 I'm going to read a chapter tonight a little bit longer than normal. I think it's the longest chapter in the book, actually. But I wanted to read it because I sometimes like to read when I go to different locations in the city to read at locations, read chapters about locations that are close to where we are. And as good luck would have it, the chapter that I'm going to read from is actually three blocks away from here. It's on Fillmore Street between Post and Sutter. This is chapter 41. It's titled The Haunted House. Every chapter has a specific address or location. So this one is 1712 Fillmore Street. A geologist would call the block of Fillmore Street between Post and Sutter a triple junction. It's one of those three-way collisions where a swanky part of town crashes into a seedy one while a completely different quarter sideswipes both of them. In 1974, my cousin Jonathan and I were house-sitting four blocks away at Pine and Buchanan in a majestic, decaying Victorian with a big psychedelic mandala painted in an alcove. We didn't know it at the time, but our building was a weird precursor to the summer of love. In 1965, that stretch of Pine Street had been a pre-hate hippie scene with half a dozen houses filled with long hairs and dealers. The downstairs unit in our building had been home to the legendary hippie newspaper The Oracle. Across the street at 2111 Pine, a rooming house once stood. Some of the itinerant musicians there played in a vanished after-hours jazz club three blocks away called Bop City. The rooming house was managed by a guy named Bill Ham, who invented psychedelic light shows. Our block was mostly black and pretty run down. We used to walk down to Kim's Market at Pine and Fillmore, now a Kiehl's, which sells $50 bottles of shampoo, to buy our daily $2 ration of sausages, carrots, and potatoes. If you turned right on Fillmore in a block, you would come to California Street, the city's great north-south dividing line. California was and is the unofficial border of Pacific Heights, the swankiest neighborhood in town. Turn left, and you would quickly end up in the unswankiest neighborhood in town. Past Kim's Market, as you walked toward Bush, the block was a grab bag with a venerable Japanese restaurant rubbing shoulders with a jumping jazz and R&B joint called Minnie's Can-Do Club. In the block after Bush, things started to become disheveled, a no man's land traversed by Japanese blacks and a few confused tourists looking for Japantown. Once you crossed the ugly, multi-lane, geary expressway, you were in the heart of black San Francisco. Some years after I moved out of the neighborhood, I happened to find myself on Fillmore between Post and Sutter. I remember being subliminally aware that there was something odd about the east side of the street. Its fang shui was wrong. In particular, there was something weird about a row of five stately Victorians, but I couldn't put my finger on it. It took me a few decades, but I finally learned why that block felt off. Those five Victorians were not built there. They were saved from the wrecking ball, raised up from their original sites, and plunked down on Fillmore. The block felt weird because the setbacks were too deep. It is appropriate that this line of Victorians stands out. For one of its buildings has a history so rich and strange that an entire book could be written about it. The house at 1712 Fillmore is San Francisco's version of Joyce's Seven Eccles Street. It is a universe on a 27 and a half by 93-foot lot. In or around 1895, a three-story Victorian was erected at 1690 Post Street just east of Buchanan in the Western Edition. The name Western Edition is a link with the Gold Rush Days when the city did not even include all of Knob Hill. In 1851, San Francisco's Western Limit was Larkin Street, a few blocks west of my old house on Jackson. A year later, the booming city extended its boundary 13 blocks west to Devisadero. The area north of Market Street between Larkin and Devisadero became known as the Western Edition. Despite the fact that the addition is now 160 years old, the name has stuck. A more suitable name, considering the way the city has treated the neighborhood and its residents, might be the Western Subtraction. The Western Edition was a solidly middle class and upper middle class neighborhood. Streetcar lines carried its merchants and professionals to their offices in downtown San Francisco. By 1900, its residents were mostly native-born, three-quarters of them to immigrant parents from countries like Germany, Austria, Ireland, and France. A significant number of them were Jews, mostly from Germany, attracted by San Francisco's lack of overt anti-Semitism and business opportunities. By the 1870s, Jews made up 7% to 8% of the city's population, the highest percentage in any city west of New York. The first of the neighborhood's three great transformations was a result of the 1906 fire. Displaced working-class people from the burned-out downtown and south of market areas poured in. The stately single-family Victorians were divided into rooms and flats. The neighborhood became more densely populated, a poorer and much more ethnically diverse. Large numbers of working-class Filipinos, Mexican-Americans, and Jews moved in. So did the two ethnic groups whose fates would become entwined in the neighborhood and in that wooden building on Post Street, African-Americans and Japanese. Blacks began arriving in San Francisco before the gold rush, but never in great numbers until World War II. As Albert Broussard notes in Black San Francisco, the struggle for racial equality in the West, 1900, 1954, the lack of factory jobs and the distance from the South discouraged black immigration, but so did the politely racist attitudes held by many white San Franciscans. The early city had no racial covenants for blacks and no ghettos, but it was only the fact that there were so few blacks that created the illusion of unusual tolerance. The white citizens of San Francisco shared many of the racial prejudices of their fellow white Americans. After 1906, increasing numbers of blacks moved into the Western edition. By 1930, almost half of all the 5,000 blacks in the city lived in the neighborhood. So did most of the Japanese. The first Japanese immigrants arrived in San Francisco in 1869, establishing the first and oldest Japan town in the United States. One of the most influential early immigrants, a devout Christian and future newspaper editor named Kyoto Abiko, established an agricultural colony of fellow Japanese in Livingston in the Central Valley, soon followed by a colony in Cortez, near Turlock. My Japanese grandparents emigrated to the Cortez colony in the early 1920s. My niecee, which means second generation father, was born in nearby Turlock in 1925. The first Japanese in San Francisco lived in South Park and on DuPont Grant Street in Chinatown. Like many other ethnic groups, they moved to the Western edition after 1906. The willingness of the neighborhood's landlords, many of them Jewish, to rent to Japanese did not sit well with many whites. In 1907, the Chronicle ran a scare piece about the Japanese invasion of the Western edition, titled A Greater San Francisco or a Lesser Nagasaki, which the Western edition was one of the most diverse neighborhoods in the country. Rider Jerry Flam calls it San Francisco's Little United Nations. The Japanese population was a mixture of older first generation Issei immigrants, many of whom were not US citizens. And their second generation, Issei children, almost all of whom were citizens. For convenience, I will refer to them all as Japanese Americans. At some point after the quake, the majestic Victorian at 1690 Post Street was divided into apartments. Sometime before 1920, the Nippon Drug Company opened on its ground floor. In 1930, the co-owner of Nippon drugs was a man named J. Hatsuto Yamada, who lived eight blocks away at Bush and Devisadero. By 1940, more than 5,000 Japanese Americans were living in Japantown. There were more than 200 Japanese-owned businesses. Some owned property, the exact percentage is unclear. Many worked as domestic servants, the famous Japanese houseboys. Japantown on the eve of the war was a bustling enclave. It had 40 churches, 17 schools and kindergartens, a department store and dozens of small businesses. Culturally, it was a scramble. There were four traditional baths, but also American-style diners, serving hot dogs, ham and egg sandwiches, and fried noodles. Then came Pearl Harbor. After war got out of the attack, hostile whites drove through the neighborhood, staring creepily at its inhabitants. The authorities immediately began arresting suspicious Japanese. An incident reported in the December 9 Call Bulletin reveals the round-up the usual suspects' nature of this early venture into homeland security. Under the headline, Enemy Aliens Arrested Here, the paper gravely reported that three Japanese men had been arrested on suspicion of taking a photo of an army transport, although no camera was found. No camera was found could have been the motto for the entire hysterical fear and race-driven episode that followed. Californians in general and San Franciscans in particular had long viewed the Japanese as even worse, more ambitious, more evil, more underhanded than the despised Chinese. Journalist and historian Kerry McWilliams described the hostility as the California-Japanese war. In 1900, the San Francisco Journal organized labor, opined. Chinatown, with its reeking filth and dirt, its gambling dens and obscene slave pens, its coolly labor and bloodthirsty tongs is a menace to the community. But the sniveling Japanese, who swarms along the streets and cringingly offers his paltry services for a suit of clothes in a front seat in our public schools, is a far greater danger to the laboring portion of society than all the opium-soaked pigtails who have ever blotted the fair name of this beautiful city. In February 1942, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, expelling all persons of Japanese ancestry, including aliens and non-aliens, from West Coast military zones. Every Japanese person in San Francisco was ordered to register and report at various sites for processing. Stripped of their belongings, except for what they could carry, they mustered at 2020 Van Ness near Jackson and then were sent to assembly centers, mainly the Tan Faran Race Track in San Bruno. Most of San Francisco's Japanese residents, including Nippon Drugs co-owner Hatsuto Yamada, were sent to the Topaz internment camp in Utah, one of 10 hastily built relocation camps scattered across the barren stretches of the country. My father and his family from the Central Valley were mustered at the Merced Fairgrounds, where my dad had once shown his 4-H club chickens, and imprisoned at Desalet Camp Amachi, official name Granada, on the high plateau in Colorado. By April, Japan town was empty. Sometimes the silences left by cataclysmic events are the loudest reminders. While researching the city directories, I compared the 1942 listings, compiled before the internment order, from Yamada to Yamazaki with the 1943 listings. In 1942, there are 32 listings. Yamada, Yamagata, Yamaguchi, Yamamoto, Yamasaki, Yamazaki. In 1943, there are none. The names and the people are simply gone. The forced removal and imprisonment of 110,000 people, most of them American citizens, for no other reason than their race, was one of the great injustices in US history. But the sudden departure of 5,000 Japanese from the Western Edition proved a boon to another victimized group of Americans, blacks. As we have seen, World War II was responsible for the great influx of blacks into San Francisco. Before the war, the city had fewer than 5,000 black residents. By the end of the war, 32,000 blacks, drawn by good-paying shipyard jobs and the opportunity to get out of Texas or Louisiana, were living in the city. The jobs were there, but there was literally nowhere for the newcomers to live. Some found housing in the apartments that were quickly constructed in Hunter's Point by the shipyard. But thousands more units were needed. San Francisco was not an egregiously bigoted city, but many white landlords refused to rent to blacks and overtly racist actions were not unheard of. In this charged situation, the empty apartment buildings and houses in Japantown were a godsend. Because the neighborhood was already racially mixed, its landlords were happy to rent to blacks. Between 1940 and 1950, the black population of the Western Edition went from 2,144 to 14,888. Citywide, the demographic change was even more startling. San Francisco went from having 4,846 black residents in 1940 to 43,502 in 1950. In one of the stranger urban transformations in American history, the area around Poston Buchanan went from being a Japanese neighborhood to a black one, virtually overnight. Maya Angelou, bless her, who, as a 13-year-old, had moved into a building near that very corner, wrote, the Yamamoto seafood market quietly became Sammy's shoeshine parlor and smoke shop. Yashagira's hardware metamorphosed into La Salon de Butte, owned by Ms. Clarinda Jackson. The Japanese shops, which sold products to Nisei customers, were taken over by enterprising Negro businessmen, and in less than a year became permanent homes away from home for the newly-arrived southern blacks. Where the aromas of tempura, raw fish, and cha had dominated, the aroma of chitlins, greens, and ham hocks now prevailed. The old neighborhood was gone, and overnight its new inhabitants made it their own. And the neighborhood they created before the city destroyed it was one of the most jumping places on the planet. It was called the Fillmore, aka the Harlem of the West, or just the Moe. Within months, the Fillmore was exploding with life, and its crown jewel was its jazz clubs. By a coincidence, as exuberant as an art Blakey snare drum roll, the Fillmore's incarnation as a black neighborhood at the beginning of World War II exactly coincided with one of America's great artistic achievements, a rival to abstract expressionism, the birth of modern jazz in its first incarnation, bebop. The virtuoso improvisational style created by Bird, and Diz, and Monk, and Max Roach, and Bud Powell ushered in a new age of intense, deeply personal, and harmonically advanced music. It took serious chops to play bebop, to use a phrase coined by Mark Shorer, the great English professor across the bay at UC Berkeley. It was technique as discovery. And what they discovered during 1,000 jam sessions was an American soundtrack of genius and joy. For more than 15 years, the Fillmore was the hottest jazz, blues, and R&B scene outside New York. Everybody in the hood and plenty from outside dressed to the nines and hit the streets to drink, party, and listen. The mile-long stretch of Fillmore and its side streets was packed with more than two dozen clubs. All the greats came, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Billy Holiday, and Dexter Gordon, to name just a few. Even Art Tatum, a.k.a. God, played the mo. In 1949, the old Victorian at 1690 Post underwent its strangest transformation yet. Shuttered up Nippon drugs reopened as Voote City, a club run by a jazz guitarist, pianist, composer, and singer named Slim Gaylord. Gaylord was a weird and wonderful character, a musical cousin of Lord Buckley. In addition to speaking eight languages, Gaylord made up his own, which he called Voote, hence the name of his club. Jack Kerouac immortalized Gaylord in On the Road. He describes going to see him at a little Frisco nightclub, where great eager crowds of young semi-intellectuals sat at his feet and listened to him on the guitar, piano, and bongo drums. He does and says anything that comes into his head. Shockingly, Gaylord turned out to be a terrible businessman, and Voote City quickly folded. The building's owner, Charles Sullivan, had to find a new tenant. Sullivan approached John Jimbo Edwards, one of the first black car salesmen in San Francisco, who decided to open a cafe called Jimbo's Waffle Shop in the former Voote space. When local musicians discovered it had an unused back room, they started using it for after-hours jam sessions. Jimbo changed its name to Bob City. Word got around, and soon every jazz musician who came to San Francisco started heading there. The cover photograph of a book about the Moe's Glory Days, Harlem of the West, the Fillmore Jazz Era, by Elizabeth Peppen and Louis Watts, captures an indelible moment. A heartbreakingly young, innocent-looking tenor player stands on the stage. He and fellow tenor man, John Handy, and trumpeter, Frank Fisher, are listening to Altuist Pony Poindexter soloing. The young man is leaning slightly forward, his eyes half shut, a slight smile on his face. He is listening so intently, so gently, that his whole body seems to be a receptacle for sound. The young man is John Coltrane. Bob City carried the torch for 15 glorious years. But by the early 1960s, musical tastes had changed. Jazz was not as popular with either whites or blacks. The club featured more R&B. In 1965, owner Charles Sullivan closed it down. Sullivan was a remarkable man. He was born in Monroe County, Alabama, to an illiterate mother. He ran away from his adoptive father at age 13 and made his way to San Francisco. When the war broke out, he was the only qualified black machinist in California. He tried to get a job at the shipyards, but the Union refused to hire blacks. Sullivan got 50 white machinists to testify on his behalf, but it took the personal intervention of President Roosevelt to get the Union to hire him. During the war years, he began opening bars and liquor stores in the Bay Area, including a liquor store just down the street from Bob City at 1623 Post. It was the first liquor store in San Francisco to make free deliveries. Branching into entertainment, he became the leading black music promoter on the West Coast. The same year that Bob City closed, Sullivan played a key role in the birth of music that would permanently relegate jazz to the high art low audience niche. Sullivan loaned his dance license for the Fillmore Auditorium to a young promoter named Bill Graham. The airplane, the dead, Big Brother, Zappa, and other rock bands played there in 1966 and 1967, kicking off a musical revolution as profound as the one that created jazz. Sullivan himself met an unhappy fate. In 1966, he was found dead near Fifth and Bluxom Street, shot in the heart. The case was never solved. The ghosts of Vute City and Bob City haunt San Francisco, evoking a fabled time and neighborhood that will never return. But those legendary clubs were themselves haunted by a ghost, the ghost of Nippon drugs, the business that had occupied the building for decades. When Hatsuto Yamada returned to San Francisco from Topaz, he opened a new drug store two blocks away at 1698 Sutter. The 1945-46 city directory shows that James H. Yamada gave up his old residence on Divisidero and moved to 1950 Bush between Laguna and Buchanan. Whether he owned the old building and sold it before shipped off to the camp or rented it is not clear, but he never returned to 1690 Post. Yamada renamed his new store Jim's Drug Company after the James that he aberrantly began calling himself after the war. One wonders what Jim thought as he walked past his old store, now bearing the ironically similar name Jimbos. After the war, some of the internees returned to Japantown, but many did not. As Reid Yoshio Yokoyama notes in one of the few studies of Japanese resettlement in San Francisco, many evacuees believing ethnic enclaves only exacerbated racism thought it would be better to disperse the major Japanese-American organization, the Japanese-American Citizens League, took the same position. JACL president Saburo Kido, who visited Japantown in late 1944, wrote that returning Japanese-Americans would face four problems, housing, jobs, hostility from labor unions, and relations with blacks. Kido warned, since blacks occupy the former Japanese residential district, they will resent being displaced by returning evacuees. A confidential government report echoed Kido's fears, predicting that the release of Japanese from war relocation authority camps will be the cause of friction and racial clashes when the Japanese arrived back in California. Despite such concerns, about half the former residents of Japantown did return. They found that housing was indeed a major problem. Those who had been renters found that their apartments were occupied by others. Property owners, who may have constituted as much as half of the returners, fared better, but not always. There were 13 occasions on which their property was seized by the government. At first, many stayed in hostels or slept on cots, but gradually the Japanese-Americans found places to live. Work was also hard to find. Anti-Japanese sentiment continued to run deep for years after the war. In 1949, the famous Japanese tea garden in Golden Gate Park was still being referred to as the Oriental Tea Garden. The Hagiwara family, who had lovingly tended it for three generations, was not allowed to return to it. Not until 1958 did ownership of the garden return to the Japanese community. Many businesses would not hire Japanese. Some owners said their veteran workers would kill any japs who were hired. In late August 1945, more than 60 members of the AFL Machinists Union threatened to strike after they learned that a 37-year-old Nisei named Takio Miyama had been placed as a mechanic with a municipal railway. Mayor Roger Lapham and State Senator Jack Shelley tried to convince the workers not to strike, but they refused to back down. Miyama was going to withdraw, but after a three-hour meeting with JACL and war relocation authority officials, he decided he would go to work, saying that he, quote, would be betraying other Nisei and other minority groups if he abandoned his fight for a job. Miyama showed up for work at the bar in the next morning, and the machinists put down their tools. Facing 60 angry men, two men rose to defend Miyama. Both of them were bus drivers and part of a different AFL union. The first driver was a black man named Robert Gray. As the Pacific Citizen reported, Gray said, when Negro bus drivers went to work from uni, there was some fuss at first, but soon everybody got used to it. If you boys let this man go to work, you'll find it'll be the same way. The second driver was an American Indian named James Burns, who said, do you want the sort of thing here that goes on in the old south? But the machinists refused to yield, saying that because Miyama had not fought in the war, they would not work with him. At this moment, the chief radio technician at the barn, Harold Stone, spoke up. Just five months earlier, Stone had been awarded a silver star for bravery. When his carrier, the USS Franklin, was devastated by Japanese dive bombers on March 19th, and 807 men were killed. The most casualties on any American warship during the war, except the Arizona, sunk at Pearl Harbor. Stone said, I didn't go out to fight in the Pacific, so people with differently colored skin would be discriminated against when I got home. The war hero's speech made the difference. By a better than two to one margin, the machinists voted to stay on the job. By 1946, 2,500 Japanese Americans had resettled in Japantown, about half of its original population. Within two years, the population was back to its old size. But many of these were newcomers. San Francisco State University professor Ben Kobashigawa found that only one third of the 1952 Japanese surnames listed in the directory were pre-war names. By 1949, a lively but smaller Japantown was centered at Post and Buchanan, with 150 instead of 400 businesses. It is difficult to get a clear picture of the relationship between blacks and Japanese Americans after the war. Research is scanty, and neither group is interested in reopening any old wounds that may still exist. After her family moved to Japantown, the young Maya Angelou was struck by the fact that the Japanese seemed to have vanished into thin air, leaving not even a memory. No member of my family and none of the family friends ever mentioned the absent Japanese, she wrote. It was as if they had never owned or lived in the houses we inhabited. Keenly aware of the irony of one victimized people taking the place of another, Angelou wrote, a person unaware of all the factors that make up oppression might have expected sympathy or even support from the Negro newcomers for the dislodged Japanese. Blacks did not feel such sympathy, Angelou believed, for all two human reasons. They were doing well, and because the Japanese weren't whites, they didn't have to fear or even consider them. Some blacks shared the negative views of the Japanese held by most of society. The NAACP, for example, took only a tepid stand against internment, but many blacks had a more favorable view. A reporter for the Afro-American newspaper, Vincent Tubbs, went to San Francisco during the evacuation. During the course of his stay, Tubbs's attitude became more sympathetic to Japanese Americans, and he noted that the black community's attitude had also changed. Tubbs came to understand that, like blacks, the Japanese Americans had been victimized solely because of their race. He said that many blacks referred to Japanese Americans as their good friends. As for the returning Japanese Americans, they mostly wanted to avoid conflict and resume their lives. Some Yisei, and to a lesser degree some Nisei, may have held racist attitudes, but if so, they did not express them. More likely, the returnees were simply wary of their new neighbors. In making home from war stories of Japanese American exile and resettlement, one aged Nisei, who was sent with his family to live at Hunter's Point, describes running away in fear as a child when he saw a large black man on the street and offers a poignant apology for something that had clearly troubled him his entire life. In general, I would say the relations between the blacks and the Japanese were friendly, not chummy, 86-year-old Yokio Takakua, whose family returned to their home in Japantown after being interned, told me. We tolerated each other, and we were decent to each other. There wasn't that much contact. Certainly, the predicted clashes did not take place. When a black group, the Carver Club, put forward, should the Japanese be returned to the West Coast as a debate topic, no one was willing to argue the negative side. There were numerous documented acts of black kindness toward the Japanese Americans. A black landlord saved Onami Taito's stock during Taito's internment, allowing him to reopen his arts goods store. The first cleric to welcome the returnees was a black minister who invited them to join his church in San Francisco. In Oakland, the black neighbors were among the first to welcome back a returning dentist and his wife. A number of black families took Japanese Americans into their homes. During the 1950s and early 1960s, San Francisco's Little United Nations experienced a renaissance. Japantown, or Nihonmachi, was now a thriving Japanese-American neighborhood, adjoining a thriving black neighborhood. The two worlds collided at Post and Buchanan. Jimbo's Bop City was right next to one of the oldest Japanese businesses in the city, Yuoki Sakai's Fish Market. 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 across the street to the Miyako restaurant, where her mother was a waitress. The Western edition 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 edition was the result of a perfect storm of good intentions, unconscious racism, naivete, 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 edition debacle emphasize the high-level planning decisions made after the war, but the die was cast during the war. The residents of Japanhound had not even been shipped off to Tanforan when city officials began worrying what to do with their run-down neighborhood. In 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 Tokyo 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% of Jap Hantown. There matters stood for a year. Then the flood of black shipyard workers into Jap Hantown 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 West Side Courts Project at Bush and Baker. Still stands there. 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 or four families, they sleep and 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 that 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 simply by 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 cost of renewing such areas. In 1947, the city hired the respected planner, Mel Scott, a former journalist, to look into redeveloping the Western Edition. 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 book, The San Francisco Bay Area, A Metropolis and Perspective, he defended the black residents who flooded into the Western Edition 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-spaul and open space advocates. And as we have seen, his 1961 survey triggered the movement to save the Bay. But Scott's report on the Western Edition 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 live. A shorter version of the paper 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 cartoon-like 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. Tatfully, 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 quote colored and foreign-born families could afford to live in the new neighborhood, Scott asked the city to ensure that they would be adequately housed in quote, 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 edition 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 edition, urban renewal was negro removal by design. On June 3rd, 1948, despite resistance from black and Japanese-American residents, the Board of Supervisors declared the Western edition 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, Gary Boulevard was demolished and work began on the enormous Geary Expressway. This third great transformation of the Western edition turned out to be the most catastrophic of them all. 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 non-whites. 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. And 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 Edition organized. In 1967, a coalition of progressive ministers and community leaders, including black leaders like Hannibal Williams and Japanese American ones like Yoriwata formed the Western Edition Community Organization, WACCO, to try to save their neighborhood. They picketed the SFRA organized and blocked bulldozers. WACCO 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, although a target just opened there, 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. And 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 and service and tourism where all too often they face discrimination. It's the same old loaded dice for a Negro in San Francisco, said a Fillmore resident. They just sugar them up a little. As 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. Minis Kandu 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 Pettis, 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 restaurant and clubs, including a swanky San Francisco branch of the great Oakland Jazz Club Yoshis. But it hasn't worked. All four businesses have had to go repeatedly back to the city for more money. They're too expensive for the black residents of the area and not enough newcomers or non-residents 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. Yoshis 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 edition, 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 Victorian at 1690 post was slated to be razed as part of the Japan Town 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 edition, but there was one for the haunted house. The building that once housed Nippon Drugs and Jimbo's Bop City is now home to Marcus Books. Not anymore, but this book was written a year ago. The oldest African American bookstore in the United States. I walked in there one 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 rye. Dr. Julian and Ray Richardson. Ray Richardson was the head of the black studies department at SF 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 from 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 all 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 caddy 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 light hearted 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 Voote 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. Thank you. Ooh, that was long. Hope I didn't go on too long, but it's a long, long and complicated story.