She was a crusader for San Francisco’s Chinese American residents at City Hall, known for smoking cigars, loudly demeaning enemies and tirelessly advocating for a 1.7-mile train line to lure tourists from SoMa to Chinatown.

Three years after her death, Rose Pak is still the San Francisco personality most closely associated with Muni’s Central Subway project. Supporters want to enshrine her name on the Chinatown station when the long-delayed subway line opens, currently projected for January. Pak’s enemies recoil at the idea.

The political battle, which has stewed for months, will return to the city’s transportation board next week.

When the $1.6 billion subway opens next year, it will link Chinatown to Union Square and the downtown core, bringing an influx of tourism and money to merchants on the historic corridors of Stockton Street and Grant Avenue. It will also make Chinatown a new terminus for Muni’s T-line, which rolls southeast to serve a growing Asian American community in the Bayview and Visitacion Valley.

For years, Pak devoted her political juice to the Central Subway, calling it an ideal replacement for the Embarcadero Freeway that sent tourists from the waterfront into North Beach and Chinatown until it was closed and eventually torn down following damage in the wake of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake.

“Without her advocacy, there would be no Central Subway,” said David Ho, a community organizer and protege of Pak. “Any leader in Chinatown will tell you that,” he added, “even the people who oppose her.”

Still, Pak’s detractors say she is too polarizing to be placed on a critical piece of transportation infrastructure.

Already, the fault lines are showing. On Wednesday, more than 100 people gathered at Grant Avenue and California Street for a rally and march through Chinatown.

Participants strode in an orderly line down the middle of the street, and many dangled signs with messages in English and Chinese: “Chinatown only — no Rose Pak.”

“Rose Pak is the village bully,” said Eva Lee, a board director of the Chinatown Merchants Association who helped organize the protest.

Others stressed that the name will confuse tourists. They urged the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency to follow its own policy of identifying stations solely by geographic location.

“Chinatown — that says it all,” said Tane Chan, owner of the Wok Shop, a kitchen supply store on Grant Street. “Let’s make it sweet and simple.”

The issue has sown divisions throughout the city, with tenant activists and supervisors fervently advocating for the Chinatown-Rose Pak Station name, over opposition from merchant leaders who sparred with Pak for influence in City Hall. Opponents also include practitioners of the Falun Gong spiritual movement, who believe Pak was connected to the Chinese government they say has persecuted them.

When the issue came up for a vote in June, the SFMTA board left it in limbo, with three directors approving the name as a way to celebrate Pak’s legacy, and three arguing that a transportation board shouldn’t name infrastructure after people. But then new Director Steve Heminger joined the dais, and many people see him as the crucial swing vote who could make the Rose Pak Station a reality.

“I don’t think the proponents would push this through if they weren’t confident they had four votes to make it happen,” said Janice Li, a BART board director who has urged the SFMTA to name Chinatown Central Subway Station for Pak.

“The opposition that’s being formed is a deeply cultural issue,” Li said. “It’s not translating well into San Francisco English-speaking politics, or into the debate that’s happening at the SFMTA board.”

Members of the Chinatown Merchants Association say they want the board, and in particular Supervisor Aaron Peskin, who has been a vocal supporter of naming the station after Pak, to respect their wishes.

“MTA already has a policy in place stating that public-transit stops should be named by geographical location, which can be clearly understood by the general public and first responders,” said Betty Louie, board adviser to the association.

She said more than 10,000 San Francisco residents have signed a petition calling on the board to name the station “Chinatown.”

If the SFMTA approves the Chinatown-Rose Pak Station name, Pak’s rivals have vowed to press on by submitting an initiative for the November ballot. The notion made Ho laugh — he said members of the Merchants Association were turning personal baggage into a political cause.

“At one point all these people worked with Rose,” he said, “and they just don’t like her.”

Rachel Swan and Jill Tucker are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: rswan@sfchronicle.com, jtucker@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @rachelswan @jilltucker