In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Ross Alley was part of the network of narrow lanes and passageways that made Chinatown a maze of hidden businesses and underground economies. Chinese immigrants, confined to the neighborhood by discriminatory housing laws and racial hostility, built a self-contained community that included both legitimate commerce and the shadow economy that exclusion fostered. Gambling, opium, and prostitution operated behind unmarked doors. The tong wars that periodically erupted in these alleys were violent power struggles over control of these enterprises. The alleys were also places where people lived, worked, and maintained family life under conditions of extraordinary constraint.

The Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory has operated on Ross Alley since 1962, using vintage machines that press flat circles of batter, which workers then fold by hand around paper fortunes while the cookies are still warm. The process is mesmerizing and the cookies fresh in a way that mass-produced versions cannot match. The factory has appeared in numerous films and television shows, and its open-door policy makes it one of Chinatown's most accessible attractions. Ross Alley itself has served as a filming location for movies including Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, whose chase scenes used the alley's narrow confines to dramatic effect.

Ross Alley retains the scale and character of old Chinatown in a way that broader streets like Grant Avenue cannot. The buildings crowd close, shutting out the sky. Fire escapes hang overhead. The sounds of kitchens and sewing machines drift from upper-floor workshops. It is a working alley in a working neighborhood, not a museum exhibit. The fortune cookie factory draws visitors, but the alley's other businesses serve the community: tailors, barbers, small workshops producing goods for Chinatown's restaurants and shops. Ross Alley is a reminder that Chinatown is not a theme park but a neighborhood, and that the narrow passages between its buildings contain more history per linear foot than most of San Francisco's boulevards.