On a morning in September 2020, the streets in San Francisco’s Chinatown are empty of the usual throngs. Anyone outside is wearing a mask, on account of the virus and the wild fire smoke. Without crowds or traffic, the clang of jackhammers ring as clear as church bells. Chinatown is always changing, and construction hasn’t stopped even now. There’s a hole at Washington and Stockton streets to fill with a new subway station. A crew is building a dragon behind the scaffold sheeting around the Willie “Woo Woo” Wong playground. Restaurants are piecing together streetside parklets for outdoor dining.

You think you know a place so well you could never forget it, until it disappears. In a city, we take the landscape for granted while knowing a square block can change overnight through demolition but also from fear. But then, no landmark in this world is fixed. Even the north pole is moving. 

Ecologists use the term “shifting baselines” to describe the impossibility of understanding the present without a sense of the past. You need a point from which to measure, a landmark so that you don’t lose sight of where you have been and where you want to go, so you get a sense of those who existed before you, so you start to understand that whatever is happening at present is neither inexplicable or inevitable. We need baselines and landmarks in times like these.

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