A Bridge at Powell and Clay: Designing Chinese American Community in San Francisco’s Chinatown YWCA

abstract: Recently, scholars of Asian American studies and architecture have been revisiting Chinatown architectural design as a unique form. Much of that research focuses on the pagoda-adorned Chinatown architecture of commercial buildings like restaurants, banks, and theaters to appeal to tourists. This article explores the 1932 Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) Clay Street Center and Residence in San Francisco’s Chinatown as an example of vernacular Chinatown architecture that breaks from the standard image of the early twentieth-century Oriental style. I argue that the YWCA’s function as a nonprofit community space allowed the women who designed it to portray a creative vision of Chinese American identity that shares some visual continuity with, but is uniquely distinct from, most iconic Chinatown architecture. I also argue that, in a moment when Chinatown was still very much segregated from the rest of San Francisco, the Chinese YWCA board working with architect Julia Morgan used architecture as a medium of pleasure and aspirational visual integration for working-class immigrant women.