Directions to Wilma Chan Park
Lake Merritt BART and Chinatown
Wilma Chan Park, formerly Madison Square Park, was one of seven public squares in the early days of Oakland. There has been a Chinese community in Oakland since the city’s earliest days. By 1860, there were 200 Chinese residents in Oakland out of a total population of 1500.
In 1882 President Chester A. Arthur signed the Chinese Exclusion Act which prohibited Chinese workers from coming to America and denying citizenship to those Chinese nationals already living and working here. This act, the first legislation to explicitly bar a group of people based on their ethnicity, suppressed the Chinese population in America for decades. Oakland’s Chinatown was no exception. There was widespread housing and employment discrimination. Few white employers would hire Chinese except as houseboys or agricultural workers. Even the refugee camp along the shores of Lake Merritt after the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake was racially segregated with the Chinese refugees clustered in an area called the Willows, along the estuary channel, a short distance from the Lake Merritt BART station.
Yet by 1906, due to the displacement of Chinese in other areas of the state, Oakland had gained 1,500 Chinese to its population. The Chinese community had been displaced from a few locations in Oakland, too, before finally settling around 8th and Webster Streets where a business center sprang up with financing from prominent and enterprising Chinese businessmen and family associations. There were laundries, restaurants, retail stores, herb shops, and gaming rooms. Madison Square was a neighborhood of small Stick-style Victorian houses and light industry.
In 1964 the City of Oakland decided to sell Madison Square Park to the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) District. This park had been the community’s gathering point since the late 19th century. The agency’s administrators wanted the land to locate its headquarters. They planned a six-story building between 8th and 9th Streets, Oak and Madison Streets, just above the Lake Merritt BART Station. The administration building was to house 400 employees, according to a 1970 Oakland Tribune article.
The Chinese community protested BART’s encroachment on their neighborhood. Hundreds of people would be displaced. The construction of the Nimitz freeway had already destroyed the western edge of the neighborhood. The Laney College/Chinatown redevelopment plan and the building of BART in the early 1970s helped displace 10,000 residents of the neighborhood. Important cultural buildings were lost during this construction, including the Ming Quong Home, an all-girls orphanage at 51 Ninth Street. According to community historian Roy Chan, about 70 homes were demolished to make way for BART. The city council was not in agreement about what to do with the proceeds of the sale of the park; some thought the sale could help finance the relocation of Madison Square. Others thought it should go into the General Fund, and still others thought the park relocation should be postponed till sometime in the future. The BART headquarters were eventually located across 8th Street from Madison Square Park.
Threats to the community space continued into the 1980s and 1990s. BART bought the 98-unit Madison Park Apartments, damaged in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, in a 1990 foreclosure sale with the intention to tear the building down and build its administrative offices on the site. At the time of its construction in 1908, the Madison Park apartment building was the largest wooden apartment building in the West. At the time of the sale, it was on the National Register of Historic Places. That status didn’t deter BART’s plans. Chinatown community leaders along with local residents and preservationists rallied to save the building, urging the transit agency to sell the building to the East Bay Asian Local Development Corporation (EBALDC). The community badly needed affordable housing. Eventually in 1991 BART relented. EBALDC bought the apartment building and renovated it into a much-needed low-income housing development. Despite the disruption of infrastructure projects, Chinatown residents began to reclaim the space at Madison Square Park.
Chinatown is a neighborhood rich in culture and stories. The Oakland Asian Cultural Center (OACC) supports the Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) community by providing cultural programs such as films, tours, exhibits, oral history projects, lectures, and book talks. The OACC also provides programs that promote health and wellness. Founded in 1984 by a corps of volunteers who recognized the need to promote and create cultural programming for Oakland’s Asian community, the organization now offers programs such as the Open EARS for Change lecture series which promotes multiracial, intergenerational anti-racism dialogues and actions, featuring members of Oakland’s African American and AAPI communities. Another popular project designed to preserve community history is the Oakland Chinatown Oral History Project, headed by community historian Roy Chan.
Roy Chan grew up in Oakland’s Bella Vista neighborhood but was frequently in Chinatown. His father, Albert Chan, came to America as a stowaway on a ship bound for San Francisco. The elder Chan moved to Oakland in the 1950s and operated a butcher shop on 9th Street in Chinatown. Roy attended Oakland schools then enrolled at UC Berkeley where he majored in architecture. He began his professional life in New York City as an urban planner and became interested in mapping. When he returned to Oakland in 2007, he interned at the East Bay Asian Local Development Corporation (EBALDC), learning about the city’s built environment and how it impacted people. Working under the mentorship of Oakland journalist William Wong, Roy undertook his first oral history project to capture the stories of Chinatown residents and merchants.
With the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 which removed quotas to enter the United States, a new influx of Asian immigrants arrived. Chinatown, according to Roy, continues to serve as an “initial settlement place,” an important gateway to life in California. He estimates that about one-third of Chinatown’s recent population have come from diverse Asian backgrounds.
In more recent years, Roy Chan conducted an ethnographic film study of the regulars of Madison Park. He has recorded stories to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Asian Branch Library, the country’s first to focus on Asian culture and languages. He has also preserved the oral histories of residents who related stories of the community before the development of the Lake Merritt BART station. One of the more creative projects Roy Chan worked on was the interactive Memory Map which is displayed at the Oakland Asian Cultural Center. It is a large, aerial photo of Chinatown on which the public can add their written memories of each building. There is also an online version of the map. Through the collaborative work of the Oakland Chinatown Oral History Project, the vibrancy, resilience, and history of Chinatown, past and present, lives on. Today’s Chinatown, Oakland’s fifth Chinese settlement, is a community rich with stories of immigration, displacement, self-sufficiency, interdependence, and resiliency.
The venerated Madison Square Park (now officially renamed Wilma Chan Park, named after the recently deceased Alameda County Supervisor) continues to be a lively communal space that attracts hundreds of seniors each week who come to exercise and socialize. Not only does the popularity of this public space foster social connection, but many who come to exercise stay to shop and eat in Chinatown, strengthening the economic vitality of the neighborhood.
Listen to an interview with community historian Roy Chan: