Exploring San Francisco through the lens of city blocks, Blocker is a regular series by Charles Hodgkins. Look for it on SFist every other Wednesday, around the lunching hour.

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Blocker, No. 34: Stockton St. in Chinatown

There’s a woman over there wielding a paring knife, daring the throng to come closer by yelling for their attention every few seconds. There’s a live fish flopping around in an entryway, and not far from that, a bunch of dead chickens in a window. And here comes a couple men, sending fresh loogies flying at low angles. Sidewalk jostling, auto honking, bus exhaust. River traffic is heavy.

Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.

The woman with the paring knife holds a trout pear in her other palm. She’s in the employ of Little Paradise at the corner of Stockton and Jackson, and she’s taken to the sidewalk at this busy market hour to offer a bit of her shop’s freshest goods. It’s food sampling at its lowest-fi. We take a slice and are thankful she’s cutting slices of trout pear instead of simply trout.

Up Stockton toward Pacific, at a fish market at 1135, the fish that had inadvertently hopped out of its holding tank is casually scooped up within moments by one of its minders and reunited underwater with its similarly doomed cousins. As for the poultry hanging in the window at Duk Hing Chinese Deli & Meat Inc., they’re skinned, sauced, and beyond help at this point.

Elderly men shuffle down the Stockton sidewalk, many with canes. They smoke stubby cigarettes, they hack phlegm, they expectorate. In some cases, their loyal wives shuffle a few steps behind.

Stockton’s sidewalk crush prevents getting anywhere quickly, but that’s not really the point on this block. This impossibly dense stretch of produce, meat, and fish markets – with the occasional dim sum shop, bakery, and camera store interspersed at street level, and apartments, offices, and benevolent associations above – is essentially a locals-only shopping corridor, in sharp contrast to the rampant tourism that lines Grant a block east. In the unfortunate event you’re on foot and in a rush, your best bet here is to simply step into the street, walk parallel to the sidewalk, and hope you don’t get bumped by a delivery truck or 30 Stockton bus crawling along through traffic.

This block of Stockton does much to discredit the notion that youthful neighborhoods are the only vibrant neighborhoods. A majority of the people here on a Friday morning look to be on the far side of 50 years old and perhaps not as spry as they once were. But that doesn’t stop any of them from picking up their 89-cent mangos for the day.

To handle its rivers of pedestrians, certain street intersections in Chinatown, including the two that bookend this block of Stockton, support diagonal crossings via a third pair of pedestrian signals. The safety measure makes a fair amount of sense, considering that San Francisco’s Chinatown contains one of the largest populations of Chinese outside Asia. Of course, this results in longer waits for cars at stoplights, but the joke’s on you in the first place if you’re behind the wheel in this part of town.

As intoxicating as Stockton’s commotion can be - the sweet fragrance of baked goods wafting onto the sidewalk doesn’t help our focus any – we remember to look upward here and there. Chinatown’s building lots look to be among the narrowest in town, including several along the west side of this particular block. But a sense of spatial relief arrives across the street in the form of the mural-clad wing of the Ping Yuen public housing complex, which has its main point of entry around the corner on Pacific. The boxy tenement, constructed in the darkest ages of 1950s institutional architecture, sits well off and below the Stockton sidewalk, where a group posts photos and offers literature chronicling Chinese government atrocities against followers of the new spiritual practice Falun Dafa. Even where there’s a bit of open space here, its use is appropriated and intense.

Browsing goods at Kwong Cheong Tai at 1199 Stockton, we see shark fin available for $358 per pound; ginseng root is a relative bargain at just under $100 a pound. A few doors down, 16 ounce containers of Mexican strawberries are on offer for a dollar. We pull the purchase-trigger on the plump fruit, walk off with our own little pink plastic bag, and float down the Stockton River to Jackson.

(Photos by the author.)