This story was originally published by Fresnoland.
Kathy Omachi used to wonder why there was no D Street in Fresno’s Chinatown.
The street names otherwise went in order from A to G in the West Fresno neighborhood, then continued through the alphabet in downtown proper.
Omachi later learned that there indeed used to be a D Street — but that was all before State Route 99 came along. The north-south freeway was built over what was once D Street in the 1950s, taking down hundreds of West Fresno homes with it.
“They wiped out two full blocks,” said Omachi, whose grandfather once ran a pool hall in Chinatown. “Where you see the freeway now going through, those were all houses.
“All of those people had to relocate,” she said. “They had to find other places to live.”
A new report from the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies helps quantify just how destructive the freeway’s construction was for West Fresno.
Four hundred homes were demolished to make way for the freeway’s construction, touted by state transportation planners at the time as the area’s “first real freeway” that would benefit Fresno’s economy. Those demolitions forced the displacement of roughly 1,000 West Fresno residents, UCLA researchers estimate.
But the report also approximates how much of that destruction could have been avoided — had state officials instead selected one of the alternative routes that West Fresno community leaders pushed for back then.
“The more destructive route was chosen in Fresno,” said Jacob Wasserman, the project manager for the UCLA study.
“We found evidence of chambers of commerce and a (former) Congressman that was advocating for bypass routes that bypassed downtown Fresno and West Fresno altogether,” he added. “But those voices were not heard.”
This chapter in West Fresno history — from 1949, when state officials announced the selection of the D Street route, to 1957, when construction was complete — is one that fewer and fewer surviving Fresno residents were around to see.
But its impacts can be seen and felt to this day.
“It just created a further geographic isolation of West Fresno,” said Veronica Stumpf, a realtor whose family has roots in West Fresno’s Germantown that once thrived before the 99 cut it in half.
Communities like Germantown virtually vanished from West Fresno as former residents scattered north. West Fresno’s overall population began a decadeslong downward spiral.
For the advocates picking up the pieces roughly 70 years later, this historic legacy is always present — but it doesn’t stop them from fighting for West Fresno.
“That freeway is there. How we address its impact today,” said Jan Minami, project manager for the Chinatown Fresno Foundation, “is what’s important.”
How the 99 freeway reshaped West Fresno
Before the 99 tore them up, West Fresno was home to extremely diverse neighborhoods. Japanese, Chinese, Italian, German, Mexican and Black communities — to name a few — settled in the area, many because the city’s racist housing policies forced them west of the railroad tracks.
Stumpf’s family was among them. Her father’s side put down roots in Fresno’s Germantown in 1898 after living on the Volga River in Russia for 150 years.
“Russia was becoming a harder and harder place to live,” she said, as Russian leaders rolled back promises to German immigrants. “So in 1898 they packed things up, moved from Russia to Fresno, and Germantown was their first home.”
Their neighborhood was roughly bounded by Church, Mono, G and Fruit streets, according to city documents.
From her family’s stories, Stumpf said she heard of a tight-knit community of newcomers to the United States. They owned a home in Germantown and went to Lutheran Cross Church.
But when the freeway sliced up Germantown, the Stumpfs and other families scattered into the Fresno High and Tower District neighborhoods.
“They had the privilege and the financial means to move north,” she said.
“I don’t know if they received any relocation assistance,” she added. “I’m not too sure about that. But my understanding was that they were homeowners.”
Among the West Fresno residents that relocated within the city in the wake of the freeway’s construction, the report found that, overall, more white residents left West Fresno while residents of color stayed in the west area.
“Non-Hispanic white immigrants were economically and socially assimilating in that era,” the report continues, “which provided them with more opportunities to leave West Fresno.”
On the other hand, as West Fresno areas like Germantown became more affordable with the economic “devastation” brought on by the 99, more residents of color moved in.
Racially-restrictive covenants legally barred people of color in Fresno and other cities from moving north in the ensuing decades before those practices were banned in 1968 under the Fair Housing Act.
An alternate route?
D Street was the route ultimately chosen by state transportation officials, due to largely economic factors, the UCLA report notes.
State engineers’ reasons included cheaper land acquisition costs, as well as “the potential for business development in West Fresno that they believed the freeway could bring,” the report says.
But before that, an alternative route was also considered along G Street, closer to the railroad tracks.
That route would have displaced “less than half” that number of households as the D Street route, according to the report.
As many as 2,000 West Fresno community members spoke out against the D Street route and urged leaders to consider alternatives, researchers found through newspaper articles and other archives.
That included former Congressman Bertrand Gearhardt, who called the D Street route a “sentence of death on West Fresno’s community life.”
The West Fresno Chamber of Commerce, which the report says was formed in 1949 “as a direct response” to the D Street route and claimed over 200 members, staged some of the most well-documented opposition.
West Fresno religious leaders were also some of the “earliest and most vocal opponents,” the report adds, since many of their houses of worship were in the path of the D Street route.
These opposition efforts came at a time when state agencies largely weren’t yet “forced” to undertake robust community engagement processes, said Paul Ong, one of the report’s authors and director of the UCLA Center for Neighborhood Knowledge.
“There’s no question in early freeway development, planning, building — that state agencies were not held responsible for lots of things,” he said.
Even with the few opportunities that existed for the public to weigh in, some forces held more weight with state planners than others.
That included “powerful economic agents” like the railroad industry, Ong said, which held more influence at the time. The report also notes that the central Fresno Chamber of Commerce and Merchants Association supported the D Street route, unlike the West Fresno merchants.
These outcomes don’t surprise Omachi, looking back.
“It was in the community with really no political representation, no political power, no economic muscle,” she said, “and it was the easiest route for them to go through.”
West Fresno today
The highway’s construction and the housing destroyed in its wake helps explain the beginning of a “downward population spiral” for West Fresno, the report says.
Within two decades of when the route was selected, “West Fresno’s population decreased by 42 percent compared to two decades earlier.”
“By 1980,” the report continues, “it had dropped to less than half of the 1950 population.”
This set the stage for some of the biggest obstacles to revitalization efforts for areas like Chinatown.
“It’s difficult to build (and) revitalize a commercial neighborhood without a residential population,” said Minami, whose organization works to support both commercial and housing development in Chinatown.
Stumpf, whose family now has a real estate business, said she sees the difference in her work, too.
“In Chinatown,” she said, “a property might be worth $50 per square foot, max. But then if you cross the train tracks into another part of downtown, the central business district, that same building is probably worth $100 per square foot — maybe $125 per square foot.
“You can clearly see how the train tracks and the freeway 99 definitely create a barrier when it comes to real estate values.”
Some critics also hear echoes of this in more contemporary state infrastructure projects like the embattled high-speed rail. The controversial bullet train — which has both supporters and detractors in Chinatown — is supposed to have a station in Fresno with entrances from both downtown to the east and Chinatown to the west.
Omachi, a vocal critic of the project, is worried to see the state acquiring properties in Chinatown again and displacing businesses that give a window back into the neighborhood’s past.
“Someone brought up with me the issue of (how) all these other countries have high-speed rail, like Japan. I said, yes, but they also acknowledge … what they’ve lost to do that,” she said.
“They also went through many historic areas or low-income (communities).”
But advocates also see hopeful paths forward for neighborhoods like Chinatown.
Minami said it’s her dream to get a freeway cap built over the 99 in Chinatown to help restore walkability in the neighborhood.
Other cities like San Diego and Denver have built so-called “caps” or “lids” over freeways and built parks overtop them in efforts to reconnect communities that were severed by major roadways.
Despite her fears for its future, a love of the neighborhood also fuels Omachi’s fierce efforts to preserve Chinatown history, even after the state literally paved over some of it.
Omachi didn’t get to see much of the Chinatown her own father, or his father before him, spent time in. Her family relocated to become sharecroppers, and then the highway came in.
But she cherishes the stories her father told of her grandfather’s participation in a sumo ring in Chinatown, or his days studying at the old Fresno Buddhist Temple — even if as a kid, the stories went in one ear and out the other.
Her preservation efforts now, she said, are “in honor of him.”