.

Quake turns the tide

It took the great earthquake and fire of 1906 to turn the tide against the tongs.

Many highbinders left, and the climate in the rebuilt quarter became more hostile to the tongs. The Six Companies regained control. Law-abiding citizens, always the vast majority of Chinatown’s residents, were more Americanized and were no longer willing to be tyrannized by gangsters. A relentless but beloved policeman named Jack Manion, who worked the Chinatown beat from 1921 to 1946, applied the coup de grace. The last tong murder took place in 1922, and the last slave-girl raid was in 1925. The hatchet men’s reign of terror was over.

Editor’s note

Every corner in San Francisco has an astonishing story to tell. Every Saturday, Gary Kamiya’s “Portals of the Past” will tell one of those lost stories, using a specific location to illuminate San Francisco’s extraordinary history – from the days when giant mammoths wandered through what is now North Beach, to the Gold Rush delirium, the dot-com madness and beyond.

Trivia Time

Last week’s trivia question was: A famous Civil War general admitted that San Francisco’s real estate market had defeated him. What were his exact words? Answer: General and former S.F. banker William Tecumseh Sherman wrote, “I can handle a hundred thousand men in battle, and take the City of the Sun, but am afraid to manage a lot in the swamp of San Francisco.”

This week’s trivia question: Name three intersections in San Francisco where numbered streets cross.

Gary Kamiya is a freelance writer and Bay Area native. His new book, “Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco,” will be published by Bloomsbury in August. E-mail: metro@sfchronicle.com

Article source: http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Saga-and-assassination-of-Chinatown-s-Little-4663076.php

In the days after the quake, when assorted moralists intoned that the great earthquake and fire was God’s judgment on wicked San Francisco, a local poet responded with the following deathless lines: “If, as they say, God spanked the town for being over-frisky, why did He burn His churches down, and spare Hotaling’s whiskey?”

The Jackson Square district offers an evocative window into the Gold Rush days. But its history is still older. It goes back to the most charmed period in the city’s history – the 11 dreamlike years between 1835 and 1846 when a tiny hamlet called Yerba Buena stood along a crescent-shaped cove that ran through the heart of what is now the Financial District.

Yerba Buena cove was punctuated by an odd little inlet – a small saltwater lagoon, connected to the bay by a narrow neck that cut across the beach at Montgomery Street, that occupied most of the block between Jackson and Washington, extending east almost as far as Kearny.

Laguna Salada

This lagoon, known as the Laguna Salada (“saltwater lagoon”), can be clearly seen in early maps and drawings of Yerba Buena. It was responsible for the tiny village’s first civic improvement. Long before the Golden Gate Bridge, William Hinckley’s footbridge was the talk of the town.

In the 1820s and 1830s, a small Spanish-speaking colony was living at the old Mission Dolores, and a handful of soldiers and their families at the Presidio. And a dauntless woman named Juana Briones lived just outside the Presidio, near what are now the Lyon Street steps.

But the first non-American Indian inhabitant of Yerba Buena cove was a British sailor named William Richardson, whose whaler, the Orion, was one of the first non-Russian vessels to enter San Francisco Bay in 1822. Richardson jumped ship after attending a fiesta where he danced all night with the Presidio commander’s eldest daughter, Maria Antonia Martinez, whom he later married. It can be no coincidence that one of the world’s great cosmopolitan party towns was founded by a runaway who had just met a mixed-race hottie at an all-nighter.

Town’s 1st structure

In 1835, Richardson built the town’s first structure, a lean-to made out of a ship’s sail stretched between four posts. This crude tent stood on rising ground above the beach, which was only a few hundred yards east, on what is now Grant Avenue between Clay and Washington streets in the teeming heart of Chinatown. An old plaque attached to a weather-beaten apartment building at 823 Grant, hidden behind a rack of T-shirts, announces “The birthplace of a great city.”

Capt. Richardson prospered as a mariner, ferrying hides and tallow – the cattle products that were Mexican California’s major export items – from the missions to Boston trading ships. His son Esteban used to watch bears, wolves and coyotes fighting over their prey on the beach at Montgomery Street. The Richardsons were the only people living on the cove until another trader, an Ohioan named Jacob Leese, built a house nearby in 1836 – the first building in Yerba Buena. To celebrate, Leese threw an epic three-day Fourth of July bash, to which he invited everyone in the vicinity of the cove.

Like Richardson, indeed like most of Yerba Buena’s foreign residents, Leese married a “Californio” girl – a Spanish-speaking California native. (Nominally citizens of Mexico, the Hispanic Californians, many of them former soldiers who had received vast land grants, had begun calling themselves Californios, in part to distinguish themselves from déclassé newer arrivals from the mother country.)

Before 1841, when the Bartleson-Bidwell party became the first wagon train to cross the Sierra, Yerba Buena was not just at the end of the continent, it might as well have been at the end of the world. Nonetheless, a few traders, runaway sailors, adventurers and assorted human flotsam and jetsam washed up there.

The American and British traders pursued commerce with slightly more alacrity than the famously indolent Californio rancheros, but by the time the Protestant work ethic made it to Yerba Buena, it appears to have run out of steam. In his 1889 book “Sixty Years in California,” William Heath Davis describes life in Yerba Buena as an endless round of drinking, a little business, eating contests, genteel smuggling, picnics, whist games, excursions to pick wild strawberries, and more drinking.

‘The California fever’

Richard Henry Dana disapprovingly called idleness “the California fever,” but Davis spoke for most of his fellow Yerba Buenans when he wrote, “The native Californians were about the happiest and most contented people I ever saw, as were also the foreigners who settled among them and intermarried them, adopted their habits and customs, and became, as it were, a part of themselves.” Yerba Buena’s intercultural, interethnic mingling was a rarity in American history.

There was simply not much to do in Yerba Buena. It was such a sleepy place – as late as 1844 it had only a dozen buildings and less than 50 inhabitants – that anything out of the routine aroused interest. So in that year, when an American trader named William Hinckley, who had been named alcalde (a kind of mayor-judge) of the district, erected a wooden footbridge over the little creek that fed the Laguna Salada, the town buzzed with excitement.

The footbridge allowed the few dozen residents of Yerba Buena to walk to the anchorage at Clark’s Point (near present-day Broadway and Battery) without having to wade through or jump across the little lagoon. This was not exactly a life-changing civic event, but the footbridge nonetheless constituted the first public improvement in Yerba Buena, and it was the subject of great fascination. “[P]eople came from far and near to look at and admire it, especially the native Californians, who arrived from the Mission and elsewhere, with their wives and children, to contemplate the remarkable structure,” Davis wrote. According to historian Rand Richards, 30 residents – practically the entire town – came to admire it, and jumped up and down on it to test its strength.

Nothing tangible remains of the enchanted Yerba Buena years. A plaque that once commemorated Hinckley’s structure is no longer displayed. But it is pleasant, when walking by Jackson and Montgomery, to imagine the little footbridge that once crossed the lagoon here, and the town’s population happily jumping up and down on it.

Editor’s note

Every corner in San Francisco has an astonishing story to tell. Every Saturday, Gary Kamiya’s Portals of the Past will tell one of those lost stories, using a specific location to illuminate San Francisco’s extraordinary history – from the days when giant mammoths wandered through what is now North Beach, to the Gold Rush delirium, the dot-com madness and beyond.

Trivia time

Last week’s question: Where in the Bay Area is there a miniature version of the Golden Gate Bridge that actually serves a practical function? Answer: The footbridge to the Point Bonita lighthouse is a miniature replica of the Golden Gate Bridge.

This week’s question: A famous Civil War general admitted that San Francisco’s real estate market had defeated him. What were his exact words?

Gary Kamiya is a freelance writer and author of “Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco,” which will be published by Bloomsbury in August. E-mail: metro@sfchronicle.com

Article source: http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/1st-S-F-civic-improvement-Yerba-Buena-footbridge-4649647.php

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Tenant advocates and property managers in San Francisco’s hyperactive real estate market are fretting about new earthquake safety rules that will spike the cost of repairing older buildings and ultimately increase monthly rents.

 
On the anniversary of the 1906 earthquake that killed hundreds of people and leveled much of San Francisco, the city approved a new law Thursday requiring thousands of apartment buildings to be upgraded to better withstand tremors.
 
Owners of about 3,000 multi-unit residential buildings sprinkled throughout the city will have to shoulder the sizeable costs of the seismic retrofits but will be allowed to pass on those costs to tenants, although some may qualify for an exemption.
 
In a city where a one-bedroom apartment rents for nearly $2,200 per month, any increase to the already sky-high cost of housing prompts a conversation.
 
“Tenants are struggling already, so paying even an extra $50 on top of that is pretty hard for most people,” said Ted Gullicksen, the director of the nonprofit San Francisco Tenants’ Union. “The heftiest rent increases will be in the smaller buildings, just because there are fewer tenants to share the costs.”

Mayor Ed Lee signed the bill Thursday, saying the measure would better protect the nearly 60,000 people who live or work in those buildings from potential disaster.
 
“This mandatory seismic retrofit program will protect San Franciscans, protect our housing stock and ensure San Francisco can rapidly recover from the next earthquake,” Lee said in a statement. “We renew our commitment to making sure that disasters such as the 1906 earthquake and fire do not devastate our city again.”

The retrofitting legislation covers so-called soft-story multi-unit buildings built before building codes were changed in 1978 – that is, those with three or more stories that are wood-framed and have a garage or other similar opening on the ground floor.
 
Owners of suspected soft-story buildings will receive notices in the mail, which will give them a year to get an inspection to determine whether they need to retrofit.
 
Authorities estimate the upgrades could cost around $60,000 to $130,000 per building. Lee said banks are developing financing packages for owners to help pay for the work.
 
As part of a compromise with tenant advocates, the city also agreed to streamline its process for qualifying those who make less than $78,000 per year for a hardship exemption from the pass-through costs.
 
A separate, pending city ordinance would exempt single parents on welfare or senior citizens from the retrofitting-related rent increases.
 
While much of the city’s real estate market is soaring thanks to a tech boom that has attracted giants such as Twitter to the city’s downtown, many apartment owners are limited in what they can charge because most private units are rent controlled, said Charley Goss, government and community affairs coordinator of the San Francisco Apartment Association. That is often the case for owners of the buildings most likely to be affected in the Mission, Western Addition and Marina neighborhoods, he added.
 
“The owners that can best shoulder the costs probably would have rented their apartments recently, so would be getting their full market value,” he said. “Those who haven’t will likely have to get a refinance on their building or get a second mortgage or a loan.”
 
Robert Link, who owns a small property management firm, said he would have to spend about $70,000 to retrofit an Edwardian multi-unit building he owns in the inner Richmond.
 
“The ultimate beneficiary here is not the property owners but San Francisco tenants, because doing these upgrades will preserve rent-controlled buildings,” he said. “Really what this requires is managing tenants’ needs and expectations of the process, and giving them advance notice of as much as you can of the work to be done.”
 
San Francisco’s rents have been climbing in the last several years, leveling off only recently as experts say the market has approached saturation.
 
Rents average $2,175 for a one-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment, according to RealFacts, a Novato consulting group that tracks apartment complexes with 50 or more units.
 
After the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989, San Francisco mandated retrofitting of unreinforced masonry, or brick, buildings. But the effort to bolster soft-story apartment buildings was a tougher sell, and was opposed by owners and tenants rights advocates concerned over the rent increases.
 
Seismologists predict that a significant earthquake in the region – two to three times as strong as Loma Prieta – is likely to occur within the next 30 years.
 
“When an earthquake happens, these buildings will be vulnerable. If we’re going to be able to recover, this is a necessary step,” Goss said.

Copyright Associated Press

Article source: http://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/San-Francisco-Mayor-Ed-Lee-Signs-Quake-Retrofit-Law-203827081.html