Portsmouth Square is the social heart of Chinatown, a raised plaza above an underground car park where the neighbourhood comes out to live in public. From dawn the benches fill with older men bent over Chinese chess and cards, tai chi groups work through their forms, and grandparents mind children on the playground. It is loud, crowded, and entirely unselfconscious — the closest thing Chinatown has to a town square.
The site carries an outsized history. In 1846 the American flag was first raised here when the United States claimed the then-Mexican village of Yerba Buena, and two years later news of the gold discovery was announced on this spot, setting off the rush that built the city. A pedestrian bridge crosses Kearny Street to the Chinese Culture Center. Robert Louis Stevenson, who lived nearby in 1879–80, is remembered with a monument in the square.