Fillmore bringing back glory days
By: John Upton
Examiner Staff Writer
October 13, 2008
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Jazzed: The San Francisco Redevelopment Agency has been collaborating with local businesses and city officials to rebuild the Fillmore with a new $2 million public plaza. (The Examiner)
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SAN FRANCISCO — Decades after redevelopment efforts destroyed the West Coast’s jazz capital, a new centerpiece plaza in the Fillmore is the latest landmark aimed at resurrecting the neighborhood’s musical past.
The San Francisco Redevelopment Agency, which took control of parts of the Western Addition starting in the mid-1950s, including the blocks adjacent to Geary Boulevard, ended up devastating the Fillmore by upending its residents and businesses using eminent domain.
The Fillmore district today is most remembered for its jazz clubs, Japantown and as a main center for the black community and black merchants in San Francisco in the ’40s. The legendary nightclubs helped spawn the careers of jazz legends Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday. Poet Maya Angelou, the rock band Grateful Dead and singer Janis Joplin once lived or worked in the area.
But the damage caused by the era of “urban renewal” cannot be undone, agency Director Fred Blackwell said.
“Once you disintegrate the fabric of a community like it was decades ago, it’s very difficult to rebuild,” Blackwell recently told The Examiner.
Nonetheless, the agency has been working with local businesses and city leaders to try to re-establish the Fillmore as a jazz district by providing low-interest loans for the building of jazz club and restaurant Yoshi’s, opening a promotions office to market the district as an entertainment destination, and supporting the creation of the nonprofit jazz museum and cultural center within a new 13-story mixed-income condominium tower, the Fillmore Heritage Center. A new public plaza that will double as an outdoor stage is the latest effort to resurrect the area.
The pastel-colored plaza is slated for completion in time for an Oct. 25 debut, complete with a multiartist afternoon concert headlined by Lifetime Achievement Grammy Award-winner Booker T. Jones.
The $2 million plaza replaces an unpopular, unwelcoming and inaccessible courtyard that previously served as the gateway to the Fillmore Center, a 16-year-old, 1,114-unit apartment complex built across four city blocks of the Fillmore redevelopment area, said Steve Boyack, vice president of property manager Laramar Group.
The centerpiece of the plaza will be a water fountain that includes a sculpture by artist John Atkin surrounded by amphitheater-style steps. The privately funded plaza at Fillmore and O’Farrell streets also includes electrical hookups for equipment.
“We want it to be a well-used space,” Boyack said. “To me, a jazz district with no instances of jazz in it is really kind of depressing. I’d like it to eventually be a place where you can walk down to it on any day of the week and hear jazz.”
The plaza’s layout was crafted to welcome and draw in neighbors and passers-by, said architect Terry Lofrano.
“It’s almost like the plaza has two big arms that are gathering in the space,” Lofrano said.
Grants could help small businesses
Hundreds of thousands of dollars in micro grants are being doled out in the Fillmore district to resurrect a small-business community that was devastated in the mid-1950s during redevelopment efforts.
The San Francisco Redevelopment Agency grants — between $2,000 and $25,000 — are designed to help entrepreneurs establish kiosks, footpath-based businesses and similar ventures in the district, which is dominated by fast-food chains and condominiums.
“What we would love to see is just a real diversity of businesses, both in terms of the people who run them and the types of products that are offered to people,” San Francisco Redevelopment Agency Director Fred Blackwell said.
The grants may help one- to five-person businesses grow enough to lease local storefronts, according to Blackwell. Local small-time hawkers could secure funds from the $360,000 program to grow and improve their operations.
Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi, whose district includes the Fillmore, said the grants are “just a fraction” of what is needed to help the area. “It used to be a thriving small-business district,” Mirkarimi said. “Much of that was taken away.”
The agency is holding an informational session on the grants at noon Friday at 1290 Fillmore St.
By the numbers
Western Addition/Fillmore redevelopment
$41,200 Median household income
13 Percent of increase in median household income during last eight years
35 Percent of increase in residents with a graduate degree during last eight years
25 Percent of decline in residents without a 12th-grade education during last eight years
Source: San Francisco Department of Technology
