After a day of December rain, the bridge is strewn with trash. Cigarette butts, cardboard boxes and tissues form soggy clumps underneath its benches. The concrete tops of its walls are crusted with pigeon droppings. It’s empty, save for three pedestrians, who sit and talk quietly. For some, this structure is a landmark, but today, the only hint of that history is a pair of metal signs at the bridge’s end. On one of them, the lettering, which used to read “No skateboards or bicycles,” has been thoroughly scratched out. 

To most San Franciscans, this 28-foot-wide bridge doesn’t have a proper name. Sometimes, it’s plainly called the Portsmouth Square pedestrian bridge; officially, it’s the Dr. Rolland and Kathryn Lowe Community Bridge, a title that nobody uses. It stretches over Kearny Street, connecting Chinatown’s Portsmouth Square to the Hilton Hotel on the other side, which houses the Chinese Culture Center. Concrete benches line its brick walls. It’s a pedestrian bridge that’s rarely used by pedestrians; in the papers, it’s maligned as a “bridge to nowhere” and “SF’s most hated bridge.” 

For skateboarders, though, it’s called China Banks. It’s a name recognized worldwide, one repeated in countless issues of Thrasher Magazine. This bridge, apparently useless to civilians, is one of the city’s most notoriously challenging skate spots. Speaking on the spot’s significance in a phone call, Ted Barrow, Ph.D., an art historian and skateboarding expert, was unequivocal:

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“If you were to ask anyone around the world, any skateboarder, what the most famous spot in the world was, they would say China Banks.”

The December 2021 cover of Thrasher Magazine, featuring Tristan Funkhouser executing a frontside ollie along China Banks in San Francisco.

Soon, though, China Banks is slated to disappear. After five decades, the city plans to tear the bridge down next summer or fall, as part of an extensive redesign of Portsmouth Square. Along with the planned redevelopment of Embarcadero Plaza, the most famous skateboarding city in the world seems to be demolishing its skateboarding past.

Even half a century ago, before it was fully built, the Portsmouth Square pedestrian bridge was the object of scorn. The San Francisco Examiner called it “Chinatown’s Bridge of 1000 Controversies.” Advocates from Chinatown’s community criticized its $600,000 price tag, and worried that it would flood Portsmouth Square, one of the neighborhood’s most important gathering places, with tourists from the hotel. 

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The bridge was designed by a team of architects that included Clement Chen, John Carl Warnecke and Chen Chi-Kwan. Rather than replicating the style of other Chinatown structures, the team opted for a modern, brutalist look, as was fashionable at the time, mixing Chinese influence with concrete futurism. (St. Mary’s Cathedral, the city’s concrete-walled church, was completed in the same period.) Clement Chen told the San Francisco Examiner at the time that the........

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