History

The first streetcar to resume operation after the earthquake ran along Fillmore Street. In 1907, following a streetcar strike near a car barn on Fillmore, a riot broke out, and three people were killed. The day was christened “Black Thursday.” The streetcar’s brick powerhouse still stands at the corner of Turk and Fillmore.

In 1907, Mayor “Boss” Ruef, the chief of police and 18 members of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors were arrested on charges of political corruption. Ruef was jailed in a private home on Fillmore Street. There, at the request of his dying mother, Ruef confessed to the details of what historian Carol Chamberland calls “one of the most incredible tales of municipal government corruption in American history.”

During the post-earthquake development phase, theatres sprang up along the street, including The National, at Steiner and Post, which regularly featured a young singer named AI Jolson. After the earthquake destroyed Chinatown, the Japanese-American community relocated to the Western Addition. They named the area “Nihonjinmachi,” or “Japanese Town,” later shortened to its present “Nihonmachi,” or Japantown.

For the next four decades of the 20th century, the neighborhood attracted immigrants who couldn’t afford to live in the city’s posh neighborhoods. Fillmore became one of the most diverse neighborhoods west of the Mississippi, as enclaves of Fillipino, Mexican African-American, Japanese, Russian and Jewish residents moved in. San Francisco’s Jewish population thrived there, founding three synagogues, a Yiddish Cultural Center, dozens of kosher butchers, restaurants, bakeries and shops. In a sense, the Fillmore District became a West Coast version of turn-of-the-century New York’s Lower East Side.

In 1909, the Fillmore Street Improvement Association, a group of Fillmore merchants, erected 14 electrically lighted steel arches over the street. Fillmore was dubbed “the most highly illuminated street in America.”

During the 1940s, dozens of jazz clubs opened in The Fillmore, among them the storied Jimbo’s Bop City. The music scene is in “The ‘Mo” was likened to the Harlem Renaissance. All the major musical stars of the era — Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, Charles Mingus, Gerry Mulligan — played at these clubs. Stationed in San Francisco during the Korean War, Chet Baker would sneak out of the barracks at Ft. Mason to jam all night at Jimbo’s. At age 18, saxophonist John Handy played Bop City with jazz giant John Coltrane.

Artists who grew up on Fillmore Street included violinists Yehudi Menduhin and Isaak Stern, poet Maya Angelou and voice actor Mel Blanc, the voice of Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd.

In the late 1950s, Urban Renewal became the watchword all over America. The Fillmore was not spared. Hundreds of homes int he Wester Addition were demolished, displacing more than 4,000 residents. By the mid-1960s, community activism prevented further displacement. But much of the area sat empty of year until it was “modernized” with steel-and-glass apartments over ground floor shops.

In the 1960s, jazz historian David Rosenbaum ran the Melrose Record shop on Fillmore. Working in the store was a young high school student, Marguerite Johnson, who later became a famous poet and playwright Maya Angelou.

On December 10 1965, the Grateful Dead made their debut at the Fillmore Auditorium. The following year, Bill Graham began renting the Fillmore and producing shows there. That same year, Jimbo’s Bop City closed forever. Standing in its place in what is now Japantown is a bank. However, the original building housing Bop City was moved and is now occupied by Marcus Books, at 1712 Fillmore, the city’s largest African-American bookstore.

The “Summer of Love” arrived in San Francisco in 1967. That year, the Jefferson Airplane introduced “Somebody to Love” and “White Rabbit.” Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company were headliners at the Fillmore.

In 1968, Bill Graham opened the Fillmore East in New York City and moved his San Francisco operation to the former Carousel Ballroom, renamed the Fillmore West.

That same year, Japan Center opened in Japantown. It featured a Peace Plaza and five-tier pagoda.

In 1969, police raided the Black Panther headquarters on Fillmore Street. Mayor Joe Alioto later praised community leaders for calming the crowd of more than 2,000 who had gathered to protest the raid.

In 1972, a progressive preacher named Jim Jones leased a former Masonic temple near the Fillmore Auditorium and started a ministry centered in the Western Addition. It was called the People’s Temple. Jones’ ministry took a sinister turn and ended tragically in November 1978, when more than 900 people, many of them Fillmore residents, died in Guyana, victims of an idea gone mad. In 1989, the former temple building, damaged in the Loma Prieta earthquake, was razed.