Chinatown – San Francisco
Stockton and Pacific
This mural is also on the Ping Yuen Housing Project. This is the Stockton Street Side of the building.
Painted by Darryl Mar in 1999. Mar is a graduate of UC Irvine. He went on to get a masters in Asian American Studies from UCLA. Mr. Mar was aided by Darren Acoba, Joyce Lu and Tonia Chen. It is in memory of Sing Kan Mah and those who have struggled to make America their home.
Walking further down Stockton Street towards the tunnel you will find this mural on the Victory Memorial Hall it was erected by the China War Relief Association of America and painted by Amy Nelder.The Center sign reads: “Ten Miles of Track, Laid in One Day, April 28, 1869”
The waving banner reads “On April 28th 1869, a team of 848 Chinese railroad workers, using only hand tools, set a record laying more than 10 miles of track in just 12 hours. For the entire year of 1868 the Central Pacific Railway laid only 350 miles of track – about one mile a day. Chinese immigrants, the overwhelming majority of whom (over 90%) came from Gwang Chou Province, constituted about 86% of the Central Pacific workforce, more than 12,000 of out of 14,00 workers.”
According to Wendy’s website she “comes from a rich San Francisco tradition. Her grandfather, Al Nelder, was the revered former Chief of Police for San Francisco and her mother, Wendy, is the former president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. She continues that spirit of public service by being one of only 18 fulltime forensic artists in the United States as the forensic artist for the San Francisco Police Department.”
As you can see above, the Chinese were instrumental in building the railroads throughout the west. It is a piece of our history fraught with both the good and the bad. If you are interested in reading further about it I suggest checking out the following book. “Nothing Like it in the World” by Stephen E. Ambrose, I know there are hundreds others, but his makes for wonderful reading about the entire railroad history in the west.