Peace Plaza - Built on Redevelopment
Photo: Matthew Rutledge from Seattle, WA, CC BY 2.0 (cropped)
A stop on San Francisco, District by District, a free self-guided tour.
Peace Plaza and the Japan Center malls around it opened in 1968, built by the city's redevelopment agency on land cleared in the project known as A-1. That project leveled 28 blocks of older housing, much of it the homes and shops of Japanese American families who had returned after the war, and displaced about 8,000 people. The new center was meant to draw trade with Japan; for many families it meant losing their neighborhood a second time.
Japanese American residents and businesses stayed and organized, and today this is one of only three historic Japantowns left in the United States, all of them in California. The plaza hosts the Cherry Blossom Festival each April.
The concrete pagoda, a gift from the people of Osaka, follows the form of traditional wooden pagodas but was designed for a modern plaza. Walk north from here up Buchanan Street.
More on Wikipedia: Japan Center · Yoshiro Taniguchi
Stops on this tour
- Ferry Building and the Embarcadero - Where the City Met the World
- Financial District and Jackson Square - Gold Rush on the Old Shoreline
- Chinatown - The Neighborhood That Refused to Move
- North Beach and Telegraph Hill - Little Italy and the Beats
- Fisherman's Wharf - Italian Boats and Old Ships
- Nob Hill and Russian Hill - Cable Cars, Mansions and the Great Fire
- The Presidio - Two Centuries Guarding the Golden Gate
- Japantown and the Fillmore - Two Communities, One Neighborhood
- Haight-Ashbury - From Victorian Suburb to Summer of Love
- Golden Gate Park - Sand Dunes Turned Into a Park
- The Castro - A Neighborhood That Became a Movement
- The Mission - Where San Francisco Began
- Civic Center - Domes, Charters and Protest
- South of Market - From Rincon Hill to the Tech Boom