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4. “The Best Project in Town”: North Beach Place
- University of Minnesota Press
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147 four “The Best Project in Town” North Beach Place North Beach is like America, in a sense, where different ethnic groups come together to give it a strength and vitality all its own. —Ken Wong, San Francisco Examiner, December 1978 Public housing isn’t public when any citizen because of the color of his skin is not allowed to live there. —M. Colton, San Francisco Chronicle, 1952 As Chinese Americans celebrated the opening of Ping Yuen in 1952, two hopeful African Americans applied to live in the newly built North Beach Place public housing project in predominantly white North Beach. With over 51,000 African Americans living in San Francisco amid a persistent housing shortage and entrenched residential segregation, these applicants, like thousands of others, desired a decent living environment.1 Rather than applying to live in the nineyear -old Westside Courts, where the San Francisco Housing Authority concentrated African American tenants, Mattie Banks and James Charley sought admission to the new, modern North Beach Place. Nestled between Telegraph and Russian Hills near the waterfront, the North Beach neighborhood was an eclectic and convenient area, with the Powell-Mason cable car line exiting next to the new public housing development. Banks, separated from her husband, worked as a presser and lived in a one-room rental where she shared a bed with her two daughters. Charley, a hospital orderly, lived with his wife and three children in a two-bedroom rental where they shared a kitchen and bathroom with other families.2 Despite their demonstrated need, the SFHA rejected both applications for North Beach Place. A decade after adopting the neighborhood pattern policy, the SFHA continued to place tenants in specific public housing developments “The Best Project in Town” 148 based on the racial and ethnic composition of the surrounding community . The Housing Authority claimed, however, that Banks and Charley were not turned away because they were African American. Citing the applicants’ moral shortcomings as the determining factor in denying their admittance, the SFHA demonstrated both its continued paternalism—housing residents it deemed to be “upright” citizens— and institutionalized racism.3 Long criticized by the NAACP as well as the Council for Civic Unity and other interracial coalitions, the SFHA’s segregationist policy and practices came under legal attack at North Beach Place in a case that went to the U.S. Supreme Court.4 In this seemingly hidden piece of the national civil rights story, federally subsidized low-income housing became a vehicle by which African Americans demanded equality. The individual actions of African American applicants, and the leadership of the NAACP legal team, interrupted and challenged the SFHA’s segregationist policy and practices that were simultaneously lauded locally and nationally at Ping Yuen. These efforts by African Americans opened the door for North Beach Place and other San Francisco public housing projects to become racially and ethnically diverse developments. Over the second half of the twentieth century, however, integration did not always result in cohesion . Community formations have shifted over time from intraracial and ethnic ties to stronger intergroup bonds as changing demographics , shared difficulties, and collective threats of redevelopment emerged. The North Beach neighborhood Banks and Charley were trying to live in had a long history as a diverse neighborhood. The district originated out of the mid-nineteenth century enclaves of Italian, French, Spanish, Irish, Mexican, and South American immigrants living in the area near the waterfront. By the turn of the century, Telegraph Hill and the wharf had acquired the name “the Latin Quarter” because of the proliferation of Romance languages there. Between 1850 and 1920, Italian immigrants transformed North Beach into a colonia or Little Italy, a spatial and cultural designation that marked the district in the mid-twentieth century.5 Praised by many for rapidly rebuilding North Beach after the earthquake and fire of 1906, the district residents continued to strengthen the reputation of the area as an Italian neighborhood.6 North Beach’s Italian population peaked in the [13.59.218.147] Project MUSE (2024-04-18 00:28 GMT) “The Best Project in Town” 149 mid-1930s, at 27,000 Italian-born and 30,000 locally born of Italian descent .7 The hub of Italian American life in the Bay Area, North Beach drew immigrants and tourists alike to its markets, cafés, delis, and sights such as Saints Peter and Paul Church and Coit Tower.8 Writing in 1939, columnist Bill Simmons described North Beach as “world famed.”9 World...