Cool Gray City of Love

by Gary Kamiya

  Judy Hamaguchi was a Nisei girl who grew up in a subdivided Victorian flat on Post Street, right next to Bop City. Despite the crowded conditions, she described Nihonmachi as a “great neighborhood for a child to grow up.” Hamaguchi said that Jimbo Edwards would sometimes help her and her toddler brother cross the street to the Miyako restaurant, where her mother was a waitress.

  The Western Addition was far from perfect. It had crime and drugs and high unemployment, and a lot of its buildings were decrepit and overcrowded. But for all of its faults, it was a living neighborhood—until the city decided to fix it.

  The destruction of the Western Addition was the result of a perfect storm of good intentions, unconscious racism, naïveté, greed, and technocratic optimism. It was San Francisco’s cardinal sin, and the city is still living with its legacy.

  Most accounts of the Western Addition debacle emphasize the high-level planning decisions made after the war. But the die was cast during the war. The residents of Japantown had not even been shipped off to Tanforan when city officials began worrying about what to do with their run-down neighborhood. An April 16, 1942, Chronicle editorial headlined “Quick Action on Rehab of Jap Houses” read, “Departure of the Japanese from San Francisco presents an opportunity that will not come again to lift the face of a dreary section of the city—and at the same time creates a danger of the kind we are so prone to neglect until now. A blight now, the 20 blocks of ‘Little Tokio’ will become an outright slum if left alone. What to do? There’s the rub.” The paper acknowledged the city had only limited options, since the soon-to-be-imprisoned Japanese owned as much as 60 percent of Japantown.

  There matters stood for a year. Then the flood of black shipyard workers into Japantown caught the attention of the authorities. In June 1943 the extreme overcrowding of the neighborhood led a city commission to investigate conditions. Its findings were alarming. In its story about the dire situation there, the Chronicle interviewed Robert Flippen, the respected black director of the just-built Westside Courts project, at Bush and Baker. Due to racist policies, they were the only wartime housing projects in San Francisco open to blacks. Flippen told the Chronicle, “I know of one place where 15 people live in one room—cook, eat and sleep there. They have no toilet facilities. For that purpose, they go to a filling station or out into the street. These 15 are 4 families. They sleep in shifts … They are willing to live in anything and a certain kind of landlord knows it.”

  The Chronicle reported, “All participating in the effort to find a solution emphasized that it is not a racial problem, but a social and health hazard that would be the same if the district were overcrowded with whites.”

  Japantown was indeed severely overcrowded, and city officials appear to have believed they were simply taking urgent action to clean up a health menace. But there was cultural and racial topspin. The fact that the “slum area” had been first a Japanese and then a black neighborhood clearly led officials to view Japantown as a kind of urban cancer that needed to be cut out. It was only the war that prevented the city from wielding its scalpel. And when the war ended, the scalpel came out.

  In fact, the war whetted America’s appetite for wielding the scalpel. It is no coincidence that “urban renewal” became a national policy after the war. If America could defeat the Nazis and the Japanese, why couldn’t it solve inner-city blight by simply destroying the inner cities and building new ones? There may be an unconscious connection between the “strategic bombing” that left Berlin a heap of rubble and the urban renewal that eviscerated America’s inner cities.

  The federal government played a critical role in the nationwide campaign to remake inner cities. The 1949 Housing Act allocated $1.5 billion for urban renewal, defined as redevelopment of “blighted areas.” The federal government would pay two-thirds of the costs of “renewing” such areas.

  In 1947, the city hired the respected planner Mel Scott, a former journalist, to look into redeveloping the Western Addition. Located near downtown and with a politically weak population, it was a prime location for pro-growth forces.

  Scott’s role in what was to come was heartbreaking. He clearly meant well. He was not a racist. In his 1959 The San Francisco Bay Area: A Metropolis in Perspective, he defended the black residents who flooded into the Western Addition during the war, saying that “most of them were products of a social system that resolutely kept them ‘in their place.’ “He was one of America’s first anti-sprawl and open-space advocates. And as we have seen, his 1961 survey triggered the movement to save the bay, a fact that qualifies him as one of the city’s heroes. But Scott’s report on the Western Addition was a product of the ignorance and hubris that marked urban planning at that time, and it sent the city down a terribly wrong path.

  His official 74-page report asserted that rehabilitation would not work: “Nothing short of a clean sweep and a new start can make of the district a genuinely good place to love.” A shorter version of the report, titled “New City: San Francisco Redeveloped,” featured an illustration of a white couple standing on the balcony of a high-rise, looking out over the city. The text was hopeful modernist Muzak: “It is a green city. Broad lawns, trees, ample flowers form a setting for your 10-story apartment house. You look down on tree-lined walks and attractive spots for relaxation.” The next page featured a ludicrously propagandistic double-page photo-collage depicting the blighted old neighborhood, “with its death-trap intersections” and “alleys in which juvenile gangs plotted mischief that sometimes ended in murder.” Decaying Victorians, a wrecked car, a junk-filled yard, an overflowing trash can with a liquor bottle crudely drawn atop it, and a building with cartoonlike flames painted on it form the background against which two vaguely Filipino-looking urchins look out in mute appeal, next to a young white delinquent covering his face. With his striped double-breasted coat, jeans and pre-Elvis pompadour, he looks like he stepped out of the pages of Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock.

  Tactfully, no ominous black hoodlums are pictured in the report—in fact, no black people are depicted at all. But the city had no plan to include minorities in the “new city of space and living green.” Noting that few of the “colored and foreign-born families” could afford to live in the new neighborhood, Scott asked the city to ensure they would be adequately housed in “future projects.” The key word, and the one that revealed the limits of 1947 liberalism, was “future.”

  James Baldwin famously said, “Urban renewal is Negro removal.” In his study of the Western Addition debacle, Jordan Klein correctly argues that it is too simplistic to reduce the entire complex movement to that motive. But as he also correctly notes, “in the Western Addition … urban renewal was ‘Negro Removal’ by design.”

  On June 3, 1948, despite resistance from black and Japanese American residents, the Board of Supervisors declared the Western Addition a blighted area and designated it for redevelopment. The San Francisco Redevelopment Agency was duly created in 1948, but for 10 years it did almost nothing. Then, in 1959, Justin Herman took charge. He was the man who was most responsible for urban renewal—and, ultimately, Negro removal—in San Francisco.

  Herman was a dynamic, politically connected leader who made things happen. The city acquired the properties in the area by eminent domain and began bulldozing them. In 1960, Geary Boulevard was demolished and work began on the enormous Geary Expressway.

  This third great transformation of the Western Addition turned out to be the most catastrophic of all of them. Redevelopment was supposed to be a win-win-win: Corporations and real estate interests would grow, the city would increase its tax base and clean up blighted areas, and the neighborhood’s residents would be compensated for their losses and relocated in better housing. If the third part did not happen, the whole endeavor would be a failure. As Herman himself wrote, “Without adequate housing for the poor, critics will rightly condemn urban renewal as a land-grab for the rich and a heartless push-out for the poor and nonwhites.”

  Herman’
s words turned out to be prophetic. There was no adequate housing for the poor, because the planning for it was fatally flawed from the beginning. Klein lists the five critical mistakes. First, the destruction of housing units was not phased: Thousands of units were demolished, and new housing not built for years. As a result, by the time housing was available, the community had scattered. Second, the redevelopment plans relied on invalid, overly optimistic predictions of turnover and vacancy. Third, the income of the displaced people was overstated. Fourth, the planning ignored segregation and racial covenants. Fifth, it relied on SROs as replacement housing, but no one wanted to live in SROs.

  Facing the destruction of their community, the residents of the Western Addition organized. In 1967 a coalition of progressive ministers and community leaders, including black leaders like Hannibal Williams and Japanese American ones like Yori Wada, formed the Western Addition Community Organization (WACO) to try to save their neighborhood. They picketed the SFRA, organized, and blocked bulldozers. WACO won some legal battles, managed to delay redevelopment, and got additional housing built, but it was too late. The battle was lost.

  By the time the bulldozers fell silent, 883 businesses had been closed, 20,000 to 30,000 residents displaced, and 2,500 Victorian houses demolished. Most of the displaced people left the neighborhood for good.

  The old, racially mixed neighborhood around Japantown was trashed. The Geary Expressway, designed in part to carry commuters to department stores on Masonic that no longer exist, was not only an ugly gash, it became a Berlin Wall separating blacks and Japanese Americans. The corporate Japan Center gutted Japantown. With the exception of old people, few Japanese Americans live in Japantown today.

  What happened to Fillmore Street was worse. The heart and soul of black San Francisco was torn out. The loss only exacerbated a crisis fueled by unemployment. The demise of the shipyards and the disappearance of construction jobs forced blacks to look for work in service and tourism, where all too often they faced discrimination. “It’s the same old loaded dice for a Negro in San Francisco,” said a Fillmore resident. “They just sugar ’em up a little.” As for the big housing projects built in the 1960s, they proved to be far more efficient petri dishes for growing crime and social pathologies than the crumbling old Victorians they replaced.

  Minnie’s Can-Do Club, the last of the great Fillmore clubs, died in 1974. Much of the Fillmore stood empty until the 1980s. Only one of the original businesses on Fillmore remains: the New Chicago Barber Shop at O’Farrell. Its proprietor, Reggie Pettus, coined the phrase “Fillmo’ no’ mo’.”

  The phrase could apply both to a neighborhood and a community. There are fewer and fewer blacks in San Francisco. Late one summer night in 2011 I walked the entire length of Fillmore, from Geary to Haight. I saw only one black person.

  Trying to make amends for the past, in 1995 the city created the Historic Fillmore Jazz Preservation District in the heart of the old Fillmore. In a well-meaning attempt to revitalize the area, the city poured $15 million into loans to launch four jazz-themed restaurants and clubs, including a swanky San Francisco branch of the great Oakland jazz club Yoshi’s. But it hasn’t worked. All four businesses have had to repeatedly go back to the city for more money. They’re too expensive for the black residents of the area and not enough nonresidents are coming in. The peculiar, sterile vibe of this stretch of Fillmore, with its high-rises and empty public spaces, doesn’t help. But the real reason the “jazz district” is a failure is simple: Jazz isn’t popular. Yoshi’s was losing so much money it had to start booking non-jazz acts. The whole enterprise reeks of artificiality and museum culture and guilt.

  As the Victorians crashed to the ground across the Western Addition, architectural preservationists and historians began cataloging them. A number of the most significant buildings were saved, but most were destroyed.

  In the late 1970s, the Queen Anne Victorian at 1690 Post was slated to be razed as part of the Japantown renovation. But in another attempt at rectification, the Redevelopment Agency decided to make it part of a city-subsidized retail development called Victorian Village. Along with five other buildings, it was moved two blocks, to where it now stands, at 1712 Fillmore.

  There can be no happy ending to the tragedy of the Western Addition, but there has been one for the haunted house. The building that once housed Nippon Drugs and Jimbo’s Bop City is now home to Marcus Books, the oldest African American bookstore in the United States. I walked in there one fall day. The proprietor, Karen Johnson, was sitting behind the counter. She was a distinguished-looking black woman with a short gray Afro and the sardonic, dry wit of a book person. I asked her about the building’s history and what she knew about Bop City. “My parents started the store in the 1960s,” she told me in a soft voice that was at once steely and wry. “Dr. Julian and Raye Richardson. [Raye Richardson was the head of the Black Studies Department at S.F. State.] It was one block up from here on Fillmore. My dad was a friend of Jimbo’s. He used to go hear music there.”

  We talked briefly about the redevelopment fiasco. Johnson’s contempt was glacial. “The store was in various locations during redevelopment,” she said. “It was at Fillmore and Turk. Then we moved to Leavenworth and Golden Gate. There was a community groundswell to bring our store back to the neighborhood. Our family bought this building after it was moved. It had stood empty for seven years. They butchered it when they moved it. They messed up the plumbing, stole all the Victorian details, the fireplaces. We’ve been here since 1981. We’re the only black business that returned to the Fillmore.”

  I asked Johnson where the famous back room that hosted the after-hours club was. She walked around to a table of books that stood in the center of the long, narrow room. “All of this was the back room,” she said. “The restaurant in front was an add-on.” She picked up a copy of Harlem of the West, the book with the amazing photograph of John Coltrane on the cover. “This picture was taken right here,” she said. “Isn’t that the coolest thing ever?” We stood there for a moment, seeing the ghosts.

  I said goodbye to Johnson and walked out onto the street. It was still a scattershot scene. A Burger King and a senior housing place stood across the road. A handsome Indian restaurant was catty-corner from a Goodwill store.

  I turned and looked back at the old purple building. It had been through most of San Francisco’s history: The lighthearted 1890s. The great earthquake and fire. The Little United Nations days when kids of all colors went to the same schools and lived on the same street. The decades when it was the Nippon Drugstore, run by a well-dressed man named Hatsuto—later James—Yamada. The Vout City interlude-orooni. The 15 years when it was Jimbo’s Bop City, a legendary jazz club run by a black man who used to walk a little Japanese American girl across the street to find her mother. The years when everything around it was torn down. The day it was jacked up and moved. The years it stood empty. And the 32 years it has been a bookstore, owned by a family who remember what needs to be remembered.

  I walked over to Geary. People hurried down the sidewalk. The traffic roared underneath. Like a great river, the city flowed indifferently on.

  Chapter 42

  If You Were a Bird

  Lily Pond, 200 yards west of Hippie Hill, Golden Gate Park

  In 1965 San Francisco was rolling comfortably along on post-Eisenhower cruise control, a prosperous, increasingly corporate city busy tearing down its poor neighborhoods and historic buildings and throwing up high-rises and freeways. For all its vaunted bohemianism, its power structure was deeply conservative. Tough, working-class Irish Americans had dominated San Francisco politics since the city’s birth, and an Irish Catholic old boys’ network ran the city—Mayor Jack Shelley, Police Chief Tom Cahill, and Judge Raymond O’Connor of Juvenile Court, with Archbishop Joseph Mc-Gucken wielding spiritual and temporal power offstage. The old Beat haunt, North Beach, had been taken over by topless clubs. In Berkeley, the free speech movement had galvanized students the year before,
but there was no evidence that anything weird was brewing.

  Yet in 1965, a strange delirium began to grow in San Francisco. You couldn’t call it a movement. You couldn’t really call it anything. What name could you give to a way of life held together only by LSD and rock music? But whatever it was, it got stronger and stronger. And by the summer of 1967, it had become so powerful that 75,000 young people from around the world flooded into the Haight-Ashbury. They called it the Summer of Love, and it remains one of the most enigmatic episodes in American history.

  I just missed getting both extremely loaded barrels of it. I was only 14 in 1967, a few years too young to experience that summer’s once-only craziness. (When it comes to recollections of the Summer of Love, don’t trust anybody under 63.) But the hippie era was not confined to a three-month or even a three-year period. It was a cultural H-bomb whose metaphysical radiation spread far and wide, and its half-life has still not expired. Growing up in Berkeley, I was close enough to ground zero to be dazzled, discomfited, and derailed. I lived out my own version of the sixties. It was not particularly noteworthy—hair down to my ass, wonderful and scary acid trips, black velvet coats, adolescent dreams of total Rimbaudian freedom, dropping out of Yale, going to work at a shipyard, reading Nietzsche, working dead-end jobs, returning to U.C. Berkeley after another acid trip—and I bring it up only because it demonstrates that everyone who was touched by the sixties lived it out in a unique way. Infinite permutations and variations and different spiritualities and politics and types of humanity were all subsumed under the rubric of “hippie.” The received image of a woo-wooing, it’s-all-so-cosmic hippie is about as insightful as the “LSD Story” episode on Dragnet.