There’s not very many people left to tell the story,” says Mattie Scott, a community activist on the San Francisco Police Commission. Scott, who is 73, is referring to the transformation of San Francisco’s Fillmore district through urban renewal, the redevelopment program that starkly altered her former neighborhood—and many others across the country. “Everyone is getting up in age now,” she says.
Currently, the Fillmore is undergoing another transformation, owing to initiatives like the billionaire-backed Upper Fillmore Revitalization Project and the city-funded renovation of the Buchanan Street Mall. For many former and current residents, these projects exacerbate the very problems—wounds from years ago—they’re claiming to address.
In 1949, the Federal Housing Act cleared the path for urban renewal, allocating $1.5 billion to bulldozing and redeveloping entire neighborhoods in inner cities around the country. The San Francisco Redevelopment Agency promptly identified the Western Addition, where the Fillmore is located, as a blighted area. Urban renewal programs targeted communities of color with surgical precision; the Fillmore, then known as the Harlem of the West, was 60 percent Black. Home to a thriving jazz scene, the neighborhood regularly hosted Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, and Billie Holiday at its many Black-owned bars and nightclubs.
This article appears in Issue 35 of Alta Journal.
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Over two decades, nearly 20,000 Western Addition residents lost their homes in one of the largest redevelopment projects on the West Coast. The demolition displaced 4,729 households, destroyed 2,500 Victorians, and closed 883 businesses. As a resident says in the 1964 documentary Take This Hammer, “You want me to tell you what kind of job they gonna give us? They gonna let us tear down our own homes.”
Now, as the city pours increasing attention and resources into revitalizing downtown, some Fillmore residents feel forgotten. Officials have effectively abandoned the Fillmore Heritage Center, a 50,000-square-foot city-owned building dedicated in 2007 as a hub for live music and Black-owned businesses. The venue shuttered in 2019 after failing to attract and retain tenants, leaving a gaping hole in the neighborhood.
Cheryl White, who is 69, grew up in the Fillmore in the 1960s. She cites the recent closure of the Safeway—the neighborhood’s sole grocery store—as the latest in a long line of disappointments for the Black residents of San Francisco. “This is the worst place,” she says of the city. “I don’t understand how people live in this area.”
And then there’s the financial fallout, as families of former residents reckon with lost generational wealth. In 2026, a three-bedroom house on Fillmore Street fetches over $3 million. During redevelopment, the city issued 5,894 certificates of preference in exchange for people’s homes—paper promises that those displaced would have priority access to affordable housing in the neighborhood. The vast majority of the certificates were never redeemed, as construction dragged on for years and property values skyrocketed. Over 25 percent of certificate holders are already deceased. Now, the certificates can only be exchanged for status on an affordable housing waiting list, and many of those eligible, having established roots in another location, are no longer interested.
Still, there have been some success stories. Majeid Crawford, the executive director of a San Francisco nonprofit that helps locate certificate holders and their next of kin, has seen unhoused individuals find shelter and families return to the Bay Area. But Crawford’s also observed that many people have lost trust in the city and its promise.
“How many times can the Black community rebuild itself?” he asks.
Crawford, who is 53, grew up in the Fillmore in a family of musicians. In 1978, his father, after witnessing the devastation of his community, moved to Paris, where Black musicians were welcomed, and didn’t return. Crawford never saw his dad again.
“I feel like urban renewal took my dad from me,” he says.
Bulldozed Businesses
Every day, Alex Gottas writes down his old address on a slip of paper: 1812 O’Farrell Street. The 94-year-old surrounds himself with mementos of the home where he lived more than half a century ago. A photograph of his former building hangs in the kitchen, and he uses the street name in his email address.
Gottas lived in the Fillmore for 30 years with his large Lebanese family. He and his three sisters, two brothers, and parents shared five spacious bedrooms; the family’s store, Alex Grocery, took up the ground level. Almost all the customers were Black, Gottas recalls. The most popular products were kerosene and Dixie Peach pomade.
The redevelopment campaign seized the home and grocery store in 1960. “It was a good business, thriving,” Gottas says. “That was my father’s livelihood. He actually had a heart attack from the deal.”
Scott also recalls the sudden closing of businesses; before, shopping trips were an important part of life in the Fillmore. She moved to San Francisco with her family in 1965, eventually ending up in a fourplex at Steiner and McAllister. “We didn’t have to go out of the community for anything. We’d go to dinner and shop for Easter clothes on the same block as the Fillmore Auditorium,” she says. “We had our own pharmacy on Golden Gate and Fillmore. We had all of our Black physicians.”
The changes seemed to happen overnight. “Our community looked like a war zone hit it,” Scott says. “The only thing you could see was the Jones temple and the top of the Fillmore Auditorium.… Everything else was flattened.” The reconstruction of major roadways—in particular, the widening of Geary Boulevard into a six-lane thoroughfare—severed the Western Addition into parts.
Today, Black-owned businesses in the Fillmore are few but steadfast: Miyako Old Fashioned Ice Cream has been serving scoops for over eight decades; Minnie Bell’s Soul Movement, which opened in 2024, has made the Fillmore a destination for fried chicken and soul food again; Honey Art Studio, a gallery offering classes and live music, produces programming that addresses the community’s history. The space recently hosted The Fillmore Eclipse, an immersive play set in a 1958 jazz club where returnees from a Japanese American detention camp meet San Franciscans affected by urban renewal—a mingling of two dark legacies of displacement.
Displaced Neighbors
Prior to redevelopment, a sizable portion of San Francisco’s Jewish population lived in the Fillmore. Among those residents was Isac Gutfreund, now 78. Gutfreund was born in Italy in a displaced persons camp, where he lived for four years before immigrating with his parents to the United States. After arriving in San Francisco in 1951, his family found a flat on Oak Street, which they called home for a decade.
Gutfreund recalls Jewish immigrants clogging city streets with rented trucks that they used to haul people’s discarded items. “Then they took everything they collected and put it in stores to sell,” he says. “A lot of them did very well that way—they became entrepreneurs.”
McAllister Street was the main thoroughfare for most of the Jewish immigrants. There was the Orthodox shul, the Ukrainian bakery, and Liber’s bookstore. At Goldinski’s, the neighborhood butcher, customers selected their live chickens for slaughtering. Gutfreund remembers shopping at Drabkin’s Delicatessen with his mother. “You’d walk in, and there was a barrel of pickles and a barrel of herring right next to each other,” he says. “I can still smell the aroma. It was like in a shtetl.”
Many Jewish families moved out before the height of redevelopment and relocated to the Sunset and Richmond districts. Gutfreund’s family, however, stayed longer, and he enjoyed the diversity of the Fillmore. A close Black friend became Gutfreund’s unofficial protector. “If anybody ever tried to intimidate me, or entice a fight, he would stem it,” Gutfreund recalls. There were also the Benders, Gutfreund’s neighbors, an African American family. They would occasionally invite him over for dinner: “First time I ever had Southern fried chicken,” Gutfreund says. “It was probably the best chicken I ever had.”
The Fillmore also had a large Japanese American population. Before redevelopment, part of the area was often referred to as Nihonmachi—or Japantown. Judy Hamaguchi, the president of the Japanese American Citizens League’s San Francisco chapter, was raised in the Western Addition by immigrant parents. They owned and operated Hisago, a homestyle Japanese restaurant on Buchanan Street. “It was great being at the table with a Black family and best friends with the Jewish folks who lived in the area,” Hamaguchi says.
Hisago was near the nightclub Bop City, which Jimbo Edwards owned. Edwards looked out for Hamaguchi and her younger brother while their mother worked long hours at the restaurant. “Jimbo would grab us and say, ‘Where are you going?’ ” she recalls. “He lifted up my brother and held my hand and walked us across the street. He opened the restaurant door and said, ‘Hey, Nancy, your babies are here.’ He did that many times.”
When the bulldozers arrived in the 1960s, Hamaguchi was too young to understand what was happening. Her section of the neighborhood was one of the last to be torn down. “I used to sit on the fire escape and watch all of it,” she says. “Everything beyond Geary Boulevard almost looked like a desert.”
Paul Osaki, the executive director of the Japanese Cultural and Community Center of Northern California, says his community is often left out of the story of urban renewal. “Of the 5,000-plus Japanese that used to live in San Francisco’s Japantown, we have maybe a handful left,” he says. Osaki describes urban renewal as a “second evacuation,” following the detention of Japanese Americans during World War II. “No other people in the United States, other than the Indigenous people, were physically moved by the government out of their neighborhood twice.”
Scattered Landscape
In 1969, the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency distributed a pamphlet titled You and Your Housing to Fillmore residents before the second stage of demolition. “This booklet has been prepared for your convenience,” it reads. “It will help answer your questions & explain your rights & privileges.”
Scott recalls the painful anticipation before the construction began. “I remember the conversations of folks at the church, at the NAACP meetings, crying and saying, ‘What are we going to do?’ ” she says. “I remember watching [residents] Mary Rogers and LeRoy King laying down in front of the bulldozers to stop them from tearing down an area of Fillmore. I thought the bulldozer was going to actually take them off, but it didn’t.”
The ongoing discussion regarding the Fillmore’s future has been brought into focus by a new and controversial undertaking: the Upper Fillmore Revitalization Project, funded with $100 million by venture capitalist Neil Mehta in 2024. Mehta, who grew up in the Fillmore and lives there today, hopes to entice small businesses back to the area with the promise of investment. So far, Mehta has funded the purchase of a handful of buildings on Fillmore Street and has raised the rent on retail spaces, forcing several restaurants and shops to close. One local business owner recently characterized Mehta’s project as a “land grab” in an op-ed for the San Francisco Examiner.
Walking through the Fillmore today, the tragedy and confusion of the place is palpable. Old Victorian homes—that somehow survived demolition—are sandwiched between empty lots and brutalist apartment complexes. The Fillmore has become a place of contrasts: new money beside housing projects, heartbreak beside hope. Though much of the original Fillmore community has relocated and rebuilt across San Francisco, those who experienced redevelopment will never forget. “We want to preserve the history and the true story of what happened,” Scott says.•
Julie Zigoris is a storyteller in San Francisco, where she works to uncover the people and places that make the city unique. Her work has been honored by the Society of Professional Journalists, the San Francisco Press Club, the Los Angeles Press Club, and the Journalism Association of Community Colleges.
