Kinmon Gakuen - The Line on Bush Street

Kinmon Gakuen - The Line on Bush Street

Photo: BriefEdits, CC BY-SA 4.0 (cropped)

A stop on San Francisco, District by District, a free self-guided tour.

At 2031 Bush Street stands a plain building that holds one of the hardest chapters in the neighborhood's history. Kinmon Gakuen, the Golden Gate Institute, was founded around 1911 as a Japanese language school for American-born children.

In April 1942, under the Army's exclusion orders, it became a civil control station. Families from these blocks lined up on this sidewalk to register, were given numbered tags and told to bring only what they could carry, and days later boarded buses for the Tanforan racetrack south of the city, the first stop on the way to camps in the interior. Photographer Dorothea Lange, working for the government, documented the lines here.

After the war the school reopened in 1949, and it still serves the community. View it from the sidewalk, then walk west to Fillmore Street.

More on Wikipedia: Tanforan Assembly Center · Dorothea Lange · Executive Order 9066

Stops on this tour

  1. Ferry Building and the Embarcadero - Where the City Met the World
  2. Financial District and Jackson Square - Gold Rush on the Old Shoreline
  3. Chinatown - The Neighborhood That Refused to Move
  4. North Beach and Telegraph Hill - Little Italy and the Beats
  5. Fisherman's Wharf - Italian Boats and Old Ships
  6. Nob Hill and Russian Hill - Cable Cars, Mansions and the Great Fire
  7. The Presidio - Two Centuries Guarding the Golden Gate
  8. Japantown and the Fillmore - Two Communities, One Neighborhood
  9. Haight-Ashbury - From Victorian Suburb to Summer of Love
  10. Golden Gate Park - Sand Dunes Turned Into a Park
  11. The Castro - A Neighborhood That Became a Movement
  12. The Mission - Where San Francisco Began
  13. Civic Center - Domes, Charters and Protest
  14. South of Market - From Rincon Hill to the Tech Boom