Two months into the $73 million renovation of Portsmouth Square, merchants around the closed park report a 60% drop in business — and, at two storefronts, physical damage the city says it is still investigating.

When the fences went up around Portsmouth Square on June 11, the visible loss was the park itself — the 1.3-acre plaza that Chinatown treats as its living room, closed for a $73 million renovation the city expects to run two years. Two months on, the merchants who ring the square say the loss has moved indoors, into their basements.

The clearest number comes from Edward Siu, head of the Chinatown Merchants Association, who told CBS News Bay Area that some nearby stores are reporting a 60% drop in business since construction began. He blamed the mix any shopkeeper on a torn-up block would recognize: noise, dust, and parking spaces pulled from the streets around the square — the last, he said, without enough warning. "They took the parking spaces. Why can they do that, you know, without talking to us?" he told the station.

At Charming Sun Market, the trouble is structural. The owner says vibrations from the work have shaken rock and sand loose from the basement ceiling — roughly 30 pounds of it so far, according to CBS — and knocked out power to part of the space. A staff member described sweeping it up daily. Down on Kearny Street, Garden Restaurant, which also sits over a sub-sidewalk basement, reported a sewage backup that Tan Chow of the Chinatown Community Development Center dated to roughly ten days after the demolition of the Kearny Street pedestrian bridge — the 240-foot span from 1971 that came down at the end of July, over residents' objections.

The city says the damage claims are under investigation. "If it's found that this construction did cause some damages, then the city will make good on keeping people whole," Rachel Gordon of San Francisco Public Works told CBS, calling disruption at this scale "just standard." Rec and Park, which runs the renovation, said vibration monitors are placed around the site and pointed to new signage urging visitors to keep shopping in Chinatown, plus a coming "open-for-business" campaign.

For now, the promises are the abstraction and the plywood is the fact. Walk Kearny and Washington tomorrow and you'll find the same fence line, the same missing curb parking, and — a resident named Wilma Pang told CBS — the same quiet where the seniors' music used to be.