If people know anything about this neighborhood, it's probably because of this building, the Fillmore Auditorium, home of the legends of rock and roll. Few of the kids in the 60s who made the pilgrimage upstairs knew much about the neighborhood they had come to, or who'd been here before them. The music was the story up here.
And that story, well, it's been told. Our story happens here too. But it's a little harder to find.
You see, it's down here, on street level. When we first started down here, redevelopment had come through, and now this whole area was blighted. They just tore down all the buildings and it was just all empty. Long time ago, I used to be, years, years back, I used to call it the Fillmore.
And then I called it the No More. Long before Janice and Jimmy and the Jefferson Airplane played upstairs, this whole neighborhood meant something. To some people, anyway. It was more than a district. It was a world.
The Fillmore was black. And that part that wasn't black was Japanese. And you walk the streets looking for parties.
And it was the way that many other people wrote about the Renaissance in Harlem. That was what Fillmore Street was like in those days. You used to have restaurants and clubs and so on and so forth.
back in those days. Afro-American hotels down here, clubs, everything, you know, because this was a centralized area. But as I said before, redevelopment came in and just wiped it all out.
It's a strange thing about this neighborhood. Time and again, people in the Fillmore have been told they have to leave. It was always for their own good.
Always for the sake of a better tomorrow. Well, tomorrow has come. And it's time to take stock. Because getting here has been one of the most important things in my life. hell of a ride.
That's our story. It's the one nobody likes to tell about the prettiest little city in the world. Funding for The Fillmore has been provided by...
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People can't agree on much about this place, even what to call it. The Fillmore. The Western Edition.
The Fillmore. The lower Pacific Heights. Japantown.
J-town. Nihomachi. The Western Edition.
The Western Edition. The Fillmore. It's plain old Fillmore, okay? It's the muddle in the middle. A four square mile...
level patch just west of downtown. That's what earned it its original name, the Western Edition. But if there's one thing people do agree on, it's that for nearly 40 years, this neighborhood was San Francisco's little United Nations.
Not by design, but by an act of God. The great earthquake of April 1906 left the city in ruins and the resulting fire burned for three days. Refugee camps sprang up in parks bordering one of the few neighborhoods left unscathed, the Western Edition.
Row upon row of stately Victorians stood untouched by the devastation. Built to house one or two families, They were quickly subdivided into boarding houses for the new residents pouring into the neighborhood. What had once been a bedroom community was suddenly city center.
Within days of the earthquake, City Hall, now in ruins, relocated to the closest thoroughfare left intact, Fillmore Street. The first streetcar to resume operation ran along Fillmore. Soon, San Francisco's finest shops were setting their sights on the bustling streets of the Western Edition. At the beginning, the Fillmore merchants that settled in there... had visions of Fillmore Street replacing Market Street as the main street.
And for a few years, Fillmore was the main street of San Francisco. The merchants along Fillmore chipped in to build a set of 14 arches. stretching more than a mile.
On each corner, there's four arches covered from one side of the street to the other. And they're always lit up every single night, like white lights. The big lights were beaming all over the place. Just a beautiful sight.
Fillmore Street would become the meeting ground for some 50,000 residents who found themselves drawn together into one of the most diverse neighborhoods in the country. The Fillmore in those years was about the kind of life the closest to a large Jewish neighborhood that San Francisco ever had. We had three synagogues.
We had a cluster of Jewish restaurants. We had Jewish merchants. You knew the butcher.
Your mother would go into the butcher shop and say, hello, Dave Darling. 1043 Steiner where Yehudi Mnuchin's family lived. You could possibly hear either Yehudi practicing the violin or you could hear Yalta or Hepzibah sisters practicing the piano. We had different ethnic mixes and that was reflected in the makeup of my school classes. And we didn't have any racial problems somehow.
We had Irish, we had Russians, we had white children. Chinese children, Japanese children. The colored population, although we were small in number. I'm surprised to hear that there was a black community because, you know, we had very few in school.
You could walk down Market Street and at the time the only black fish you'd see is looking in those plate glass windows and see your own reflection. Fewer than 1% of the city's residents were African Americans, but those who were migrated into the Western Edition alongside the Filipinos, the Jews, the Mexicans. Not that San Francisco was colorblind. Far from it.
Many Menorahs had a hard time finding any place to live. But in this neighborhood, for a long while, race didn't seem to matter much. East of Fillmore Street was a Japanese settlement.
There must have been at least 5,000-6,000 Japanese Americans living within this area. You pass them on the street, they bow down to you, greet you. I was always taught that when you met a first generation, the older people, you would always bow.
Konnichiwa. Doris Morimoto spent her childhood on Fillmore Street. Her parents, both born in Japan, operated a dry cleaning store, and the family lived upstairs in a rented flat.
The Morimoto family, four generations, has been in the same house on Fillmore Street since 1917, on the edge of what became known as Nihonmachi, Japantown. My parents didn't want us to forget that we were. Japanese, and so for us to learn Japanese custom, because American custom you can pick it up, but Japanese custom, the real nitty gritty, you have to learn it from them. My father had this bookstore that sold nothing but Japanese books. Everybody gathered there and played cards or read books.
We were always poor because nobody bought any books. They just stood there and read the books and went home. It was a kind of an isolated community. We did have a barrier or there's this invisible wall that we always seemed to stay within. We had our regular hot dog, hamburger shops, and nothing was different other than American kids, but we were all Asian kids.
It's a phenomenon how an ethnic community comes into a neighborhood and makes it all of a sudden a nyohomachi, a J-town. You know, shoe store, candy store, drug store, churches, and Girl Scouts, and you know, activities for the young niseis in terms of sports. The environment for Asian Japanese Americans was not the most welcome, you know, atmosphere for these folks, you know. It's amazing that within that, to me, is this. There's such a strong desire to adopt this country because the bottom line is America is good.
How did you hear about it? What kind of notification did you get? It meant for us to move?
Uh-huh, to relocate. That war had broken out. I don't know.
I don't remember any of that. Well, I think historically what happened was they put... I really don't.
I put it all in the back of me. I didn't want to remember. And that's something you don't want to remember.
War? No. It's a period where we would try to wash away from our memory.
And that's the reason I don't recall too much of what really happened. I mean, I can't recall, but I just did want to remember, I guess. When Pearl Harbor hit, I can remember the Japanese people, they really stuck close, and you'd very seldom see them on the street, and there was a lot of resentment. My husband and I had... a contract with the San Francisco Presidio and we were doing all the cleaning of the uniforms.
The people going by, seeing all the uniforms. brought in, taken out, they didn't like it. And we were called dirty Japs. Yeah.
I remember that so distinctly. Personally, I had a high regard for the Japanese community that existed in the old Fillmore area because they were industrious, they were clean, they were honorable, and if you did business with them, them you didn't have to be afraid that you'd be misled but there was some Apprehension, and that's why I think prompted Roosevelt to make this eviction notice and take him over to concentration camps. I remember cleaning up all those books and... Get ready for evacuation.
Everything had to go. We don't know Japan. We've never been there. Deep inside, we're just as much Americans as anybody else. We had to sell the store, our truck, sell everything, leave everything, and leave San Francisco.
And so we sold it for $400. Everything we had for $400. I remember the awful feeling when they disappeared.
It was as if it happened overnight. Now, perhaps because of the nature of the Japanese community, their pride, and that they internalized most things. They knew, had been given short notice, but they knew, but nobody told us. It's just one day they were there, and the next day they were gone. As the Japanese move out, African Americans move in immediately to the Japanese community.
I arrived here October the 16th, 1942, and the train was loaded with people with paper bags and cardboard boxes and one-way tickets to California. They were the people who were coming out to man the war industry. They're coming from Louisiana.
in large numbers. They're coming from the state of Texas. They're coming from Arkansas and Oklahoma and Mississippi. My aunt came to San Francisco in 1943 and she went to work immediately in the defense plan.
She came in June, her husband came in August, and her mother's sister came....flying out trembling, while the train goes round the pavilion... You have tens of thousands of people pouring into the city every single month, and you have thousands of African Americans pouring into the city every single month. And the job at that time was paying good wages, and that was better than working for $5 a week as a black man. black women working and then weren't very few of them making over $100 a month.
This migration is taking place against the backdrop of 12 years of economic depression and so it really doesn't take much to get people on the road when they find out that the shipyards would be paying extremely high wages. San Francisco, please make room for me. Apartments were hard to come by. Well, blacks moved into the buildings, into the rooms, and into the apartments that Japanese left. You had no choice.
Real estate interests would show you properties and rentals in. that area and only in that area. You were not welcome anywhere else. They quickly over expand the amount of available housing and so what What happens, interestingly, is the four or five block area, which had been the hub of the black community, begins to expand. There was a premium on housing.
People doubled up, tripled up. Any space that you could turn into a sleeping area, they did that. Red stores of people literally sleeping in shifts in apartments, buying or renting beds in shifts for eight hours.
I know one guy rented a... An armoire. It's a living place for a guy.
An armoire. Yes. A piece of furniture.
Yes, but big enough for a guy to have a drawer and hang his clothes up in and a big drawer in it. Well, anyway. There was a section in the kitchen for every single couple and they would cook at different times or they would serve their meal.
meals at different times. Fillmore Street was crowded because there were three shifts of war workers. You could walk in the middle of Fillmore Street, there's a hundred dollars hanging out your pocket, nobody would touch you because everybody was making money. Black migrants don't generally check their culture at the railroad station, they bring it with them.
They came with a tremendous amount of resources. My uncle, for example, was a carpenter. One was a mechanic.
My uncle's brother was a barber. On Saturday mornings, they'd line up, get in their head, And then on Sunday, after church, people came to visit to see when you'd heard from home. It was a social place. They were building community. You see an increase in the number of black churches in San Francisco for the first time.
The main organization in the black community, of course, is the church. Anybody who overlooks it makes a bad mistake. It's a very powerful, very powerful force.
My dad was a minister, and he bought a church which had been vacated by the Japanese. community that would seat about 1,200 people. We had less than 100 members, but between 42 and 43, the congregation exploded from maybe 100 to well over 1,000. By 1945, some 30,000 African Americans were living in San Francisco. The workforce that had arrived so suddenly was starting to feel that they had made a difference in the war and that the Fillmore was becoming their own.
The greatest, the wildest celebration of them all was in New York's Times Square. Never before or since has there been a crowd like this on the Great White Way. Two million people screamed their elation at the end of the most devastating war in recorded history.
I didn't feel anything against anyone. I just wanted to get back to be able to come back and live in your own neighborhood. And the only neighborhood I know is Fillmore Street. The only place I feel comfortable.
And it was a nice feeling. The feeling that the war was over. They're forgetting that part of their life, that it so-called didn't exist.
And so they could start all over again, back to where they were when they left. Returning to the Fillmore District wasn't easy. Their dry cleaning shop had been turned into a warehouse. Upstairs, their beloved home was occupied by strangers.
But through persistence and a bit of luck, the Morimoto family did what many coming out of the camps could not. They returned to the home they'd left and stayed. We paid only $10,000 for this building when we bought it. And my husband, every night after work, after dinner, and on Sundays, put this hardwood floor in. So I take great pride in this house.
They always say it's to be kept so that each one or anyone in the family has a roof over their head. This house is going to stay here. It's not going anywhere. It's survived how many earthquakes? It's not going anywhere.
You know, and I think that presents... Kind of a symbolic way of my grandmother, you know. I don't plan on her going anywhere for a long time. But the neighborhood the Morimoto's returned to was far different from the one they'd left.
Fillmore Street's famed arches had been melted down for scrap iron during the war. The old Victorians were strained to the breaking point from overcrowding. To top it off, many of his new residents were suddenly out of work. Thousands upon thousands of blacks, as they leave government defense industry employment, could not find comparable employment in terms of wages, and in many cases could not find employment at all.
This is complicated by the fact that many public officials felt that these migrants would return home. I met the mayor and he called me, he pulled me aside and he said, Mr. Fleming, how long do you think these colored people are going to be here? And I said, Mr. Mayor, you know how permanent the Golden Gate is out there?
He said, yes. I said, well the black population, is this it permanent? I said, because we don't need a passport to come in here.
We're American citizens. But even as blacks were settling in, others thought it was time to leave the Fillmore behind. It had become more fashionable to move to other areas.
There were huge tracts of land that were being converted into developments. After all, the houses in the Washington Edition were old houses and the plumbing and they had been around for a while. A lot of the shops kind of closed up, you know, some of the stores down there because they just didn't people, the white people was moving out and there's nobody left there.
There were people there of course. San Francisco's first large black community. But there they were, along with the old houses and the bad plumbing and the unemployment.
Newspapers started calling the Fillmore a slum, and a cry was heard that echoed across post-war America. Fix our city. The answer came in two promising words.
Urban renewal. The Senate Banking and Currency Committee reports out the Housing Act of 1949, providing for slum clearance and for the construction of 810,000 new low-rent housing units by 1945. With the stroke of a pen, there was money to rebuild cities. In San Francisco, city planners drew a big red box around the Western Addition and called it Priority No. 1. They even wrote a brochure.
The new San Francisco, planned for better living, replaces the dilapidation and disorder of more than half a century. Gone are the disreputable joints, the so-called smoke shops, the hotels and pool hall hangouts known to the police. The future of this once valuable property will be dark and uncertain until the old structures can be scrapped and attractive new buildings, adapted to modern needs, can be built on the land.
The Fillmore would become one of the largest urban renewal projects in the West, affecting nearly 20,000 residents over two square miles. But at its beginnings, nobody could possibly know what it would do to the residents of the Western Edition. Some of them were worried.
Carlton Goodlett, a physician and newspaper publisher, was emerging as a spokesman for the new community. He argued for neighborhood input into the city's plans. Experience has taught minorities, he said, that if we don't start outright, we might not end upright. There was certainly an awareness that there were slums or blighted communities within the Western Edition.
Black leaders do talk about this, but there's no sense of how this concept is really going to affect the community. I don't think anyone can conceptualize what it's really going to mean down the road. Down the road was a long way away. Because for more than a decade, plans for the neighborhood stagnated in a mire of politics and paper shuffling, it would be a crucial delay, because in that time, the neighborhood tossed together by the war would start tenderly at first to put down roots. I was born in 1947 in a community called the Fillmore.
Just plain old Fillmore, okay? We didn't have nothing, but we were happy. I love the Fillmore.
One of the things I recall is just knowing so many people up and down the community. The houses were beautiful. Looked like gingerbread houses to me at the time. You can imagine a little kid from a place like Mineola seeing these incredible structures.
The ornaments around the ceiling. and the doors and on the post as you entered the building. Coming here felt like we were in another world. We'd sit on our front stairs, you know, and sing and walk down the street singing, sing all the way. We were singing everywhere.
You walk down and... different doorways you started to hear doo-wop. The middle of the afternoon these guys are in there man and they're singing in this doorway because the marble floor gives a better sound effect off of the wood wall and man they're cutting it up. To see the array of movie theaters all within five or six blocks of each other, the uptown, the temple. Just blocks and blocks of nothing but nice stores.
There was a roller skating rink. There was a bowling alley. I still recall whites who would never come down to the Fillmore District coming down on Friday and Saturday night to buy barbecue in the black community. I started to like it. I started to dig it.
There was an explosion of restaurants, cleaning shops, and naturally, nightclubs and bars. The Booker D. Washington Hotel had a celebrity room. Ella Fitzgerald appeared there. All the greats came there. Lou Rawls was not a star then, but he was performing there.
Dinah Washington, which walked there. Carmen McRae. Fillmore Street, it sort of like became Swing Street. Jackson Sutter was more jazzy, you know what I mean?
You might see Thelonious Monk sitting there, you know. or just having a tea or whatever, whatever. There were certain areas where they had bars and restaurants where they wouldn't serve you.
And we were aware of that, those of us who lived around here. So we just didn't go to those places. We were limited to the Western Addition to the Fillmore's history.
They didn't hire you east of Venice Avenue. There were hustlers out there selling half pints and pints or whatever amount of booze you wanted. Your gambling would start like five.
five o'clock on Friday, and it would go 24 hours a day. You only handled cash. And every Monday, my uncle would have a bag of money that he would take to the bank having earned it, unless he got drunk and got in the game himself and start playing out of the bag. At last.
People get dressed, I mean, like to kill. Stacey Adams shoes with the white strings shown that had been highly cleaned up with Clorox, make sure the strings and the stitches could be shown. Very well polished. You would see great diamond sticks. pins, you would see satin ties, long coats, you'd see great looking jewelry on the women, fur coats, there was no such thing as an endangered species.
They were on the people in the film mall. That was the best days, you know, we just had all kind of clubs and all kind of nice restaurants. Our jazz scene, that's when it really developed. Musicians would come to town, they'd say, well what's doing?
I'd say, well when I get through work, come on, we'll go down to Bop City. So all of a sudden in the heart of J-town is this jazz club called Bop City and it doesn't come alive until after 2 a.m. I went to Bop City.
most every weekend whether I was working there or not. If I was working in Richmond, I'd get a ride back to San Francisco and I'd go there on Friday, Saturday. You never knew who you would see on the bandstand.
I've gone in there on nights when Oscar Peterson was playing, Errol Garner was playing, Billie Holiday was singing. So if you were really hip in this community, you'd try to sneak out of your house and stand underneath jingles about 2 a.m. and be able to hear all the jazz that was going on in the club until 6 a.m. and then everybody left and they went.
I went to do their thing. You'd go there with your musical boxing gloves on. You know, you had to.
Because practically every band, they have some young hotshots who want to play because when they do their regular performance, you know, it's this sort of structure. And so they get a chance to stretch out. I was playing many times with my heroes right away. That's what was blowing my mind, is I never knew who I was going to play with.
And I got to know and play with people like Paul Gonzalez out of Big Sp- band. He was the first person who played so much saxophone I actually think he swallowed it that night. He just absolutely killed me. You know I never heard anybody play like that on that level.
I was 17 and then that was my input. And it was time for me to play. There were these thrills that are unspeakable thrills.
It's like if people love art and they love music, think of what it does to the artist. It's unutterable. This jazz, the film where jazz had a way of bringing the people together.
That's what you learn. That's why that was important. That's why it was vital.
I could see San Francisco as an oasis of music. There was a tremendous sense of pride in this community, where most of the black businesses, where most of the black professionals lived and operated. I mean, this was their community. Harlem. This had to be the closest thing to Harlem.
It felt good. And it was a great, great time. By the late 50s, the Fillmore, for jazz lovers at least, was on the map. But in Mayor George Christopher's office, it was on a very different map. How long can you condone a slum area?
The Fillmore area was just dilapidated, but we didn't want to leave it go for another two or three years or four years because... then it would become an area that would be impossible to restore. It had been more than a decade since the area had been targeted for renewal.
And though the redevelopment agency had taken little action in the neighborhood, the label of flood... slum had stuck. Now once an agency comes in and says this is an area that's blighted, well, if you own a house or a landlord, you're not going to put a whole lot of money into that because it's blighted and something's going to happen here and you're just going to kind of sit around and wait and see what happens. And the Fillmore.
Some 90% of the buildings were now owned by absentee landlords. With no incentive to keep up the properties, they wore down. While chronic underemployment.
sent the crime rate up. There may have been a nightlife, but word on the street was that Fillmore was a bad neighborhood. Many times the cab drivers would try to discourage tourists from coming out here. They would claim that it was a slum and you'd get your throat cut if you went out there.
What people also said, under their breath anyway, was that it was a black neighborhood. Just what that meant. The city was about to demonstrate.
In order to get federal money for urban renewal, City Hall had to prove there was blight in San Francisco. Each neighborhood was assigned penalty points based on conditions considered undesirable. Dilapidation, traffic accidents, tuberculosis, and near the bottom of the list, non-white population.
I believe that people felt that African Americans equal blight. The Western Edition was targeted to a large extent because there was a very, very strong, vital African American community. I mean, I don't think that we can discount the issue of race here.
I don't think urban renewal was developed to get rid of just blacks in Central Sydney. I think urban renewal was to get rid of anybody in the way of using that piece of property. now in the middle of town for a higher purpose.
Goodness, I don't know of anybody who ever told me that they were trying to get rid of the blacks, because the black community has always been a very strong community in this city. I think they saw land and an opportunity to get land. And they had to clear the land. And the only way to clear the land was to use the tools of government to achieve that goal.
The tools of government were in the hands of the Redevelopment Agency, but it was still mired in bureaucratic bungling. Its harshest critic was a federal government bigwig. Justin Herman, an urban planner himself, was the ranking bureaucrat sent from Washington to oversee urban renewal in the United States. the West.
He held a purse strings for San Francisco's redevelopment and he was disgusted with its stagnation. He felt that the city at that time did not have strong personnel that knew what the program entailed. So one day I convinced myself that I should call Herman.
I said to him there's only one solution for this matter. He said what? I says you quit your job with a federal government you work for the city.
Oh my god he said how can I do that? do that? I said, if you work for the city and you solve this matter, which I think you will, your name will be of lasting moment in our city. Whereas now you're a little secretary of a little job in the federal government. When you go, you'll be a forgotten issue, won't you?
Two days later, he says, okay, I'll take the job. Justin Herman would preside over San Francisco's redevelopment for 12 years. By the end of his tenure, the city would be transformed and he would be at the center of a wrenching controversy over power, money and race.
But at the outset, he embarked on a fervent mission, making the city better for everyone. Justin was quite a man, quite a man, most unusual fellow. A very bright man, and a dreamer, a visionary.
One of the two or three best urban renewal directors in the country, quite frankly, in terms of his ability to see the vision for what renewal could do. But he did not understand the downsides of it in terms of its impact on people. He was a little on the egotistic side, but... but I guess you could call it self-respect.
And he had that, and he took pride in the fact that he was able to get certain things done. His first priority was not the film, but a decaying produce market smashed into his house. back in the middle of downtown.
With astonishing speed, he and Mayor Christopher brokered a deal to move the produce vendors, clear the land, and construct a gleaming set of luxury apartments and offices. The Golden Gateway was urban renewal at its most glorious, swift, prosperous, and uncontroversial. No one thought the Fillmore should be any different.
Justin Herman was very much a believer. in the big project, the big project, which meant tear it all down and start over. What Herman envisioned for the Fillmore was breathtaking.
He championed the plan for Western edition Project A1, which had been adopted three years ago. earlier and took it further. The heart of old Japan town would give way to a major trade center and hotel financed by Japanese and Hawaiian banks.
Next to it an underground Boulevard would replace old Geary Street, whisking commuters entered downtown bypassing the bottleneck of the Fillmore. To make way there were some 100 acres of aging Victorians to deal with. The only problem was people lived in them.
There was no intention of involvement involving them in the process, no intention of saving the neighborhood for them, just get them out of there. After years of rumor, delay, and inaction, the residents found themselves unprepared for the reality of Herman's efficient plan. Some 6,000 people lived in the pathway of Phase A1.
Most were African American, but there were whites and a smattering of resettled Japanese. Less than 20 years after Pearl Harbor, residents of the Western Edition were again told by the government they had to leave. Renters were given $50 in moving expenses, $25 if they lived on a ground floor.
For homeowners, the news came first in letters, then in visits from agency personnel bearing settlement offers. Not a single house was deemed worth saving. Among the homeowners who got the bad news was Carol O'Gilvie's family. My aunt and uncle had spent From 1943 to 1950, with their eyes on the prize of owning property in a very good section of the Western Edition, where it would be our community, our culture, our people, our church, our lodge, our clubs.
They offered us, I think it was $11,000. I said no or something. And then I went down and talked to them and they raised it to $11,500, I believe. Then they served us papers that we had to get out. And then to be told that now you need to relocate.
That's discouraging. But now where do we go? The agency had no relocation plan. Residents scrambled to find a place to live.
new housing in the already tight market. You were kind of more or less scared. You didn't know what to do.
Some, like Carol O'Gilvisant, saw a way to move up in the world and away from the Fillmore. When they gave her that lemon of forcing her to sell her property, she just made lemonade out of it. My aunt was very upset that she could not have made the decision to move when she wanted to do it.
After you're living there for 70, 80 years or something and then somebody comes along and say you got to get out and you're gonna take this amount of money and you had no say at all. The concept of eminent domain, which is an old concept in the Constitution, actually. The government has a right to go in and take property, forcibly, with compensation, but regardless of whether the owner wishes to sell the property, must sell it to the government, in effect, in order to accomplish some kind of a public purpose. They took our house down.
What did they make a parking lot out of it? That's all they did. They just paved it open, and it's a parking lot. There was a long period of time before the property was demolished. And until the property was actually leveled, my uncle would drive every morning and come back and park in front of the property and maybe read the newspaper.
They just did not go away. You gotta understand that as I looked down the street, it was nothing but Victorians. And at one point, there was a bulldozer there, and by the time you came back from school, the house ain't there no more.
Phase A1 was in full swing. No longer just a plan, but a physical force. Stunned residents watched as Gary Street disappeared to be reborn as Gary Boulevard, a highway six lanes wide and a mile long. It's like a Mason-Dixon line.
The Geary Corridor going from downtown San Francisco all the way out to the Richmond District, in fact, created a north-south dividing line that separated the black community from what was north in Pacific Heights. And this is the sort of thing that redevelopment countenanced and allowed to happen. Unfortunately, it was very much a borderline between black and white.
the Japanese were kind of that gray area in the middle. Within two years, the heart of the Fillmore had been cleared. In its place rose the new Japan Trade Center and high-rise apartments, outpricing most of the former residents.
Justin Herman himself later admitted that of the 4,000 households displaced in Phase A-1, only one family moved back in. And this is part of our redevelopment also. What do you mean?
You say redevelopment, you mean removal of Negroes. Yes, that's what I thought you meant. In other words, a lot of the Negroes who came because the Japanese were pushed out, now are being pushed out themselves. That's right.
In effect, San Francisco is reclaiming this. This property had to be built up, which means Negroes have to go. That's right. By the time James Baldwin visited the Fillmore, the black middle class was leaving for the suburbs, both by choice and by force.
The Fillmore... Fillmore, even with some brand new housing projects, was in danger of becoming what nobody had dared name it before, a ghetto. I got to know all the winos on the street, all the drug addicts on the street, the drug dealers.
Mary Rogers, a mother of 12 children, moved into the neighborhood in 1965. And they kind of had a lot of respect for me because when I see my kids, I go out there and I have a wooden spoon and I paddle them back around the corner. So when they would see him out there, they'd say, now you know your mother don't want you around here. Get on back around that corner.
Even after Phase A1, there were still some 30,000 Fillmore residents like Mary Rogers who didn't like the worsening conditions they saw. Neither did Justin Herman. He offered a solution, A2. San Francisco, the lovely old city is bursting at the seams.
The old must give way to the new. To that end, a daring master plan has been inaugurated. The urban renewal plan under which the substandard dwellings are to be replaced by more. modern housing and business centers poses problems beyond the multi-million dollar financing. Removal of vast numbers of people to low-income residential developments could fill up the...
The paint wasn't dry on the New Japan Trade Center when Justin Herman announced the ambitious plan. Phase A2 was massive. It would target some 60 square blocks, affecting more than 13,000 residents.
This time, they were skeptical. I've lived here all of my life. I've worked here. I've sweated. And I'm still working, even though I'm in a wheelchair, and I don't know how much longer I'll be here.
But nevertheless, I have no intention that if a bulldozer comes down my way, baby, I'll be there in this wheelchair, and he'll have a hell of a good time. People had experienced A1 and they knew about it and when A2 started to come along, these homeowners were up in arms. I refuse to be said that because I'm black I got to go somewhere else.
And I decided I wasn't going to move. I wasn't going nowhere until I got good and ready. There was no community organization, but there were a bunch of concerned people. I'm just about to flip. Please believe me.
They were having one of the early meetings. They even ask you what you're willing to accept. They don't even do that.
They come and put the price to you and then you got to accept it. I don't approve of that. I was sitting there, had never opened my mouth in public.
in my life. And all of a sudden, as I listened to them and listened to the complaints, the things that were down in their guts that were hurting them, that they were angry about, I got up and began to speak right out of the clear blue sky. They liked the way I spoke, and everywhere we went from then on, we want Hannibal to be our spokesman.
Neighborhood activism was still a new idea in 1966, but encouraged by progressive ministers, mostly white, Hannibal Williams, a recovering alcoholic, and self-described ne'er-do-well, had found a calling. We promise you that we will be back. And we will see the mayor. Then we could get the homeowners group, the welfare rights group, the people that were organizing against the schools, any group that would join our group of groups, you know. They call themselves WACO, the Western Edition Community Organization.
Now, when the redevelopment agency, you know, as a branch of our government, becomes, you know, the slumlords in our area, then I say that things have reached a deplorable state. We just used to raise so much hell, they thought we was crazy. They didn't want to see us coming. We know there's a need for the renewing of this area, but we would like to have the assurance and the guarantee that the process will include us at the completion date.
We found out downtown was having a meeting concerning housing, concerning the Western Addition. We'd all go home and we'd each call 5 or 10 people and say, meet us in the morning at 10 o'clock or 8 o'clock, and we'd turn out 200 or 300 people. Waco demanded a say in the planning of A2, insisting that residents should have a right to remain in the neighborhood and low-cost replacement housing built to their needs.
The trouble was, they didn't have any rights. As far as the law was concerned, redevelopment was a contract between the federal government and the city. People were helpless against the power of the redevelopment agency.
And somehow the city and county of San Francisco... had given to Justin Herman tremendous power to do whatever he wanted to in this community. The notion of citizen participation was very, very, it was real anathema to people like Justin Herman.
He wanted to be the planner. He didn't want those folks down there to interfere. We didn't know who the devil was, but we knew who Justin Herman was, and that was the devil for us. Herman felt that the plans for A2 included plenty of low-cost and middle-income housing and insisted they move forward. This will have 116 units of family housing.
We call it moderate-priced housing because... it is much lower than what the market would ordinarily provide. Well, those are Justin Herman's words. And he is going to keep talking. And while he keeps talking, he's going to keep grinding up little people.
And when he stops talking and starts listening to us, maybe some of this will make some sense. Mr. Herman, that's all garbage. That's what it is. The agency would try to impress people that they could come back to the area. But there were problems with that.
One is there was an enormous lead time between when people were displaced and when the new housing was up there. Years and years in many cases. Secondly, the housing that got put up was usually not of the same type, much larger buildings and more expensive. So it was kind of a false promise that was put out that we're doing it so that you can come back. But it just didn't work out that way.
Frustrated by the ongoing demolition, Waco took direct action. We chained hands. Oh yeah, we joined hands and said...
He said, run over and kill us! We don't care. We ain't got but one life to give.
You ain't coming in here. Well, I'll tell you what we did. They opened this project, which was supposed to be this great boon to the black community. We couldn't afford it. And we looked at it and we said, this is a shame to project this thing as something to benefit poor black people when it's just the opposite.
So we're going to stop it. We went to the hardware store. I personally purchased a padlock and I padlocked, we padlocked. locked that gate and then we stood in front of it and said this project is closed by the people.
We stood against the police department, we stood against the threat of arrest, we stood there. We said we're not moving. Both Herman and his staff were extraordinarily arrogant about all of this. He hated people who were trying to involve themselves, mess up with his empire, because he really wasn't an empire builder.
Privately, Herman called the Waco prison. protesters, irritants, and their supporters, the Bleeding Heart Club. But their tactics were making news and beginning to embarrass the agency.
Herman began recruiting community members who might help him win support in the neighborhood. He founded a candidate in Wilbur Hamilton, son of a Western Edition preacher and an energetic city commissioner. Hamilton could bring credibility to the agency if Herman could woo him on staff.
What he did was he created a circumstance where a whole conference room for the agency at a public meeting was filled with African Americans from the Western Edition. And then he threw down the gauntlet, took some kind of totally. inane and unconscionable position, and I was on him quickly. At the height of that, Justin bellowed at me.
Well, he stood up in his chair and said, well, if you are so damn dissatisfied with what's going on, why don't you come out to the Western Edition and run the program? I didn't have to think long about that. I told him, you got a deal.
I'll run it. it."And Justin said, gotcha. I became the director for A2. I really felt highly motivated to do it because I saw the opportunity to do some things that could only be done from the inside. We thought anybody who went to work for the agency, they were going to be was the enemy. It's an interesting point because the agency started out with practically no black employees and the longer we fought them and the harder The harder we fought them, the more blacks they hired. But the one thing that qualified them, in Justin Herman's eyes, was they had nothing to do with us. Integrated or not, the agency continued to acquire and demolish property. To make room for new housing, Wilbur Hamilton himself had to oversee the destruction of an old church on Post Street, the church his father had built. To Hamilton and to Herman, it was all for the larger good. The bottom line, Justin was committed to the purpose and realization of the redevelopment plan as it had been approved by the Board of Supervisors because he believed that was in the best interest long term of the community and the city. They're trying to tear down our homes, brother. When the white man try to tear down your homes, then it's time for you to do something. But what can we do? We don't know anything about what's going on. We ain't going to be no place when they get. Until we are allowed to cooperate in the shaping of our own destinies, you can give us golden gondolas to float to heaven in, and if we're not participants in the plans, if we can't say within our own souls that we helped build that, we still haven't got the dignity and self-respect that it gets to take poor people to rise up and be people. With nowhere else to turn, Waco filed a federal lawsuit. It was a long shot. They hoped to catch the agency violating federal housing law and shut off its money. Herman was baffled that residents would want to delay improvements to their own community. He remarked, a litigation attorney can do nothing in the social field. We can. For Waco, just getting a judge to hear their case would be unprecedented. Up to that point, community residents did not even have the legal right to oppose redevelopment. When the decision came, it was a stunner. And not only did we sue them, but we won. We got this federal injunction, which lasted until the Redevelopment Agency signed a contract with us. Poor little Waco. This ridiculous irritant that bothered. them, arbitrary actions were over. People had to be consulted. For the first time in U.S. history, residents had won the right to participate in the renewal of their communities. For Justin Herman, it was a bitter pill. I can't tell you exactly where Waco stands. I think Waco stands wherever it can find a chink in the armor of the community or of the redevelopment agency. It sure found one in the federal armor this time. This is the kind of victory that the country can be proud of because this victory was achieved without throwing bricks, without throwing firebombs, and without creating havoc in our community. I rather think it might be a good idea if we forgot the mistakes of the past and there isn't any doubt the mistakes have been made. And let's get down to what is it we want to do from here on in. The lawsuit seemed to usher in a new era in San Francisco redevelopment, or at least a change of attitude. A community panel now had to review plans. Churches and unions became partners with the city on new housing projects. And instead of bulldozing old Victorians, the agency looked for another solution. We can preserve housing stock a whole lot easier than we can create it. So we got into wholesale moving of Victorians. Those were the best show in town. They had to cut wires, man. They lifted these houses, they put them on these things. And it was a crack up to watch these redevelopment staff and these guys mess up, you know, like, tick the wall. build a house into a street, you know, and knock off a pole. The neighborhood was being rearranged, but the central idea of clearing whole city blocks for new developments never changed. Justin Herman remarked, no little popular group is going to be able to do it. to put together a multi-million dollar project, they aren't going to stop one either. This process, this juggernaut, this steamroller, was already in motion, and there probably was very little that could have been done about it. You could not stop that. There's no community that could stop that. The Waco lawsuit would affect the way an entire nation came to think of residents'rights. But for the neighborhood it meant to save, it seemed to have come too late. Okay, back in the 60s, when you told us we can come back, this was our promissory note. You know about that? Tell me about it. This was a certificate of preference. So when the businesses, the people that moved out of the area, if you moved back once you rebuilt it, this is our certificate of preference. We had a choice to come back. We stayed vacant for 20 years. So when we did decide to come back, we couldn't afford it. Who signed it? Justin Herman. Ain't no good. Just my mentor. But anyway, that's our promissory note. Mm-hmm. There were thousands of certificates like the Chicago barbershops entitling residents and businesses to return to the Fillmore. once it was rebuilt. The certificates were the spoils of a hard-won community victory. At that moment, no one knew that they would eventually be considered phantom certificates. By the time they were issued, large tracts of the phantom certificates of land had already been cleared in the Western Edition, and 10,000 people had moved out to make way for major housing projects. They demolished, and the land stayed vacant for years. Years. The churches began to lose population. The black businesses were totally destroyed. Totally destroyed. The entertainment world for African Americans virtually ceased to exist in San Francisco. A lot of the clubs were just dying, you know what I mean? Money's was getting funny. They just started closing. Bob City was open, but the fire was gone. You know, the inspiration was gone. The music was gone. Of all the certificates allowing Fillmore businesses to return, 96% went unused. I remember clearly when it started to get dark and desolate and empty and abandoned, and then the boards started going up, then it started to really look like crap, and it started to fall into what I call, you know, the tournament 60s. San Francisco had fairly Serious racial problems and that came home in a very real way in 1966 when San Francisco had its first race riot. This riot was sparked by the killing of a black teenager in Hunters Point by a white policeman. The community exploded. Fighting spread from the Hunters Point to the Fillmore District and almost overnight you could see a change. Many of the storefronts, particularly those owned by whites, were destroyed. The National Guard was ultimately called in. It was a time for anger, not just in the Fillmore, but all over America. War, assassination, poverty, racism. People who'd been locked out and fooled with were fed up. They stood on the rubble of their neighborhoods and screamed. They got mad Sunday, jumped on a few of them, sent a few of them to the hospital. There were some shots fired and some gas was used and of course this caused a great many people to gather. The film hall may not have burned like Watts or Newark, but the rage ran just as hot. We had reports during this time of assaults and other activity. And so it was that at a routine redevelopment agency hearing in 1971, Justin Herman came face to face with the anger and hurt of the community he had worked 12 years to transform. The next month, he died of a heart attack. At the time of his death, few people would have remembered an early warning. uttered just a year into Herman's tenure in San Francisco. Without adequate housing for the poor, this prophet said, critics will rightly condemn urban renewal as a land grab for the rich and a heartless push out for the poor and non-whites. The speaker was Justin Herman. Sadly, Even with the victories that we won, I saw us gradually lose. I think that we slowed the agency down, we altered some of their processes, but in the end urban renewal performed pretty much what we feared that it would. Urban renewal became black removal. It looks as if an atomic bomb has been blasted and this is ground zero. Have you ever been in a situation where sometimes your mood is gray and everything is overcast and cloudy and gloomy? You could ride Fillmore with all of these skeletons, all of these buildings just lined all the way up and bordered up and dismal and desolate. And the only spots of people were people who were at bus zones. You would see preponderance of junkies and prostitutes. You would see more policemen. And you would see steel doors or burglar bars on windows. The more dangerous the neighborhood became, the less it attracted developers. The prime property was the Fillmore Center, nine acres in the heart of the neighborhood. The appearance was bombed out and nothing is happening. Well, the reason that was that way, quite frankly, was the insistence... on my part and that of the Commission's, that that was going to be an opportunity for African-Americans from the Western Addition to participate in the redevelopment of the area. And so we had three different attempts which failed. I invested a lot of money, lots of times, and I'm certain that if we had been selected, we could not have secured the financing. The financing institutions were not buying it. That is, they were very apprehensive about investing that kind of money in the middle of the pandemic. We even a restored African-American community. As banks turned their backs on the neighborhood, the Fillmore Center lay vacant for more than a decade. Winter in America Many of the guys that I grew up with got strung out on drugs and almost without exception most of them were Most of them did not live to see their 40th birthday. What was missing in the whole equation were jobs, was the structure of work, and the incredible importance of economic development and economic opportunity. I had a gray wool suit that I referred to as my funeral suit that I would always keep dry clean and ready because within about a two month period, I would have to go to the month period of time I remember going to three funerals. I think that it is not insignificant that born out of this particular community was Jonestown. In 1972, a progressive preacher named Jim Jones leased an abandoned synagogue. next to the Fillmore Auditorium and started a ministry for the urban poor of the Western Edition. The temple was right at Geary and Fillmore, ground zero of what happened within the redevelopment area of the Fillmore. Fillmore district. And he came into a community that needed to have a sense of belonging for people to be able to come together, people who were broken. People were incredibly, incredibly vulnerable. I recall even my own mother in one instance having gone to a People's Temple service coming home telling me about this wonderful man named Jim Jones. And now it's winter. People were desperate for solutions. People who needed something to follow. Jim Jones was another solution. He was something to follow. And so the notion of leaving Fillmore and going to Guyana and building a New Eden was probably very attractive to these hundreds and hundreds of people and dozens and dozens of families. Most of these people came right from the Fillmore district. In November 1978, more than 900 people, many of them families, Fillmore residents died in Guyana, victims of murder and suicide. Their bodies were returned and buried in Oakland. Eleven years later, the temple they left behind in the Fillmore, damaged by fire and earthquake, was demolished by a bulldozer. Thank you. We're going to be having breakfast for the homeless and we need to be our brother's keeper and that's what this money at this agency is here about housing for people and it's not for profit so put it out there and get some houses done get these people off the street. Well Mary was an activist when we met her you know it wasn't as though we made an activist out of it. Now what are we on now? We're on the Gallowsboro. Okay when I walk the street with Mary Rogers there's these four Four-lawing guys wandering around. They all know Mary, you know, and they have some affection for her. They're like lost souls. The fact that she's there gives them something of a community that they can still hold on to. Mary's the community. The Fillmore didn't just change, I think it was destroyed. It was devastated as an African-American community, as an important African-American community. We have been dispersed just like the Jews were. Each winter, in another part of the Fillmore, the Nisei, the Sansei, and now two younger generations gather from homes all over the region to remember the day the President signed the order to send Japanese Americans to relocation camps. There is a very important need to have our physical community that we can all focus upon. Japan tell me how much it does represent to me the community Only a small percentage of Japanese Americans lives in Japan town anymore But even with all the changes the old neighborhood still calls them back Still is our little niche in San Francisco There were so many traditions lost through the years that we're trying to get some of those things back. And I'm actually going to participate and be a candidate in the Cherry Blossom Queen pageant. It gives me a chance to learn my grandmother's history. I hope she does well. I hope so too. Going back to the Japanese dance, it reminds me of my past. Amy Tsutsushi There is a sense of community and a sense of ethnic solidarity in Japantown. I think it's a sense of closeness. You know, that's what it is. It takes a long time for a culture or a civilization to develop. What I saw was happening in that seven-year period or in that ten-year period, it was remarkable. But to have it at its tenderest point, to have it destroyed and disseminated, makes it very painful. It's hard to recreate community consciously. It sort of comes up almost of its own. forces and it's very easy to destroy and so much of urban renewal did consciously destroy community and neighborhoods. One of the things that you recognize in redevelopment is the Humpty Dumpty notion. You know, Humpty Dumpty had a big fall. And nobody put Humpty Dumpty back together again. Once you've taken apart a community, it never comes back together again. This is the Fillmore Center and right now we're in the plaza. The Fillmore is spread over nine acres. We have over 1,100 apartments. The city has become universal in every sense of the word and we're never going back. So one can lament. about the change in who lives where, but you can do absolutely nothing about it. One of the advantages that our residents enjoy most is Club One here at the Fillmore. We have a five lane lap pool, they have a cardio theater, we have five large screen TVs. The city has been transforming very rapidly, being a city that is not for poor people. It's still a city very much with a racially mixed population, although I believe it is the only major U.S. city that is actually losing black population, both numerically and as a proportion. This is sad, I think, because I think any city should have a much greater mixture than seems to be the case occurring here in San Francisco. Thank you. This particular apartment is one of our penthouse apartments. The price range on this apartment is about $1,600 to $1,700 a month. If you didn't want a penthouse... Gentrification is in fact occurring. There's no question about that. We live... in very, very prosperous economic times. It's been more than 50 years since the neighborhood was first called a slum. At last, the kind of prosperity envisioned long ago by City Hall seems to be taking hold, in most parts anyway. But as the Redevelopment Agency closes out its projects in the Western Edition, it is giving one final nod to what once was. Among its last efforts here is the creation of a jazz preservation district in the heart of the old Fillmore. One of the key properties is being developed by Charles Collins. We look at the film world and it's very rich history in jazz, music, blues, hip-hop, bebop, R&B, soul, and we ought to reclaim our history. If it happens, it'll happen on a totally different level. I don't think it'll, it certainly can't be the way it was. We're not there anymore. You got to leave the walking home. Yeah. What we're doing in the Western Edition now is frankly adding an additional attraction to San Francisco. It's not so much that we are restoring the original African American community. Do I care? Yes, I do. I wish I could have it like it was many years ago. But I know that the world moves on, and unless you move on with the world, you're in for a rude awakening. There will be some of the old flavor. The Fillmore Auditorium will be there forever. The Chicago Barbershop, where I get my hair cut, it will be there forever. It is an institution. We got a club across the street and we might have one down in the next block, but other than that though, no, there's no comparison. It won't come back. No, it won't come back. They said, well, I hope it'll still be here, but nah, it won't come back. The flavor is gone. The flavor is gone. So as I said before, a few more, no more, maybe some more in the future. But right now, we're just taking it day by day to see what happens. There's only one thing we can do. Day by day. Tomorrow Yeah, tomorrow We'll all My dream be in vain Tomorrow Yeah, tomorrow Deals one by one Has a loneliness What have you done with my happiness? Maybe I'll meet you again. Bye. Maybe I'll meet you again. Funding for The Fillmore has been provided by Neighborhoods. They provide a sense of community, a source of support, a place to call home. That's why we're proud to be a part of your neighborhood and the California landscape. Union Bank of California, since 1864. Additional funding provided by... This is PBS.