Fillmore — a street steeped in S.F. history
Fillmore Street slashes right across the city, from the edge of the Castro to the edge of the bay. It touches huge parts of San Francisco. It can make you proud to be a San Franciscan. It can break your heart.
The best way to see Fillmore is to walk it. Walking lets you get the feel of the place.
I started on the south end. Fillmore starts at Duboce Avenue, near the Mint, near the biggest Safeway in the city. One side of the Duboce Triangle.
Neighborhood cluster
At Fillmore and Haight Street, everything changes. It is the first of a cluster of self-contained neighborhoods, all different, like layers of a cake with many flavors. This one is the Lower Haight. Not that long ago Haight and Fillmore was a dangerous place — the biggest concentration of heroin dealers in the city, the cops said.
Now it’s full of bars and restaurants, full of young people. “Grungy, postpunk Bohemian,’’ Wikipedia calls it, quoting The Chronicle. Well, maybe.
At the crest of the hill is the former Sacred Heart church. The cornerstone was laid in September 1897, in a very different Western Addition. The last Mass was offered on the day after Christmas, 2004. Now it’s a roller disco rink. “A different kind of holy rollers,” said David Miles, who operates it.
Fillmore then runs down the hill, past Victorians, many of them with fresh paint, on the edge of the Alamo Square Historic District.
Fillmore flattens out at the bottom of a big valley, the historic heart of the Western Addition.
The names of vanished storefronts on Fillmore are carved in the sidewalk, names from the 1920s when this was a Jewish neighborhood. Then later names: Jimbo’s Bop City, the Booker T. Washington Hotel, just off Fillmore, the offices of the African American Sun Reporter and the Japanese American Nichi Bei Times.
For years, Fillmore was the main street of black San Francisco; the old Japan Town was just to the east. Both still exist, but only as echoes of their former selves.
World War II and its aftermath made the big difference. The Japanese were packed off to internment camps and black families, drawn West by the promise of jobs, replaced them.
Bulldozed blocks
After the war, the city’s Redevelopment Agency went to work. Whole blocks were bulldozed, rundown Victorians torn down in the name of “slum clearance.’’ It ripped the center out of the black community.
There is a little park where O’Farrell Street runs into Fillmore. There are dozens of names on plaques embedded in the concrete — civil rights leaders, union men and women, writers, preachers and politicians. Unfamiliar names, too: Audley Cole, the first African American to work for the Muni Railway, his wife, Josephine, the city’s first African American high school teacher, Yori Wada, the first Asian to be a UC regent.
It’s a sad little park, windswept and half completed, like an idea that was forgotten after a week or two.
Up Fillmore, past the venues where they are trying to keep jazz alive, is Geary Boulevard and just west of that are the sites of Bill Graham’s Fillmore Auditorium and Jim Jones’ Peoples Temple — both famous in their day.
Up toward a gentle hill and into another world: Harry’s Bar and the Elite Cafe, the Perfect Cleaners. A couple of blocks away, young men make hanging out on street corners into an art form. Just to the north, young matrons and their escorts enjoy a late lunch at sidewalk tables.
Florio, a bistro on Fillmore between Bush and Pine, advertises “a facade that seems at home in Paris, London or Milan yet is firmly planted in San Francisco’s Pacific Heights.’’
Beautiful views
Fillmore changes again about Jackson Street, now lined with tall apartments. At Broadway, Fillmore takes a sharp dip, as if the street went over a cliff. Beautiful views: the misty bay, Alcatraz, the Golden Gate, the hills of Marin.
Fillmore runs down to Union Street, which is Very San Francisco, as they used to say. There is a minipark that looks like a Citroen truck, the Balboa Cafe, the grand Plump Jack wine emporium.
Chestnut Street is next, and then the Marina. Fillmore ends at Bay Street, blue water just beyond. You can take a Muni bus back, over the hills and through half a dozen different San Franciscos.