Jazz clubs and record shops once lined this street, the West Coast's most vibrant African American cultural corridor you now walk, nearly destroyed by the urban renewal that claimed to save it. The Western Addition, the neighborhood surrounding Fillmore Street, became a center of Black San Francisco during World War II, when tens of thousands of African Americans came west to work in the shipyards and defense industries of the Bay Area. The neighborhood already had a thriving Black community; the wartime migration made it a cultural capital.
Fillmore Street between Geary and Post became lined with jazz clubs, record shops, and restaurants. Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Ella Fitzgerald, and John Coltrane all performed here. The neighborhood was called the Harlem of the West.
Then came redevelopment. In the 1950s and 1960s, the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency declared the Western Addition a blighted area and used eminent domain to demolish much of it, displacing more than 4,000 African American families. The process, which James Baldwin called Negro removal, destroyed the community fabric that had taken decades to build.
The Fillmore jazz clubs are largely gone. The neighborhood is now a mix of rebuilt housing projects, Victorian houses that survived, and gentrifed corridors. The Fillmore music venue — where Bill Graham launched the psychedelic rock scene of the 1960s — still operates, carrying a different set of musical memories.