 to you were not able to live in other neighborhoods if you were a person of color. So that's also why the film war became even pre-World War II known as the most diverse neighborhood west of the Mississippi. And pre-World War II there actually were two jazz clubs or three jazz clubs right in the film war. The first being Jax of Sutter which was on Sutter Street near film war and that was opened in 1932 and ran by an African-American couple. And then the town club joined them and this is the problem with getting old. I'm starting to forget my names. There was a third club which I'll have to look up in a second and I can tell you. This is David Johnson who actually came in the 40s to study at the San Francisco Art Institute on the GI Bill with Ansel Adams. In fact, he wrote to Ansel Adams and Ansel Adams invited him and there's actually now an exhibit. So he came and studied with Ansel Adams opened a photography studio in the western edition and for many years people would go and he also documented the neighborhood. And so when we finally discovered him basically when Liz and I met we discovered he and a number of other families that were photographers and also of some of the jazz club owners who had the who actually had many of the photographs that we'd seen at Red Pals. This is one of his photographs taken from Sutter and from Post and Film or Looking South toward the Film or Auditorium. And next to that is the building that was actually one of the first or second synagogue commissioned in San Francisco that later became a church and was actually the People's Temple. This is an ad in the Sun Reporter for David Johnson's photo studio that was on DeVizodero Street. So we in when I finally found the photographs that Reggie had rescued there were a number of they had he had some of them were framed and some of them were sitting stuffed in you know safeway bags and but we noticed there were a lot of photographs from the clubs that a lot of photographers could make a living. It's so many of whom were self-taught where they would photograph in the clubs go home and develop the pictures they did with their speed graphic and come back before five or six in the morning and sell the prints to the patrons and some of the performers that they had photographed. We love this of the dual flash unit which was a great way for him to deal with the the sort of difficult lighting. This is that's Red Powell in front of his shoe shine parlor this was from his collection that Reggie rescued that's him on the right and here you see in the background all the photographs are on his wall that he would not let me photograph it's sort of interesting here you see pictures of Bobby Kennedy Joseph Stalin sitting bull and Bobby Freeman who had a big hit in the 60s and 70s who was from San Francisco. The swim. Yes and here's Reggie across the street and and in the African-American community barbershops beauty parlors mortuaries or usually the visual archivist and so he knew that there was something valuable across the street and was actually very excited when I was excited that he had rescued the photographs. One of the reasons that that red was so angry and didn't want to talk to either Lou or myself because the film auditorium was right across the street from what was his fifth location of his shoe shine parlor and the reason that he was so bitter is because he had watched the demolition of his neighborhood he had worked downtown in the early 1950s at a shoe shine parlor saved up all his money to buy his own parlor opened it up in the film or neighborhood in 1954 and so by the time that I tried to go in and talk to him and he threw me out his parlor had been moved by the redevelopment agency five times and so each time that he would move they would say okay you're going to be here for now and they would demolish the building that he was in before and then a little bit of time would go by they'd come back and say okay we're going to demolish this building you have to move again so it's understandable that he was a little ticked off by the time in the 1980s when we both tried to talk to him. James Baldwin did a of a documentary in the in san francisco in the I think in the 60s. 1964 yeah 64 yeah a call take this hammer and there's an incredible interview with red there that he did which we discovered later so in the the collection of photographs that Reggie had rescued many of the photographs were some of them were framed and beautifully it's shaped and some of them were not in really good shape and I actually learned photoshop restoring these photographs I'm I was a film photographer I was teaching it I was very comfortable and I had some students that would go to with his new digital technology and much to his credit one of the students who was helping me said you know you really need to do this yourself and so I when I was invested in it I learned how to both restore and manipulate and produce images digitally and it changed my whole career whoops let's see here we go so and and for me I know there's a controversy about kind of historical photographs I was really interested in restoring these photographs to the way they look when the photographers made them I thought that was really important because that was I wanted to kind of restore history because that's really what it happened that this history had been erased when many of the clubs and the houses that people lived in and the victorians were torn down by the redevelopment agency for a variety of reasons one of which was to maybe modernize San Francisco and I think there were some people that really did not like having a large black population right in the prime real estate in San Francisco so I was going to so on the you see the gentleman on the right I have a good friend Jules Allen who grew up in San Francisco and I knew he grew up in the film or and so I was showing him the book when it first came out and he stopped dead in this photograph because that's a picture of his father in Jimbo's Waffle House and you can see that they look a lot alike so that we've gotten a number of those where people have seen photographs of relatives of theirs from the period that they've never seen before so it's been really gratifying to restore that so if anybody sees any photos and recognizes where they're located or who's in the photos please send us an email through our website Harlem of the West SF.com or in the chat or question and answer chat section of our Zoom talk. Here's a barbershop on Fillmore and there was a period in the 50s when a lot of men got their hair combed you see there's jars of concholine in the background and I was remembering the Malcolm X fell asleep with the lioness hair and woke up with his scalp burning and so it was a sort of interesting time and an aesthetic that then changed. This is a vaudeville performer a bicycle and he's in front of a movie theater that also would have a live show much like the Apollo in Harlem and we were interested both in the because a lot of these were not dated but that the kind of war posters kind of date that this must have been in the around the Korean war period. So during the heyday of the Fillmore there was seven movie theaters in the neighborhood and many of them would have these shows in between each film and once or twice a week two of the movie theaters would have talent shows and that is where both Edda James and her cousin Sugar Pie de Santo were discovered by Johnny Otis so it was quite the quite the thing in the neighborhood if you won one of those talent shows and in several cases led to international careers. So I've shown you pictures from many of the clubs and this is actually in the basement of the Booker T Washington Hotel and you see on the left is Ella Fitzgerald with her white gloves folded and next to her is little Robert Lee who we had soft photographs of and then next to him is Don Newcomb and then of the Dodgers and Joe Perry of the of the San Francisco 49ers and a number of prominent people. I love that rug and I love the Argyle socks of the gentleman on the right. There's a lot of things that we kind of discovered by clues because a lot of times there were not people there to describe them. Here's an ad for the Booker T Washington Hotel. So there were two big hotels in the Filmar District Booker T Washington Hotel and then this one the Manor Plaza and anyone who was anyone in the African American community would stay there the reason being was that until the late 1950s anyone who was playing at a club downtown like the Fairmont you had to be a huge star like Duke Ellington here but you weren't allowed to stay there. You had to go back to the film or and stay in either Manor Plaza or the Booker T Washington Hotel but what was wonderful is that this created the vibrant music scene in the Filmar District because Duke Ellington would come back to the neighborhood and these amazing parties in the basements of both hotels would happen and there's also a little stage and so people would have jam sessions. And then after hours places also began. This is the couple that owned the Manor Plaza and you can see a poster for Louis Jordan and there he is second from the right with a DJ named Little Tiny of course. And the couple was named the McCoys. They also owned a club which is pictured here called the Primalon Ballroom. It was a roller skating rink during the day and then several evenings a week the Primalon would have mainly R&B and jump blues shows. This is a David Johnson photograph and it's Amos Milburn's band. So you know obviously these photographs and many times were signed by people in them and we were interested in the style and the other thing that everybody says is that they said it was on the best times of their life that there was kind of full employment until economic downturns and people were really happy and had places to hang out and especially people who had migrated from the south that there was still certainly segregation and restrictions in San Francisco but it was not anywhere near the extent that it was in the places that people had come from mostly Louisiana and Texas. So the slide that you just saw was Jack's of Sutter. That was the very first jazz club in the Fillmore district as I mentioned before. It opened in 1932. It then relocated to Gary and Fillmore and is now the boom boom room the place. Yes it was another place that got relocated by redevelopment. This is Frank Jackson sitting in with a group called the Four Naturals and we were thrilled that he with the first time we showed work from this collection he played which was great and he's been a great supporter. He just passed a little while ago but to be able to sort of talk to the people in many of these photographs while they were still with us has been really thrilling for Elizabeth and I. This is an unknown group celebrating a record release and we were also interested in the ads in the background sort of giving you an idea of the sort of atmosphere. This is another David Johnson photograph in front of the bar called a doghouse. Elizabeth you can talk about this. So when David Johnson first gave us this photograph he told us that it was taken outside of the Melrose Record Shop which was on Fillmore Street and the Melrose Record Shop was the record shop in the Fillmore neighborhood. It was owned by a Jewish guy named David Rosenbaum who had been a lifelong jazz fan. And so one of the amazing things that has happened over the course of the decades that Lewis and I have been researching the Fillmore history is that so many things have so much information and so many things have come to light especially because of the internet. So I had always wanted to read the Sun Reporter newspapers which Sun Reporter was the African American newspaper out of the Fillmore. It started in the late 1940s but no one seemed to have any copies of the Sun Reporter archive until just a few years ago when UC Berkeley put the Sun Reporter archive from 1951 until present day on microfilm. So I ordered a library loan and sat in entire summer in my local library. I live down in Ventura County now and look through every page of the Sun Reporter and through reading the newspaper found out in fact that this photo was David Rosenbaum's first record shop which was just down the street from Jackson Sutter also on Sutter Street and it was called Rhythm Records. So David opened this record shop right after World War II and he also started a label of the same name Rhythm Records and he did it with a gentleman over in Oakland named Bob Gettings who eventually took it over from David. So this is a photograph taken outside of Rhythm Records on Sutter Street not Melrose. Also in the window is a sign for a Rhythm Blues hit called Bilbo Was Dead which was celebrating the death of a senator and former governor of Mississippi named Bilbo. This is more David Johnson pictures from clubs. This is actually from Frank Jackson and I love this picture of musicians in daylight not completely comfortable. So I want to talk about the way that redevelopment was talked about in both the Chronicle and the Examiner. So you've just seen a bunch of photographs taken post World War II and early 1950s. During this same time government officials were talking about redevelopment of the Fillmore neighborhood and redevelopment isn't something that was new to the United States. It actually started in the 1920s. Planners were talking about that back then but then you have sorry I'm having a blank you have World War II and you have the depression that both halted any kind of redevelopment development happening but as soon as World War II happened and ended redevelopment started to be discussed again and this was happening all over the United States not just in San Francisco. So the first redevelopment happened downtown in an area that was known as the old produce district. There weren't really a lot of people living down there and it was an enormous success and it's what we now known as the Embarcadero center area. So having the success of that they decided that it was time to have the Fillmore redeveloped and so they started this narrative in both the Examiner and the Chronicle that paints life in the Fillmore as these slums and these poor children there's a supposed child in this story here talking about how he lives in this this seven-year-old lives in this slum and it's rat infested and we need to save this child from these terrible living conditions and and the word slum and blighted are used over and over in in these stories but as you just saw in the photographs that were taken at the same time by African-American photographers the reality of what was going on in the neighborhood was very different from what was being portrayed in these articles and really what it was was to get mainstream support of the redevelopment process and make it acceptable to the general community. Yeah again you see here a photograph of a supposed kitchen in the Fillmore district that you know who knows if that was really taken in the Fillmore again trying to paint this picture that it was this blighted neighborhood that needed to be torn down and built from the ground up. So and simultaneously things like this would happen this is actually we had this photograph we knew was Earth a Kit but we didn't know the circumstances but it turns out this was a yearly party for Delivers of the Sun reporter the newspaper boys and they got to come and meet Earth a Kit and the general the the young man in the on the far left is Danny Duncan who we have since met and who's actually working on a musical history of the Fillmore because his mother had an after hours place and this is this is him so that we've done that Chris Elizabeth has done a number of these oral histories that are also on the website and some are in the book and so we were able to access his family pictures growing up and also kind of in 1951 looking at the sort of ethnic makeup of the neighborhood that after world war two a number of the Japanese families did move back not all of them some of them would stay it away because of bitterness and this is his mother who had this after hours place in her house on Scott Street so as you can see this photo was taken around the same time as those articles were being written and certainly there was no blight nor rat infested kitchens or anything else it was this picture this narrative that the examiner and the Chronicle were trying to sell to San Franciscans there was a I know when we done a couple of the projects in the library where people were restoring photographs that there was a sort of idea that the Victorians were kind of rat traps just because they were old and there was this push in the 50s for modernism but what happened from redevelopment was that before that there had never been any architectural preservation and one of the direct results of the sort of wholesale destruction or that was actually stopped in the middle was that organizations were formed to try to ensure the integrity of a certain architecture and I think that was one of the results this is an interesting photograph because this is a wedding party taken in the 50s and we were sort of always curious so what happened when the Japanese came back and in some cases some of the houses and business were occupied by African Americans and here's an example you could see of a wedding party and people getting together and in fact this photograph influenced playwright who did a play that was an ACT call after the war because of that this photograph kind of answers that at least that part of the question there was you know there was obviously it wasn't completely smooth but for a variety of reasons not the least of which was sort of common of oppression by the society people didn't get along and we've heard stories of people with the after hours clubs come when they came back to move in the neighborhood they would come and hear the music or wait outside like young young boys so there was a kind of cultural connection so this is a photo that was that photo was taken in Jackson's nook that had been a Japanese restaurant before world war two but then when the Japanese Americans were interned an African American concert promoter took it over and it turned into Jackson's nook which was a jazz club this is Saunders King and we've got his information this was the he had one of the major hits from a San Francisco performer called SK Blues that was all over the country so Saunders Saunders was one of the few musicians from the film or that actually had a national presence and he had the house band at Jackson's Sutter for many many years his daughter is Deborah Santana who actually just did an incredible program at MOAD who's also been very generous to us with her father's information so this is the gold mirror yeah go ahead so this is the gold mirror and it's another club that was only allowed whites in until a woman named Leola King took it over in the early 1950s and turned it into what she called the blue mirror and actually when we first were working on the book we approached her and she said that she had lost all of our photographs in a fire and had nothing for us and so when the first edition that was published by Chronicle Books in 2006 came out there's a picture of the Mills Brothers performing with their father she loved the book and actually made her archive available to us we had a number of those kinds of stories that when people sort of saw the book and what had happened here's Louis Armstrong with his wife and and the blue mirror here's Lena Horne signing an autograph Edward G. Robinson it was the film or was actually a kind of go-to place during this time both in terms of during the evenings and after hours this is Leola the second from the right who at one point was one of the most the wealthiest women in San Francisco had property in a number of places here's yeah all right she's actually the the wealthiest person not man or woman in San Francisco this is a picture in her Scott Street a mansion with her mother here she is with Josephine Baker I know when I showed her this picture she wanted me to photoshop out the the guy in the middle but I didn't do that and here she is with Wesley Johnson who had the Texas Playhouse I think this was a party celebrating the fact that Lottie the body who's in the blonde here on the right was about to go on tour to Asia so somebody is asking us to repeat Leola it's Leola L E O L A King and her father actually came to the Fillmore first in the 1940s and opened a very very popular barbecue joint on Webster and Fillmore and then and Leola worked there for a time and then she opened her club in the early 1950s and it lasted until the mid 1960s when redevelopment told her that she had to close Leola was amazing because she actually fought the redevelopment agency until the day she died she lost everything she like we mentioned she was the wealthiest person in all of San Francisco and lost everything to redevelopment but she never gave up the fight she was determined till the end to try and be compensated for everything that was taken away from her and she was beautiful till the very end really is striking woman so this is Lottie the body at the champagne supper club champagne supper club is another example of the changes that happened in the neighborhood during World War II it was once known as cherry land it was a Japanese American owned supper club and then when the Japanese Americans were taken to internment camps African Americans took over the club and called it the champagne supper club and this is Lottie the body jumping over T-Bone Walker's head at the champagne supper club she's a stunningly beautiful woman we got a chance to meet her and talk to her in Detroit she just passed just recently also and it's been really gratifying and you know to sort of in many times meet people that we'd seen photographs of for years and and get a chance to sort of hear their stories directly and there are a lot of people that we missed because they passed before we were able to talk to them to find out here's Elizabeth and Lottie in Detroit so this was the club flamingo that was taken over by Wesley Johnson and he because a lot of people came from both Louisiana and Texas changed the name of the club flamingo to the Texas Playhouse and here he is that's he's the second from the left and his trademark was this white Stetson hat and there were there was always a lot of kind of artwork on many of the clubs these are you can see these are posters of people who are Texas roots including Saunders King and Ivy Joe Hunter and Teddy Wilson and Eddie Taylor we met his son actually we were doing a tour of the Fillmore and someone was sort of correcting some things we were saying and it turned out it was his son who went to who was a pharmacist in the Fillmore and when he went he went to UCSF and when they needed tuition they took the dollar bills down including and the silver dollars in the bar and paid that tuition so there wasn't any live music at the Texas Playhouse what would happen is that Wesley Johnson as you saw there with the microphone would get behind the bar and do this kind of pattern and then DJ play records and it was quite the gathering place it was crowded every night and as you can see by these photos people really dressed to go out and several people told us that what they would do is they get off work on Friday they'd go home dress up and they wouldn't go home until Sunday evening because there is that much going on within the 20 square blocks of the Fillmore neighborhood there's probably during its height over 20 nightclubs after hours clubs and bars um in the Fillmore there were also churches and other kinds of organizations but nobody seemed to photograph we haven't found many photographs from the churches this is um uh Wesley with T-Bone Walker who's an ad for the Club Flamingo I think when he first opened it and here's actually um I believe this is actually in one of the churches in in the Fillmore and that's young Wesley Junior Wesley the third actually yes sitting at the pew the other thing was um there somebody painted these amazing paintings that were all over um turned out it was the person who designed uh Fisherman's Wharf and also the Paramount Theater in Oakland and we actually found these photographs someone had rescued them and given them to their neighbors in the Fillmore and so we for a while we actually showed them when we first showed the work although we've kind of lost touch I'm hoping that they're still in good shape because they were they had actually been very well preserved. Lou can you go back to um slides for a second please so in this slide you can see that there's a photograph of a singer behind the bartender in white that photograph was actually among the images that uh Reggie Pettis rescued from Red Powell's Shoe Shine Poller so what happened was that the Texas Playhouse in the mid 1960s like so many other businesses along Fillmore Street uh they were told by the redevelopment agency that they had to close they were given no money if they didn't own the building they were simply told you have to leave if they were lucky they got um moved to another part of the Fillmore but in many cases especially by the mid 1960s they just had to close and so what probably happened is that was Wesley was closing up quickly took of his collection of photos and brought them over to Red for safekeeping um and the mural go on Lou. That was it that was just that that basically that the whole idea is they knew if he was going to continue and they much like what Reggie did they knew that they wanted to give it to someone that that would honor and protect the the uh this legacy so um my friend of course who I'm not going to remember but um her this is her uncle who lived in the east bay and they would come to the Fillmore every weekend and go to the clubs and uh the you can see that they're sitting at a table in front of this Lionel Hampton painting that we had shown before so this again these interesting stories um are expanded and in some cases we've included them in the book and sometimes we hear about them later but I think that the the narrative is really pretty broad and um that's this is a universal story actually so one of the persons who spent a lot of time in San Francisco was Billie Holiday this is actually a photograph by Jerry Stoll who was uh the official photographer at the Monterey Jazz Festival and photographed throughout the Bay Area for many years and he actually gave me a copy of this picture which started a whole series I've been doing about different pictures of Billie Holiday. Here she is with Mel Torme. That's at Amon's Breakfast Club that was underneath the Temple Theater on Fillmore Street and this is Wesley John. The background is a a poster for the Tapper's Inn which was a club in Richmond where I live now so the Norland Swing Club was another sort of club appealing to transplants from from Louisiana and actually Billie appeared there for over a month but it was uh unfortunately closed down by the feds because the owner of it um was uh not paying his taxes. So this is a photograph of one of the few photographs that we have of Charles Sullivan known as the mayor of uh the Fillmore and Charles Sullivan um had his first club actually down in San Mateo and then came to San Francisco and started buying up leases in different buildings. He had a liquor store in the Fillmore District. He ran a bunch of jukebox uh jukeboxes in different bars and restaurants around the neighborhood and he was also the person who uh got the lease on the Fillmore Auditorium and the Fillmore was actually uh at that time the ambassador uh roller skating rink and Charles it turned it back into a night club and began um booking pretty big named acts and he became one of the largest promoters of African-American music west of the Mississippi and so his circuit would start up in Seattle and go through Portland and then down into San Francisco and sometimes even down into Los Angeles. That's Lionel Hampton wearing his uh wearing Wesley's um Stetson hat. Liz is also getting me one o'clock so we should keep moving along. Okay. So um it's interesting my friend John Goddard who had village music said that when he was 14 he took the bus into San Francisco to see little Richard uh at a concert that Charles Sullivan was was um promoting and he was both fascinated and frustrated by the fact that little Richard had this left-handed guitarist who was very flamboyant um and it turned out it was Jimmy Hendricks. Um we also heard that little Richard fired Jimmy Hendricks because he was too weird. We've also heard some scholars say that Jimmy Hendricks never played with little Richard at the Fillmore but John took this picture so with this idea of facts being a moving target has always been an issue well it's just a reality of uh people remembering things from the past. And so this is from uh go ahead. This is from uh the Crystal Ballroom which is in Portland, Oregon and uh my husband and I were up there last Christmas and I saw a poster of uh it was Ike and Tina Turner I'm like oh my gosh this looks just like the posters that Charles Sullivan used to do for the Fillmore and then as we were walking down the stairs because the ballroom set up a lot like the Fillmore where the ballroom's on a upper floor uh there was this little uh montage of images honoring Charles Sullivan so yes in fact it was the club that he uh booked along his west coast circuit. This is Ricardo Alborado um whose daughter is a good friend of mine and he came to in the first wave of uh Filipinos uh bachelors who came in the 30s. He taught himself photography. He worked in the Presidio in the kitchen and ended up documenting life and lived in the western edition and documented life in the Fillmore. He also documented life in rural and urban California of Filipino and Hispanic life and we were able to use some of his photographs and this idea of stories um of the and the photographers because it was very interesting to us as we did our research. This is Jackson's Nook is that right? Yeah Jackson's Nook. And here's a house party we love this there's probably a eclectic uh a group of uh of musicians and I love the wallpaper. I again want to point out that those photos were taken in the early 1950s um when the those articles in the Chronicle Examiner were painting the neighborhood as a slum. This is on Thanksgiving Day in the Presidio. This is Vernon Alley who was actually another one of the uh musicians who got international fame. He toured with I think with Lionel Hampton and other other people. He was a basis who we met before he passed and there's his brother Eddie Alley who was actually very generous uh with us in terms of his imagery and his stories. This is a picture of he and his wife on their wedding day and here they are together actually at a celebration honoring the the integration of the musicians union in San Francisco that didn't happen until the late 60s. Late 50s. Late 50s. I think it was later than that. That was the whole point was that San Francisco was supposed to be so progressive and they didn't integrate uh black musicians couldn't play east of Venice for many years. Anyway um so one of the clubs that we'd heard a lot about was Jimbo's Bob City which was located on post for many well during the whole time it was in existence and um we were able to meet Jimbo um and we've certainly heard a lot of stories about it and both Reggie and um we met finally heard about met Steve Jackson who was the official photographer which Liz can sort of talk a little bit more about but there it was a club that was known all over the world actually and a lot of the musicians who came to San Francisco would come to it after hours because there was a rhythm section set up and they would sit in and prove themselves and it was also yeah chicken shop. So Bob City actually started out in the late 1940s it was one of those spaces that Charles Sullivan leased and he leased it to uh Slim Gaylord who called it Vout City and Slim was a interesting musician but definitely not a businessman and eventually skipped town owing Charles Sullivan a bunch of money so Charles Charles approached Jimbo Edwards and asked if he would like to run um a restaurant so actually Bob City started out as Jimbo's waffle house and you saw a very um a photograph inside the waffle house very early in our talk um but the musicians discovered that there was this back room that wasn't being used so they asked if they could set up and do jam sessions and so soon the jam sessions became more popular than the waffle house and what surprises people is that it actually was only open from 2am until 6am and so after the regular clubs closed people would come to Bob City from 2am to 6am um and then go home and get ready for church uh Sunday mornings and this is Steve Jackson who I uh found out about when I was taking a cab ride to the Fillmore and happened to start talking with the cab driver and he said oh I used to play cards with this guy that said he was a photographer at some of the clubs and he's like I'll try and get ahold of him and stupidly I got out of the cab without getting his contact information so I stewed about it for a month kicking myself that I didn't get his phone number and then out of the blue he called and said I have the number and he's willing to to meet with you so I went to his house at Hunter's Point which is where this photograph was taken and after he brought me down to his man cave in the basement of the house and uh it was 10 o'clock in the morning but he still served me some some wine and we had a few drinks and then he pulled back his curtains and showed me this incredible collection of photographs because he was the house photographer of Bop City so many of these images you're about to see are taken by by Steve Jackson Jr. and we're so grateful to Steve and who has since passed away and to his family for allowing us to use so many of the images. Here's a picture of Bop City with um if you look on the right hand's upper right hand there's a Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis and a number of other really well known musicians all having a wonderful time and you can see it's also was an after hours I'm going to go through these pretty quickly um you could talk a little bit about this mural um but we'll we'll get to him in a minute the other thing was I'd seen all these photographs of of this space and it turned out this building was moved around the corner to Fillmore Street and was Marcus Books for many years and it's no longer but the space was very small that which was always sort of surprising you know the idea that photographs maybe just quickly talk about who he was and then let's keep going. So this is Harry Smith he is a well known musicologist uh experimental filmmaker artist so Harry was a huge jazz fan lived over in Berkeley finally was staying in the jazz club so much that he moved first above Jackson's nook and then uh Jimbo Edwards became kind of his art patron and said you can live above um Bop City if in exchange for doing murals in Bop City so you can see him here sitting in front of one of the murals that he painted um and he was there until probably like 1952 and then decided to move to New York where he lived in the Chelsea Hotel this is actually a Jerry Stoll photograph yet taken in Jimbo's he's Chico Hamilton a lot of the bass players said that there's the house bass was so bad that they refused to play it it's always interesting here's Johnny Mathis um San Francisco uh uh native uh sitting in he went to Washington High School up on Gary and had to decide between becoming a track star or singer I think he did make his choice this is Jimbo with Herbert Kane here's Louis Armstrong and his wife in front of a poster of being a mural and also a poster for Jimbo for mayor Roy Consolvis uh Paul Consolvis thank you this is Teddy Edwards and we heard that the gentleman with the saxophone has just been asked to stop playing this was like one of those things where if you'd sit in and if you didn't measure up you were asked to stop although we we must realize do we figure out who she is that she must have been able to play because they would not have let her sit in if she couldn't uh we did she was the wife of another jazz musician but her name's escaping me not Lenny Tristano's wife is that right I think that that's just it is Chet Baker he was stationed at the Presidio and so he would sneak out of the barracks after uh lights went out and come to bop city and jam and then sneak back in before Reveley in the morning and this is Max Roach and we think it may be Ben Webster who's second third from the left Sammy Davis sitting in we heard that Frank Sinatra and the rad pack would come to Jimbo's and Charlie Parker the other thing was interesting is that the names of entertainers and athletes were painted on the backs of many of the chairs in the club and if they showed up Jimbo would force the person in the chair to move so that the person could sit down so you know where they weren't supposed to sell liquor and also I think as part of this this strategy to try to close the neighborhood it was continually having difficulties with the police well also the police the police chief um did not like the fact that there was interracial dating going on in the Fillmore clubs and some of the jazz musicians said that he would target the clubs to try and discourage um that so he was from the redevelopment agency and then this is actually some photographs we got where they were surveying all the buildings many of which were torn down later so what the redevelopment agency would do is they systematically went to every single building in the neighborhood and you could see the numbers on the slide previous and there would be a rating sheet for each building and they would give it a rating of one to ten as you know for different things and it was pretty shocking to read them the San Francisco public library has the redevelopment archives and I encourage people to go down there and look at these sheets to see what the rating system judged the neighborhood on so in the middle of this actually activists from the neighborhood stopped the process and that's why this neighborhood had empty lots for many years because they basically people had already been displaced but they stopped the destruction of a lot of the of the remaining buildings and also made it so that many of the Victorians got moved rather than torn down that's how we moved redevelopment was in two parts so there was a one and the neighborhood really didn't know what they were getting into an a one but by the time a one was almost finished they certainly were pretty upset so they created organization called Waco which sued the redevelopment agency and the city of San Francisco and Waco actually won and it was the first time in the history of the United States where the courts recognized that the neighborhood and the people who lived in it even if they didn't own the houses or buildings in which they lived in or their businesses were in had a right to have a say in what was going to happen to their neighborhood so while it was too late for the most part for the film or neighborhood it actually set a precedent for the rest of the country because as I mentioned before redevelopment was happening in neighborhoods all over this country and primarily in in neighborhoods of color and so this was a big deal when this happened that finally people who lived in the neighborhood had a say in what was going to happen to their neighborhood so one of the spaces you saw that picture before this was the what was originally a synagogue a pattern that actually has happened in places like Harlem also and Jim Jones took it over and it became the pimples people's temple and many of the people that would come to the people's temple were people either people or the descendants of people who had been displaced by this redevelopment and they were kind of obviously looking for a connection that had been lost from before so Jim Jones sort of was connected politically but sort of started acting more and more strange and then took a lot of people to Guyana and many of the people who died in Guyana were as I said people that had been displaced in the film war so it's sort of an idea that the oppression that happened from redevelopment kind of manifested itself for generations afterwards so we actually found photographs this is a Steve Jackson picture taken at Jimbo's during a jam session and on the left is John Handy next to him is pointy point Dexter who spent a lot of time in the film war next to him is a young John Coltrane who was probably in town and came to Jimbo's and next to him is Frank Fisher who was a trumpet player who lives in Richmond still and when we first showed this work John Handy and Frank Fisher played at the kind of celebratory concert that we had at the Performing Arts Library and Museum so that became that picture became the cover of the first edition of the book by Chronicle Books in 2006 I won't talk about the tent which we were never happy about but we it went out of print in 2010 and in the meantime we've got a lot more information a lot more material and so we were able to republish ourselves a new version of the book with much better graphics larger and a hundred pages more and here's a picture of John Handy who's been all very supportive of our project so Lou do you want to wrap it up and take because it where it's we're at 120 we've gone a bit over to take questions but I just wanted to mention that the new version of the book volume four is now available through Moad and you can order it online I'm sure they will post the link to where you can do that and I think we can take questions now okay yeah we actually I thought we had a picture of the new cover but here's the the website and also you can order the book both either through Moad and their bookstore and hopefully Elizabeth will reiterate that site and let me just stop sharing hold on okay so yes we encourage people to go to our website harlemofthewestsf.com on that website are all the interviews that we did for the book in their entirety you know you can only fit so much into the book itself so you can read and in some cases actually listen to the interviews that we conducted for the book so please go to our website and check that out there's so much more information and it's wonderful to hear the musicians and club owners and photographers talk about the history of the film war I just know that the this has been recorded so hopefully that recording can be sent out to everybody who registered for it because I know a lot of people are not happy that they were not able to see this yes I have many angry uh many angry texts from my friends like what's going on so I'm not seeing any questions um go to the chat there's let's see uh we got something from Charles Charles Sullivan's family oh I guess some people seem to be able to get on it maybe through uh the moad site because I just got uh on youtube but we'll we should send out something um Anissa is any do you have some questions or Elizabeth uh somebody is asking what jazz recordings are available from the film or during that time well sadly not a lot although just this morning uh a woman radio reporter from kcbs him wonderfully sent us a link to uh recording that her father and uncle did at jacks of sutter probably in the late 40s or early 50s and we're going to share that on our Harlem of the west sf facebook page and website so if anyone can identify the band please let us know I'm wondering if it might be saunders king is an incredible recording it's kind of scratchy but it really uh brings to life the uh excitement uh that there must have been in uh the clubs going to see live music also on our website we have a couple of films that were shot in the blue mirror in the early 1960s I think there's two of them so again I encourage you to go to our website um lol fulsom is playing a song in the blue mirror in the early 1960s and it was filmed so hopefully that link still works um it's on our website and you can check it out and the other thing is that both elizabeth and I elizabeth especially was the associate producer of a of a documentary that kqed did on the film or and in fact we got a lot of material for both the film and the book by putting the word out um and that is now available is that right on uh ebay if you look up the film or maybe you have the correct information about that yeah I can uh I can uh post that later on our film or um facebook page so I also wanted to someone just reminding me there's some sugar pie to santo recordings um there's a great two c two or three cd set that um was done probably about 10 years ago uh is a compilation of all the rhythm record recordings again rhythm records was both a record store and a record label and so this wonderful uh compilation was created I think you can get it through down home music um and uh so you can again it's it's mainly rnb um there's no jazz on that but you could uh check that out as well and saunders king also has a compilation of all of his recordings um let's see so I also have a question from um ritchie under burger I know about the lull fulsen film in the blue mirror but you just mentioned two of them who is in the other one if it's not fulsen um I'd have to go on our website and look my memory is not as good as it used to be I'm getting old and how about in the original you say that billy holiday used to also play at the redwood city veterans hall when she would come to sf um to play clubs back in the day do you know the backstory about this I don't know I don't know anything about that I yeah I don't remember saying that uh we said that billy holiday used to play at the redwood city veterans hall um she played at the New Orleans swing club in san francisco and she played at uh the long bar um in san francisco and a few other clubs as well but I never read anything about her making it down to redwood city um maybe someone out someone who's uh watching our talk could chime in if they know anything about that um the photos of billy holiday do you have dates for those lou no mostly not um I could probably find the one that um uh was that um I could I I have to look I'm not sure I think they're probably in the 50s I would have think it's interesting about billy holiday there were fellows that I used to see that hung out by the burger king uh uh uh philmore kind of north of geary and we were talking about billy holiday and they said it didn't matter what kind of shape she was in she was always so beautiful everybody's um mouth would fall open when she would walk by and my uh uh good friend uh dan Collins um was uh the dentist had an office for many years in the neighborhood and he was he took care of he was billy holidays uh dentist and he said he told her that she'd never really had a man say that he loved her and that she believed him and that that was sort of the source of a lot of her blues and unhappiness but probably also helped her with her art so I was going to say that I've been collect because the thing the first thing that was interesting to me about her is that she hardly ever looked the same in photographs um her physical appearance did change but I think it was also her physical appearance and her being was elusive and I've been collecting photographs I have about 80 photographs of her um which um I find really interesting and and it kind of reflects who she is as a person as an artist also so someone's asking uh what were the exact 20 blocks that made up the film or district so what what the redevelopment agency uh did when uh they decided to do redevelopment is they took a map and basically drew this big red line that was from California, Van Ness, Oak, and Divisidero so that was the area that they targeted for redevelopment um so if you can imagine they were actually considering uh tearing down the iconic painted ladies um the Victorians that you see from the park right there I mean that was definitely on the chopping block so it's hard to imagine if they had been successful that whole area being wiped clean but fortunately um that was part of A2 and Waco won their lawsuit and all of that was stopped so we're very very fortunate that that happened um something else someone else is asking about uh West Coast Jazz has been referred to as Cool Jazz um Cool Jazz was really uh the white jazz musicians Dave Brubeck was a part of that um it was also later than that period we were talking about right and it really was uh more of white jazz musicians it didn't really um I guess Chad Baker would be uh the only one that played in the film or that was part of the Cool Jazz movement Miles Davis actually at one point was kind of a part of that also the other thing I was going to say about the neighborhood is one of the things they did the first things they did was it used to be that Geary Street would go from the bay to downtown and one of its main intersections was Fillmore and Geary and the first thing they did was to sink Fillmore um below and that actually killed a lot of the businesses um uh because it would the idea was to make it for people in the avenues to be able to get downtown faster but it basically meant that people would bypass the Fillmore and I think that that was something that um it never really recovered from I mean there were efforts actually after um the attempt to make the uh the preservation district like the last slide I showed was now on the street you see bricks that sort of show where some of the clubs were and some of the people were some of which are wrong but but um that there was a sort of re renaissance that about 2000 where some businesses came back but a lot of them did not last because most of the people have been displaced and so there was not support that Yoshi's was on Fillmore Street for a while and it didn't last so someone's asking about the both and clubs so the both and club um the building is still there on Divisidero uh but it was kind of outside the time period of the Fillmore Jazz era it was um when a lot of the clubs in the Fillmore district were closed down due to redevelopment Divisidero Street became kind of the jazz center for San Francisco and what's really amazing is that we had a talk um at the western edition uh branch of the San Francisco Public Library and the manager of the library it's her father that started uh the both and and so I'm hoping to interview her in the next few months um when we're all able to travel and mingle with each other in person and get the story of the both and from her father um it was actually you know Bob City and the both and were very tiny clubs I mean you can fortunately go see both buildings and it's pretty shocking to walk into them and think that these extremely famous musicians played at these such tiny spaces um so if you're able to take a walk and go check that out um someone else is asking about if we're going to do a similar study of 7th Street in Oakland um no I think Clue and I we still have we have enough with the Fillmore I have a lot of my friends from Oakland are not happy with me because I'm said I'm going to leave that to someone else but it is an incredible story and certainly related because it came the the scene in in Oakland has its roots from the same migration and what is was absolutely true was people brought their musical tastes and their cultural practices along with them when they came west and that that as a general story has been kind of what a lot of the work I've done since I became a photographer and archivist has been about so maybe now I was going to say hit us up in a couple of years but I think that there's a lot of really um some people that I think um would be able to do a great job we what Elizabeth and I both um it was interesting we this kind of took over our lives and it's been really good but there's been a couple times when we thought we were done and of course it's never really done and um the fact that so many people signed up for this shows how much interest there is both specifically in this story but also this is a general kind of story that has applications in a lot of different places especially now with what's been going on in the world so um a I would say I'm just really gratified and I've been told that this has been recorded and hopefully there'll be a way for people to access the whole thing because I know some people were able to join it later on YouTube and I'll jump I'll jump in really quick I apologize about all of those tech issues we were managed to get on YouTube live it has been recorded and hopefully the entire thing was recorded and it did go on live so we did pick up quite a few more people and I did email every single participant and my IT guy is in big trouble so hopefully also we're going to keep all the questions and the chats and we will get back to people you can also access us if you look up our website you can get ahold of us because we're very interested every time we do this we get new information about people and places and also the questions are always really interesting so um I don't know if it's helpful for us to say our web our emails now but maybe I will um you can reach me at lewatts at ucsc.edu and Liz and you can reach me at otw front it stands for on the waterfront otw front at gmail.com so if you've recognized anyone in the photographs that we've shown um or any of the businesses and you're able to tell us anything about them um we would be very grateful uh if you would contact us um and then we will share that on both our facebook page and on our website the website really isn't there to be uh used by everyone people can if you do your own project you're welcome to use the interviews just please credit the Harlem of the West SF project um but you know we we really have been the gatherers of this information but we want everyone to be able to use it it's important that people understand the history of this neighborhood I would do a proviso though if you're interested in using any of the images it's really important that you uh get permission from the families we have we do not have the copyrights we're able to use it in conjunction with the book and as it should be um the permission or if there's any remuneration should go to the families of the photographers and the club owners who've been incredibly supportive of us and um that's been important to us and we sort of we have stayed in their good graces by making sure that that happens thank you for saying that Lou you're absolutely right yes please do not use the photographs without the permission of the owners of the photographs which are not us anything else from either Elizabeth or Anisa um someone's asking if Leonard's barbecue was part of the era you referenced and um I don't know the answer to that do you Lou no but perhaps what we might do is post some of these questions also on the website because I think we're able to keep them and then um if people have answers or we can kind of get that information out we're on our facebook page maybe that's yeah all right well thank you yes thanks everybody and I'm glad some people were able to join and hopefully people will be able to look at the recording um which will be made available and all I can say is technology is both a good and a pain in the ass thing I agree I agree and we thank you all for being here today and it is recorded and I will be sending out a mass email to all the 1337 people that registered for this event and we so apologize but like I said we're library we learn every day and we encourage you to sign up for summer reading we encourage you to buy the book it is gorgeous if you haven't seen it um and it's available through Milwad's bookstore and I will be sending everybody a follow-up email with all of this great information and a link to the recording I also wanted to add that even if you're not in the United States for the first time ever you can buy our book so uh please do so because this is the first time since the book came out in 2006 that it's available worldwide not just in the United States although people from other parts of the world seem to be aware of it I've gotten copies anyway which is pretty amazing bye bye bye thank you everyone