 Wow. Thank you all for being here. What an amazing crowd. I sometimes on a Sunday beautiful sunny day. I don't expect it. So I'm really super happy you are all here and celebrating the work of Mr. Lewis Watts and his great research on this book and his photography expert. And I just want to make a few announcements. We are celebrating more than a month, which is San Francisco Public Library's version of Black History Month. Kick it off early around here. And then we also celebrate all year round. So anytime you're on our website, you can easily find there's like ways to filter to certain programs. So if you're looking for programs on black interest, you can filter to just that. But check it out. You'll see as you walked in, I don't know if you came in through the Grove Street, that beautiful new banner that we have up. There's an exhibit happening in the African American Center. Gorgeous photos. So please check out everything. Our at the library newsletter is on the back table, which has all the info and more. So I did set some books back there as well. And if you didn't get one, I'm sorry, but I will be doing an Instagram giveaway for this. So keep a lookout. This is on the rooftop. And this is our on the same page selection for January, February on the same page is a bimonthly read that we do at the library. And this book by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton, she cites Harlem of the West as being a prime resource for this book. This is a beautiful book. I wanted it for the one city one book, but it didn't didn't quite make it. So get look look forward to that announcement to coming out for our next one city one book. So this book should be available at all 28 locations right now. You can walk in. You'll see a big stack of them. Check it out. There'll be book clubs and then Margaret Sexton Margaret Wilkerson Sexton will be in combo with Dorothy Lazard, a celebrated librarian and historian from Oakland. And that author talk is going to take place at the African American Art and Cultural Complex. And it will be on Tuesday, February 27. And like all library events, it is free to go to and I will have more copies of that book at that event. So please come out. We really want to support our offsite locations as well. We want to acknowledge that we occupy the unceded and ancestral homeland of the Ramya Tushaloni people who are the original inhabitants of this area. We benefit from living and working on this traditional homeland and we want to pay our respects to the ancestors, elders and relatives of the Ramya Tushaloni community. With that, I encourage you to check out our many resources we have on reading, film, also check out the Segorte Land Trust. They're an all women led indigenous group out of Oakland doing amazing work in land back. All right. I think that's going to do it for my announcements. Please avoid walking in front of the camera. Now, without further ado, I'm excited to have Lou back with us. He has done this presentation a few times. Once when we went into COVID land, we did online and literally 5,000 people registered for this event. So I should not be surprised that this is a full house. And then we did it at our little Western Edition branch. I don't know if you know that branch, but the program room is about the size of my thumb. And we had people out, out, out the room, out the room. It was amazing. So I think you are all in for a treat. This book is by Hay Day Books. It's been twice published and it is out of print again. I encourage you to check out the book. You can look at it. Please, that's my copy. So don't walk away with my copy. And let me introduce you to this book, gorgeous photos, gorgeous archival photos of the beautiful Fillmore neighborhood prior to the city's destruction of it. Lou is a photographer, archivist, and professor of art at UC Santa Cruz with a long-standing interest in cultural landscape of African diaspora in the Bay Area and internationally. All right, this is beautiful. Lou, are you ready for this amazing house? Look at these people. We might even need more chairs. Hi, everybody. Let's see. There's actually a lot of faces I don't know, so maybe I won't be repeating myself, but there are some people that have seen this before. Let me talk about my history about the Fillmore. My family moved to San Francisco in 1964, right as I graduated from high school, and I spent the summer here. And the first thing I said was, this is where I want to live, although it took me three years to move back. But in that summer, someone said, do you want to go to the Black Area of San Francisco? And I said, sure. And so they took me to the Fillmore on a Friday night, and it was incredible. It was jumping from heights to all the way up four or five blocks north of Gary. People were dressed to the nines. It was basically wall-to-wall. They were walking in the streets, and I'll never forget it. So then when I transferred to Berkeley in 1968, I said, I got to go find that neighborhood again, and I couldn't find it because it didn't exist. It had been erased. So I did find it eventually, and basically it looked like a war zone. There were a lot of empty lots, and eventually I heard more about the story, which I'll show you a little bit more about. And why don't we begin, and then I can sort of talk a little bit more about how it evolved. Although I will say the book just went out of print from heyday, and at the end I'm going to put a list up here, because eventually I want to probably do another fundraising and republish it, because it needs to be published. Every time I'm on Fillmore, people come up to me who I don't know and say, when's the book coming out? So I think it's really important. It needs to be out for people to exist, and I'm glad it's in all the libraries. So let's start with the images. I was going to say that this is actually my friend Luis Montmendez, who's probably the most photographed photographer in New York. But I love it because he really has an old school. He's got a speed graphic, although he actually shoots Polaroids with it. He's just somebody I really like, and he sort of harkens back to a particular age, and you'll see he had a lot to do with a lot of the photographers in the Fillmore. I have to say the original Harlem is a place I've been photographing probably for 40 years, and it always feels like I think I lived there during the Harlem Renaissance. Everybody says I was really good friends with Langston Hughes, but it always seems very familiar, and I kind of photograph it that way. So this is actually Mr. Hayes, who was one of the photographers. What happened was, well, I'll start with that history, but eventually because the Fillmore was already an entertainment center, when a series of events having to do with Pearl Harbor, the Japanese being interned, and the need for people to work in the shipyards, and in San Francisco the only place that was available for African-Americans was the western edition. So almost immediately, the people who came primarily from Texas and Louisiana and other parts, well, people came from all over the country to the west during World War II, but the African-American migration was primarily people from Texas and Louisiana, and they brought their musical tastes with them, and it turned out in this neighborhood there was already infrastructure, so almost immediately there were seven or eight, nine clubs playing jazz for the most part and other kinds of African-American music. And the clubs hired photographers to document what was going on. This is what Fillmore Street looked like up until World War II when those gates were torn down for scrap for the war effort. But there was one of those in each intersection. So this was also, it was also one of the most diverse communities in San Francisco, and it was actually where Japantown was, it was where the Japanese had been there most of the 20th century. So right after Pearl Harbor, as I think many of you know, the Japanese were rounded up and shipped off to concentration camps, not one of the better events in the history of the United States. But they were, before that they were really integrated in the society. They had businesses, but this is someone lining up, getting ready to get on a bus or train to go one of the places in the West. So what happened was, I think actually I got hired by, I think it was by an architectural firm because there was some, I know what, well the community was basically redeveloped away, and there was some effort to try to at least honor that past, and I think I got hired to try to find evidence of the past because I kind of had hints that it existed, but basically there was nothing, there was nothing in the libraries, but I, and I think it was actually, well a couple things that happened, but what happened was I had a chance, my friend Mildred Howard said, I want you to go to Red's Shine Parlor, because you'll find it interesting, and she was doing a piece, she's a great artist, who was doing a piece on Shushine Parlers, and I went in and Red, who is that on the right, on the left, backwards, I walked in and he had photographs of everybody that had passed through and people in the community. You can see here's the hip by the bar, and you see he's got pictures of Sitting Bull and Robert Kennedy and Bobby Freeman, who was a ribbon blue star, and then there were also kind of all these jazz images, and I got really excited. I said, wow, this is amazing. Can I photograph your walls? And he said, absolutely not, he basically threw me out. And my co-author, who was working for Bill Graham, had the same thing happen, and what happened was he had really been messed over by the city and he had to move three or four times. The last thing he went in was someone saying, oh I can help what you're doing, and he wanted nothing to do with it. So it turns out Mildred's brother Billy was very good friends with him. And tell him you know me. And I keep thinking I went back like in a couple of weeks, but I think it was six months or later. And so when I went back, he was gone and the walls were bare. And so then eventually, so I was, you know, God, I wonder what happened. I hope that work still exists. And so when I got hired to do this research, I was asking, you know what happened to the Shushan parlor and eventually I was across the street and Reggie Pettis, who had the new Chicago barbershop, said, oh they're in my back room. So it turns out in the African-American community, barbershops, mortuaries, beauty parlors are the historians and the cultural archivists. And what happened was Red was also a little feisty because he had a stroke not too long after I'd seen him. He died and I think the shop was empty for a little while. I think his son tried to run it. But the landlord came and was pulling things off the wall and was about to throw them out. And Reggie noticed what was going on, went across the street and was able to rescue them. So they'd been sitting in his back room for two or three years. And unfortunately he was excited as I was. And so that started a whole, first thing, it started just this process that I was able to use the photographs that he had for a report that was being done for the, it was the forerunner, not the forerunner, the thing that's after the redevelopment agency, the redevelopment agency was actually closed probably for good. And I remember somebody who worked for the guard commission, I'd sort of started, I was looking at the images and somebody said, you know, you need to show these. So this is one of these things. I was teaching photography but I was old school and strictly dark room. But in the mid-90s there was this digital thing happening. And I think I took Photoshop a couple of times but I wasn't using it and I didn't have to teach it then. And so I would take it and then forget what I had learned. But I had some students who knew it. It was teaching in the architecture school at Berkeley. And actually architecture was the first people to do digital graphics. So I had some students that knew it and whenever I needed something done I would call on them. So I remember I called a student and said, can you help me with this? And he says, you know, you need to do this yourself. So when I had something where I was invested in it, I learned Photoshop. I mean, you know, it's what happened. I needed to have something with on the line and that's how I learned to do digital rendering. This is actually a drawing of red that was in that collection. And here's Reggie who rescued the picture. As you can see, he already had some of the photographs on his wall. So some of the pictures were not in really good shape and this is something that probably would not have been able to do pre-digital because I was actually able to restore them. It's pretty amazing. So I was hooked in terms of that happening. The other thing is that this has happened since I've been doing this. I have a very good friend, Jules Allen, who's a photographer who's from here but actually has been in New York for a long time and I wanted to show him this work. So he was looking through the book, the first edition, and he stopped dead at this picture because it's a photograph of his father. As you can see, this spitting image, and this has happened a number of times where when we've shown the work sometimes, someone will say, oh, that's my auntie. So the kind of knowledge of who's in the photographs has grown. In fact, there may be somebody in the audience now to see somebody they recognize. I hope so. So what happened was in that collection that Red had, and it turns out Red had inherited a number of the images that when the clubs were forced to close, a lot of them had collections. They gave them to Red because he was actually still in business even though he had to move. So that's what started, and what was incredible was it showed this history and kind of life. And the other thing that was interesting, I grew up in Seattle. I'm the son of parents who also came west from the south from the Great Migration. And so I kind of had some, there was the same thing in Seattle. The people came from the south and brought with them, and you could sort of see it on Jackson Street in different areas. So I was really interested in both something that was familiar and then things that were changed. There was always this interesting thing about getting your hair conked. At a particular time, it went out of favor when naturals came in. This is Bicycle who was a vaudevillian performer, although I think Flavor Flav and a couple of hip-hop people must have taken their aesthetic from him. But I think what's interesting about if you look at the movie posters, this looks like it's probably the late 40s, maybe around the Korea era because of the films that are showing. So it's interesting that because none of these were labeled and eventually some people were able to identify them, but we were never quite always able to see. And then the other thing was besides the clubs where musicians would play, there was also this whole tradition of chorus girls, which is probably a throwback from another time. And this is actually, his name was Little Ed Lee, he was actually 6'4". Here's someone, there's a number of pictures of him that you'll see. And I tried for two years to sort of make an appointment to talk to him and he kept saying, oh, I got my cars in the shop, he always kept putting me off and then he passed and a number of things that happened. So I'm sure he had a lot of stories. But the other thing was I saw these dudes in Stetson hats and as you can see, it had no influence on me at all. It was incredible. I'm actually doing a talk at the D'Young, I didn't tell you this, in a couple of weeks. They're having an exhibit that's opening on the 20th, called Fashion in San Francisco. And so they wanted me to come and talk about fashion in the film more. I know, people told me, if you were not dressed, you could not hit the street. It was actually really interesting. It did change, but that was pretty amazing. So this is actually the Booker T. Washington Hotel and I think this is in the early 50s. And what's interesting is you see Ella Fitzgerald over on the right. And I love, she's got her gloves folded neatly on her purse. I love the rug that's in that and then I love the dude with the Argyle socks to the left. But next to her is Robert Lee and next to him is Don Newcomb, a publisher for the Brooklyn and Los Angeles Dodgers. And next to him is Joe The Jet Perry, who was a running back for the 49ers. So this, I think this was obviously a breakfast, I think it was, of famous people in the Bay Area. So it's interesting kind of both what the clues, visual clues that you see. And so after World War II, some of the Japanese moved back to the area and it was always interesting to see how, because a lot of the houses were now occupied by African Americans. There were boarding houses and also private homes. And one of the questions was how did the old newcomers, the newcomers and the old residents get along? And I think there was some tension. In fact, a professor at UC Playwright wrote a play called After the War that was partly based on this photograph. And the idea was here's a wedding party, a Japanese wedding party and you can see that many of the people in the party are African Americans. So there were people connected and it took a little while for people to adjust. But I love that picture because of what it shows. This is, if you know the Boom Boom Room, this was a dax that was originally on Sutter and then moved to Fillmore. And I think this is again sort of post-war picture. I think there's the guy on the right, on the left, really, when I turn around I'm completely confused. But he seems to have an Eisenhower era jacket and you can see Acme beer and a number of other kind of references, but I like that picture a lot too. And this is Frank Jackson who was a pianist who, on the right, and it's great when I first showed this work, the first parts of this work, I showed it in the, I think it was actually in the Veterans Building because when the city hall was under construction and Willie Brown's with then mayor's office was in the Veterans Building. So I showed that and I had met him finally and he came and played at the opening. We've had a number of those situations where musicians from the period have played at events for this, which is a nice way to connect the past to the present. This is a group, I don't know who, but celebrating the release of their record and I also like the way they're dressed and then you can see other evidence of the time and the ads in the background. And this is the Four Naturals and actually the Four Naturals seemed to have an interesting set of people because this is Frank at the keyboard, this sort of, this motif, kind of a stylized keyboard, but I saw other pictures of the Four Naturals with other musicians, but I love that picture also, really great graphics and dressed to the nine. This is Louis Jordan, that's him on the right and a little tiny was a DJ and you can see the pointing to a poster of him and actually the couple on the other side ran, operated one of the hotels. There were two or three African American hotels in the neighborhood. Louis, ooh, you should look him up. Louis Jordan was a contemporary, an artist, I think you could still call him jazz, but he actually was a forerunner of rap. He did a lot of sort of talking over the records and over music. Really good, you should look him up or look him on YouTube and see he was pretty cool. So this is David Johnson, this is like one of those things where all of a sudden, I know what happened was, with the opening I had at the veterans building, a woman came up to me and said, you know, I used to work for Bill Graham and one of my jobs was to research where all the jazz clubs were because Bill Graham had the Fillmore Auditorium at that time and her name was Elizabeth Pepin and I think we sort of said, well, God, maybe we need to collaborate and actually right after that she got hired as an associate producer for the documentary, the Fillmore that KQED did that just reared a little while ago. I think you can find it on their website, it's called the Fillmore. I was kind of on that advisory board and so we put the word out and started finding people from the neighborhood and finding more photographers and a couple of people kept saying there's this photographer, David Johnson, who's the first African-American to study with Ansel Adams at the, the Art Institute or what was the Art Institute and I eventually got to meet him and he's become a really good friend of mine and this is actually the cover of a book he did that is actually in the Bancroft Library now and he's in the Library of Congress and I'm other people, but this is, I always take credit that I resuscitated his career because he studied with Ansel Adams and then afterwards opened a photo studio in the Fillmore and what we liked about his work that he contributed was besides in the clubs he photographed life on the street so that gave us another, other examples. I guess that's, oops, I went the wrong way, let's see. So these are his, this is a photograph taken from I think it's Larkin looking north on Fillmore Street at the back, that building in the back is the Fillmore Auditorium and the one next to it was the second, and I think synagogue originally in San Francisco and then it was eventually taken over by Jim Jones in the People's Temple and that looms large in the history of Fillmore also. This picture I think is taken in 1947 or 8. So like I said, this is the record shop, one of the record shops and it says, Bilbo was dead which was a rhythm and blues hit and Bilbo was a senator from Mississippi and when he died some people celebrated. God, I can't remember the name of this club but this was a club at night and a skating rink during the day. And it's interesting to see you see the audience was mixed people, I mean the Fillmore really became a go-to place to go. And here he is, he's actually 98 and doing, he's sharper than I am and this is Elizabeth and I at an opening, God I can't remember where this is but it was a venue someplace. I'll have to remember. Here's a picture of Duke Ellington charming ladies. I think this is at the Booker T. Washington Hotel also but I love that picture. And then here's a picture of Eartha Kitt and she was invited I think for a celebration of newspaper boys who delivered the Sun Reporter and you can see that she's got her hand who's overwhelmed. And actually the guy on the left is Danny Duncan who's actually an artist we sort of found him later but that was a picture of him and he was asked to come because he was already doing performing when he was young and he was not, didn't deliver the paper but I love that picture and there's more images of him. And then during World War II a lot of the male musicians were off to the war so this had an opportunity both for women to work in the shipyards you know about Rosie the River but also to play in orchestras. I think this is at a club there might have been a treasure island I can't remember in the film world. And I love this is two musicians out in the middle of the day which they were definitely unused to you can see there's a light with them. And again this is Johnny Redmond who's was a, had a collection and was also had an orchestra during that time and this was actually from his collection I think he had sort of mounted a photograph in it. So the Gold Mirror was a club on Fillmore and a woman Leola King actually eventually bought it she had come from Texas and eventually and her father who was a kind of entrepreneur had moved up to the Fillmore and she came and she was able to purchase the Gold Mirror and change it to the Blue Mirror and at one point she was one of the most wealthy women in San Francisco she did very well in a variety of different procedures. This is a picture of Louis Armstrong with his wife and a number of other people in the community inside the Blue Mirror was actually I don't think they had a lot of live music although here's a picture of the Mills Brothers with their father singing in the Blue Mirror and here's Edward G. Robinson signing autographs so there was kind of, well throw back to kind of southern culture and maybe another time like the Renaissance in terms of the aesthetics what was expected that's Leola a second from the right like I see you can see people would not you had to dress or you didn't show up they might not have let you in the door Leola in this mansion she had on Scott Street with her mother and here's Leola with Josephine Baker and Leola wanted me to erase the guy in between but she said she wanted the picture by herself and when the book first came out this was published in 1996 by Chronicle Books and I was really thrilled they wanted to do it but there were some problems with some of the things they made and this is when I was first doing research and I remember I had heard from about Leola and I went to see her and she said sorry I don't have anything but she loved the book so much that then she gave me her archive and so that was actually great the sort of first edition opened up a lot of possibilities for subsequent editions oops and this is actually in the Texas Playhouse and that's Wesley Johnson sort of holding her hand and the woman with the lay is called Lottie the Body who is an exotic dancer I think I have some other photographs of her but everybody you can see is having a really great time and here's Leola she passed about maybe five or six years ago but she was beautiful till the end this is the club Flamingo that was on Fillmore and eventually Wesley Johnson who came from Texas came and ran it that way and then changed the name to the Texas Playhouse and this is a picture of him he's the second from the left but you can see that the waiters had the people working there had a particular strong style and the other thing was that they were all these great paintings on the walls you can see, I can see this Eddie Taylor Teddy Wilson, Avery Joe Hunter and a couple of others both mostly Texas musicians but who also the San Francisco, the Bay Area was on the Chitlin circuit so they would pass through and as I said as people came and they brought their musical taste with them the music and the musicians that they followed and bought records of followed them and performed here is he was known for this white Stetson hat and as interesting his son went to pharmacy school at UCSF and when they needed money for tuition the story was they pulled those dollar bills down saving them but he pulled them down and played his tuition and I've heard different stories that there were all these silver dollars in the bar and either he used those also or they were maybe I think someone broke in and robbed him but I'm not sure this is one of those things where history well a couple things, history lies that the winners get to tell but history is always a moving target and keeps changing so you know we just listen and state it and realize that it may change over time that's Louis Jordan and actually let's see I can run down who this is that person on the left is Charles Sullivan and he actually it's funny the film auditorium in the 30s was black people couldn't even go to it but eventually he was able to buy it and it was a rhythm and blues venue and he also kind of was a promoter who promoted a lot of jazz and rhythm and blues concerts west of the Mississippi and he had the Fillmore which is sort of the center and next to him is Ralph J. Gleason next to him is Lionel Hampton and I know the other two, one is the Jimmy Lyons who started the Monterey Jazz Festival and the other person is someone well known too but my memory is a moving target like I said I'm proof of that so here's Wesley with T. Bone Walker was a Texas musician who played in the Bay Area a lot and I love the other thing was he had these great paintings that was actually done I can't think of his name but he was done by the same person who kind of painted and designed Fisherman's Wharf and you know I had seen them and then eventually somebody I got a message from someone and the paintings were in the Texas Playhouse I had them it turned out when the bar was closed the club was closed there was a Ukrainian contractor and he was going to just try to salvage them and his wife said you can't do that this is history so his neighbors were former Fillmore residents and he gave them the paintings and we were able to show them and I was able to find them and photograph them at the Performing Arts Museum and Library in the Veterans Building I think that's where the picture with David was they were really great so it turns out this gentleman's niece who's a writer was able to saw the photograph and talked about his nephew the guy on the left how he lived in the East Bay but he and his sweetheart would come to the right and usually stay through the weekend party because most of the clubs were open all night so I love that idea that the photograph of the painting elicited more of a story this is actually where the paintings were unfortunately we've lost track of them I think someone else in the family got them and I'm not sure what happened to them unfortunately yes okay okay yes please if you can't hear let me know is this better? so the film or auditorium was actually really well known as a rhythm and blues venue it was like really important and it sort of transitioned and at some point Bill Graham who had just come from New York I think was hired by the Mime Troop and looking for a venue for a fundraiser and I think he he couldn't find anything but he asked Charles Sullivan and Charles said yeah there's you know it's free a particular night he had this concert with the San Francisco bands and so many people showed up he knew something was going on and there was certainly a need for that and Charles Sullivan was actually killed mysteriously I don't think it was ever solved but I think Bill Graham was able to take over the Fillmore there was some rumor that he had something to do with his death but I don't think that's true but that began then the sort of modern era of the Fillmore actually I think from still Charles Sullivan with Little Richard and there was a picture that John Goddard who had a record shop in Mill Valley had of a left-handed guitarist in fact I saw Little Richard and I remember there was this left-handed guitarist I wanted to see him who was really flamboyant and I couldn't take my eyes off of it and it turns out it's Jimi Hendrix who played with Little Richard before it's hard to say that Jimi Hendrix never played with Little Richard but I have a photograph of someone who was there so it's like you know it goes on but I love that story and Little Richard fired Jimi Hendrix for being too flamboyant which I think is a high demand so Billy Holiday also spent a lot of time in the Fillmore it's funny there's fellows by the Barbara Burger King on Fillmore who I would talk to periodically and they say Billy Holiday was so beautiful and she walked by no matter what kind of shape she was in everybody's mouth would drop open and so this is actually a photograph taken I think at the Monterey Jazz Festival but I love that picture because when her Chihuahua died she had the dog buried with the mink coat she was wearing which is a great story and the other thing is what I've noticed and I think it may have been even before this that almost every photograph I've ever seen of her is completely different she looks different in every photograph about 80 or 90 you won't see all of them but I'm going to show you a couple of those because this is sort of something coming from it here she is with Mel Torme and then I was able to get a copy at one point get access to her passport which I thought was really interesting and you'll see just a few of the sample and you know she was a heroin addict and you can sort of see evidence of that and so it had highs and lows in her life for sure and she was known for these gardenias I think she was did something where she messed up her hair and someone suggested putting gardenias to hide it and that became her trademark and here's a pic I think this picture was taken in San Francisco where she's recovering at one point and you can see a picture of her and Luis Armstrong on the wall this is Ricardo Alvarado who was a Filipino photographer who came I think there was something called a bachelor migration from the Philippines in the late 30s and he came and was working in the Presidio and he actually trained himself as a photographer and he photographed both in the film and he also photographed the Filipino and Hispanic communities throughout California and his daughter's a really good friend of mine and his work just his archive was just acquired by Stanford but he had photographs from the clubs and sort of more of the diversity that was going on this is called Jackson's Nook which was one of the clubs and this is like a house party which we're having a really eclectic variety of music which I think is great and I also love the wallpaper and here's a Thanksgiving dinner that he took in the Presidio I think probably in the mid 50s I thought that would do and here's Eddie Alley the Alley family were some musicians Vernon Alley I should have pictures of him but he actually was joined by Colonel Hampton's band and it became sort of travel and didn't spend a lot of time in the Bay Area but Eddie was a drummer who played in the Bay Area for most of the time and so I got to meet him and he shared some of his archives and here's a picture of him we were interviewing him I think for the film and he's sort of going through and here he is with his wife and here's a picture of them this was actually commemorating the integration of the musicians union the musicians union in San Francisco didn't integrate till the mid 60s you know progressive San Francisco is sometimes not as progressive as its reputation and then here's a great picture of them on their wedding day taken in the late 30s and you know it found sort of interesting ads for some of the clubs this was the New Orleans swing club which is one of the so interesting that besides Texas Playhouse that a lot of the people came from Louisiana brought references to where they came from so Bob City was has sort of a history that I think somebody I can't remember who was somebody one of the musicians tried to open a club and it did fail but somebody else who actually had more business background kind of did it and eventually it was at first it was like a hamburger place and he had a room in the back with a base rhythm section and musicians sort of started showing up to jam after hours and eventually that's kind of what it was at first it was on Sutter for many years and then when redevelopment came it was the building was moved to Fillmore just north of, two blocks north of Geary and you can see this is the only color picture actually there's a picture of the double exposure but a picture of this really intricate mural that was on the wall and actually it's funny people knew Marcus books on Fillmore it's really tiny but in the pictures it looks much bigger and that's what Bob City turned into so Steve Jackson who was one of the local photographers photographed extensively in Bob City and I remember we found him to see him, Elizabeth and I did and he said I'll show you my photographs but you have to first try my homebrew so I had a couple of drinks of that and I'm not sure how well it was pretty amazing but you can see he has incredible and again I think what it shows you that it really was a go-to place for people from over the Bay Area this is interesting this is Teddy Edwards and the gentleman with the saxophone what happens is you could come and ask to sit in but if you couldn't measure up they would ask you to leave knowing the certain terms and so supposedly this gentleman's been told he needs to step back because he's not measuring up you can see he has a deer in the headlight look this is Jimbo Edwards who actually ran Bob City and actually bass players said that the bass, the in-house bass was terrible so they'd bring their own bass this is Roy Consolvis Duke Ellington's, it's not Roy Paul, thank you Paul was Duke Ellington's main sax player so that's what and the player behind his name I can't remember is a Filipino local musician so people would you know sit in and jam and said a lot of sort of ideas there it is thank you see this we got a great cloud what's his first name Flip Nunez yes absolutely it's in the book anyway I just can't remember thank you so this is probably what it looked like so they usually it was open at two and because you couldn't they couldn't serve liquor you could come in with a bottle at that point but this is kind of what it looked like this picture is probably three or four in the morning and kind of had that atmosphere and I like this picture because usually unfortunately male musicians were notoriously sexist but this woman must have been able to play because you can see she's sitting in and here's Jimbo in front of the sign this was on the front window and there actually there was a Bop City that opened in New York I think sort of named after this that tradition and here is Jimbo with Herb Ellis Herb Ellis Herb Cain thank you Herb Ellis was not in this picture and here's Chet Baker and here's Louis Armstrong in front of a mural of his as his pictures and here's a young Johnny Mathis performing at Bop City before what's our time like we're good okay here's Sammy Davis I've heard that the rat pack showed up at Jimbo's and that there exist pictures of Frank Sinatra there but I have not been able to find those so if anybody knows anything about that let me know and here's Charlie Parker at interesting at Jimbo's there were chairs that had the names of musicians back and if the musicians showed up and you were sitting in it you had to get up and give in the chair which would make sense yeah let's see yeah so musicians and athletes thank you I need to talk to you afterwards so actually even in as early as the 50s there were efforts by people in the city redevelopment agency we need to modernize the city there's some people also said we need to move all these black folks living right in the middle of the city I don't know if everybody presented that but I've seen evidence of that case so they began doing this survey where they started numbering the buildings in the neighborhood and also there's a lot of Victorians and it's funny I went to I think it was an event at the Fillmore Library they had people bring in family photographs because they wanted to expand their collection and they would do is copy them and then people could bring them home and I remember asking someone said did you live in one of the Victorians and she said yes and they were rat traps and I was glad to see them go so not everybody but they were sort of marked to do that and they started tearing things down and there was no they didn't have to do any vetting process it's interesting that one of the results of that was that architectural preservation started to happen so that a building is considered to have some kind of historical value it has to be you have to get decided but before that didn't happen and so a lot of really incredible housing stock was lost and in the middle of it activists from the neighborhood kind of sued and got them to stop with the idea that at this point they were empty lots and they were hoping to be able to redevelop but they could not get financing so those lots remained vacant for 20 or 30 years and in fact that's what I found when I came in 1968 I said this isn't the place where I went because it was completely different and this is actually where the Japan Town Center is now so this is like taken from Giri where it was built and everybody who was displaced was put on a list with a promise they'd be able to come back and it turns out I think one family actually was able to come back this is actually what it looked like when someone was doing an urban garden in one of the lots and here's a picture actually of the film this is maybe a little earlier but this is the film auditorium which did survive that redevelopment and I think this was either an ad or a documentation showing that if you move if we find you housing in Hunter's Point or Daily City a lot of people moved to the East Bay they would secure I'm not sure if they were or not but I think this was to sort of show the possibilities which was actually not true and the one of the results was after those people were displaced and didn't come back the people's temple was taken over by Jim Jones and a lot of the offspring some of the families that had been displaced were looking for kind of culture in a center joined the church and eventually he convinced them all to move to Guyana and then when Paul Ryan came to sort of investigate kind of the abuse that they were going on he was they supposedly committed suicide but I think he basically forced them so here's a photograph of some of the victims of that and I think what's interesting about a series of kind of sets of oppression is the Japanese were interned people were escaping the South and the segregation to come for this opportunity in the West and then when they were erased from that community this was the result that they were sort of vulnerable to being manipulated in fact she was shot I think was injured and he was killed right so this is John Handy who grew up in the I think he grew up in Oakland but he would come to the Fillmore to sort of develop his chops he's still with us and has been really supportive of the book this is an early picture of him here he is in front of one of the posters that was on Fillmore we had a couple of installations we were able to do and the first photograph that was on the cover of the first two editions of the book was a picture taken in Jimbo's left you see that's John Handy next to him is Pointy Point Dexter next to him is a young John Coltrane in fact I was able to give the book to both John Coltrane his wife Alice Coltrane and his son Ravi and Alice said she'd never seen a picture of him that young as a musician and Ravi said he wished he had the saxophone so you know things and then Frank Fisher who lives in Richmond near me is still with us and he actually just retired from performing a little while ago but I always go see him periodically and see how he's doing and he always has great stories for me so this is what the original Chronicle book and they had this idea they wanted to do this tent, sepia tent to sort of reference time and the problem is I had just spent all this time restoring the photographs and the sepia ended up wiping out a lot of the detail and this is like one of those things where when I was thinking of doing it I said well you show me before you do it and the next thing I saw was the book and so it did two editions and sold a lot of copies and opened up some other opportunities for some people that weren't in the book but it was not my favorite version so here's actually great with a show that was at the performing arts center at San Francisco we were able to have John Handy, Frank Fisher and a number of other musicians to play which I thought again was great that things could circle back on itself so besides developing and expanding kind of collection and photographs that were used in the documentary we were asked to use some of the layouts and we were able to put them on Fillmore street which they were there for because at that point there were a lot of empty slots and then it wasn't sort of things didn't start getting built until probably the late 80s maybe even more than that time so it was interesting I took this picture but there was an older gentleman who I saw there and I asked him I said so what do you think of this and he said I live not too far away from here and I come every day because it reminds me of the best time of my life that when people came there was full employment people who also came about that time was a dentist and had an office on Sutter said you could walk down the street with money bulging out of your pocket and no one would even look at you because people were doing that well that changed but I like that idea and like I said people who this is really important to want to make sure the books still exist and I think it's important for the young people all over the Bay Area for people to know this there's Marcus Books which I said what happened was in the middle when they stopped tearing down the Victorians and they made them start to move them so this building was actually moved around the corner to Fillmore and unfortunately they lost their lease they still have a bookstore in Oakland but this is a picture of the wife of the founder and we did a number of events there which was great to commemorate its past and there's still some evidence of the Fillmore there's a Fillmore Jazz Festival which I think they finally had one for the first time at the COVID last summer and I guess it's going to continue and I've actually it's been great to go photograph because it references the past this is Mel Simmons who was one of the first people I met in the Fillmore and he had a collection of photographs and I sort of kept track with him and he died a little while ago and they had a great sort of celebration at the what is it? the African American Art and Culture Center on Webster and this is actually I think this is a photograph at the Jazz Heritage Center which was on one of the new buildings on Fillmore Street so it's shown there a number of times so I like that it could show back in the neighborhood and this is actually at the African American Library Museum in Los Angeles so it's shown at a number of places it's also shown at the Bellinus Museum and a couple of other places in the Bay Area and this was 1300 which is a restaurant that was right at the corner of Fillmore and it was right next to the Jazz Heritage Center a post, yes and they had a number of photographs from both the book and other sources on the walls unfortunately it's also closed so I was going to just show you a kind of related project that I'm working on now to sort of I guess have you check out my archival bona fides I'm not sure this is actually a photograph of Wesley Johnson and Billie Holiday in the Fillmore but on the poster in the back is a picture of Tappers Inn which was a club in Richmond and I've just been hired commissioned to do a public arts project in Shills Reed Park North Richmond is a neighborhood that a lot of people from Texas and Louisiana settled in the East Bay there and there's a whole tradition in Oakland and Richmond were primarily more blues than jazz I'm not sure if that was the sort of agricultural agrarian background of a lot of the people but there's been a park there for a while and they've just gotten some money to make an amphitheater outdoor performing center and so Ray Holbert have been hired to collect photographs of entertainment and many sports stars came from the neighborhood so here's a this is that poster of the Tappers Inn that's in Richmond that sort of connects and certainly this is all going on at the same time as the Fillmore so the other thing is the strong Louisiana background is interesting I got this at our Hooli Records and supposedly Chris Strockwitz kind of knew about Clifton Cheneer and Clifton Cheneer would come to play in Richmond because that's where a lot of people at Cajuns were in that neighborhood and I think he was able to sign him and Clifton Cheneer sort of became an international world star I made it in before that but I think I just love that this is a poster of him playing at a play in Richmond and there's still a strong kind of zydeco tradition in Richmond this is a young musician originally from Louisiana who's playing so this is the Savoy Club there was a club in Richmond here's Leighton and Hopkins and Elsie Goodrock and Robbins and big mama Mae Thornton who played a lot in the Bay Area both of them came here a lot and here's a picture there was a collection of the club Savoy and this is Jimmy McCracklin who is from that neighborhood is probably one of the best known musicians and this is like a ballroom I can't remember the name but you can see people were partying all over the Bay Area when they had the chance and this is actually the Richmond Blues Festival the John Berks who was organizing this and probably this was taken in that park and this is where she'll use that theater to continue that blues tradition and this is kind of a mock-up it's still in process but the theater is going to have images on the back wall and then these panels at the top referencing both athletes entertainers and also the Richmond Seashore which also had a lot of the shipyards there converted to war effort and that's what brought a lot of people west and I believe that is it so if anybody has any questions or comments or corrections okay we got a hand wait for the mic wait wait we want to hear everything we want to hear everything I don't want to miss a thing wait for the mic I just wanted to say that I remember the upper film in the late 60s and the jazz clubs there yes many's can do club was one Nate's new beginnings and the scene and it was just they were great days and you could just go from one club to the other and you could spend hours it was a wonderful time and it was open I know a number of the beats hung out there and gay people were welcome they were not rejected so it was I think partly because of the fact that people had just come and there were certain places what happened was up to a certain point black musicians couldn't stay in the like they were playing at the downtown they had to stay in the film more and that was partly how the after hours started it was kind of interesting this dynamics anybody else what about when was Geary broadened such that the neighborhood was cut into that was I think that was about simultaneous to the the buildings being torn down probably late 50s early 60s and that you know that basically killed a lot of the businesses because the idea was so people from the avenues could get to the city faster but it really did you know that was a main intersection and really did a lot to to sort of hurt the neighborhood hi my name is Ernest East and just about everywhere you pointed to on the screen in the film I lived it I believe it yes and the Jimbo's Bop City that was the place to go after hours because everything pretty much shut down at two o'clock when you're very young you try to look hip you know by wearing a suit and a tie some people look at you like you're weird where are you going guy you know we're going to Bop City man and then after Bop City we go to Jack's Nook on Sutter Street for early morning jazz sunrises at six o'clock six a.m isn't it true you could go like Friday afternoon and just not go one place together until Sunday night wait a minute absolutely those were the days that were the most fun you could walk down Fillmore Street and it was like walking down Market Street at any time of night you know and I would like for you to sign sign the book okay for that edition and we appreciate that but we we appreciate everybody who supports the music the jazz the piece supported art forms here in not only here in San Francisco but around around the world that's true so if you get an opportunity here with some jazz go support it absolutely I'll be having a sign but I also want to talk to you a little later too okay thank you anybody else in 1954 when I was in high school I learned to do the Bop did that dance come from Bop City that's a good question I think Bop City came from Bbop which was the kind of later stage of many of the jazz traditions didn't like but things kept changing ours was more rock and roll but I think Bop became like a lot of it was used in a lot of different ways hey Steve Anderson I'm from Memphis Tennessee and we had something called Beale Street of course yes so when I moved I loved Bb King the blues there jazz but when I moved here 10 years ago the first thing I asked people 10 years ago is where's the Beale Street here and people was like there's not really a Beale Street here but when I come here today and I hear about feel more street I was like whoa that's the Beale Street absolutely so I guess my question to you is you mentioned one factor one factor which was you know homes being knocked down what other factors changed it well and what happened to there was a critical mass of black folks and they were not there anymore some of them didn't move you know a lot of them moved on the outskirts of the Fillmore the edges but the Fillmore all the things that were drawing people there were gone you know the clubs were torn down a lot of the house I mean I would say 99% of the residents of the Fillmore had to vacate because the idea at least in some minds is they were going to modernize this older area and they've done the same thing in like downtown closer to the water yeah yeah I mean so that was their sort of first effort of that and that actually displaced a lot of people too it was a Filipino community but I think it's funny because I've been at Beale Street and it's certainly fortunately they've been able to preserve it and it's tradition which did not happen here because it's probably been there longer also yeah I think I know do I know who you are? Hi I'm Alina Jones I'm the daughter of the gentleman that was in the back talking about the book it's wonderful to meet you it is absolutely wonderful and such an honor and I actually worked at Boom Boom Room which was the original Jax John Lee Hooker's club that was that you had mentioned and I had it because I'm from here obviously so I was born here and it was always my bucket list to work at Boom Boom Room and it was one of it is so I was there around 2005-6 during college and it just makes me so proud because the owner at the time he did not he made it mandatory that nothing changed since John Lee Hooker owned it and you know the Tufted Chesterfield seats and all of that he had a special table in the front right near the stage that nobody could sit at because that was John Lee Hooker's area so I just feel so proud like exponentially listening to everything today doing research I'm doing a project right now I'm a designer and a marketer and I'm here with my mentor who taught me everything I know and so I'm doing a logo that is inspired by Wesley Johnson owner of the Texas Playhouse and so it just makes me so incredibly proud and I don't know why there's no I've looked everywhere doing all the research and everything for this project there's like nothing on the film work and this book is so incredibly important I mean I've searched high and low in the library and internet research and everything so just thank you curtsy to you for this incredible important work thank you so much yes so there's a couple things going on now as I said this is the this issue this is done by Hayday they actually did it right in the middle of COVID they sold 2,000 copies but I guess they lost money on it and so it's out of print so I've been really busy but as I said and my co-author Elizabeth moved to France she left me with this so at some point I know ahead I would like to raise some money and republish it I have a couple people have expressed some interest in it so I actually I'm going to leave this sheet of paper and you're absolutely able to look at the books but if you think you might be interested in me hitting on you a little later to sort of raise some funds I would love to I'll just give you that opportunity I promise I'll just ask twice but it's interesting how the book has you can kind of look and it might be interesting that so when this went out of print from Chronicle Steve helped us helped us redesign it we were able to sort of reproduce it in color and I'd gotten better at Photoshop so the photographs would reproduce much better and we kind of published it ourselves and then Hay Day saw it and took it over so and changed the cover but I think like I said I know when I'm on Fillmore Street all these people come up to me who I don't know when is that book coming out I do have to do it and it's really important and it's you know it's actually I keep thinking oh I'm done with this but I won't ever be done with it I'm doing a talk I said at the D'Young in a couple weeks and then one in the Berkeley Library in February and this thing keeps happening so there seems to be interest in this that continues and I think it's a really important history and it's a history that's significant internationally people know about it the book is sold very well in Europe Japan so it is what it is any other questions at this point yes we got these people I get emails from a guy named Mark Myers called Jazz Wax and he was making available a documentary about Bob City that a woman did and he made it available only briefly but I think if you can get on that website he can make it available to you I actually know who did that and what happened was she didn't secure any I never went anywhere she couldn't release it because she didn't have any permission you know copyright for the music and everything unfortunately Mark has made it available oh really it's called what jazz wax okay I'll turn it over hi Lauren thank you for your help too hello hi Gabriella I'm actually here with my family it's my daughter's birthday oh happy birthday I'll just come and check this out we're all native San Franciscans and I was wondering as far as the work that you've done in terms of the research are you working with the San Francisco Historical Society or have you seen the PBS documentary on the film art I actually helped work on that it's funny they had it and I guess something happened was the person who had it they didn't have rights to it but I think that's been worked out because it just screened maybe a month ago and I think you can access it on PBS's web their streaming thing it's actually great it really is a great documentary and it's probably why the book existed because it yielded a lot of new information anybody else on the back of that book the black one you had a picture of the film art auditorium but the building looks different than the one on the corner it's a gearing film art yeah it has this pediment there's a big arch window I think it's just a different angle it's brick oh okay I was looking at the building to the right of it with the big arch that was T people's temple oh yes so that was was that demolished? yeah I think it burned down or demolished oh okay big arch window that one but this whole idea that when he took it over a lot of people who didn't live anywhere in the neighborhood I went because it really messed up a lot of people's life and connections and so I think the church became a way to reconnect with this really great life that they had and I think it made some people really vulnerable I know some people quit because they didn't like him but a lot of people went to Guyana with him and it was terrible did you also follow the rejuvenation of the film art and then Yoshi's and all of that sort of disappeared so I think that's partly because there was no longer critical mass you know they did that building where 1300 was they had a really nice restaurant and then Yoshi's was there for a while and there was a jazz heritage center which is kind of a way to reference the past but because of not having enough support Yoshi's didn't have enough support I mean Yoshi's almost went out of business of that because they lost a lot of money that's why they closed and that's unfortunate but that's what happens I think it's funny that the boom boom room seems to have endured maybe because they were farther north and right at Geary so I think they were sort of easier to access but I'm not sure about the Yoshi's locale the city put out an RFP to get proposals to put something new there with the intention of having something that celebrated the heritage of the film work have you been involved in that? I have not although I remember hearing something to that effect because there was an effort to re-establish the Jazz Heritage Center and I think it was open for a little while and someone got shot or something and then it closed again so I think there's still efforts I'm not involved directly with it I'm sort of trying to pay attention to it no okay all of these questions are great if you missed the announcement about our on the same page on the rooftop who cites this book as being a primary source you can go upstairs and get this book right now what I was going to do I was going to recommend I went and saw a talk of hers the author I've read the book it's really amazing it's a novel but it really does capture the feeling of the neighborhood so if you have a chance to go see her and her talk I'm going to be there so that was it yes unfortunately I was able to be a part of several businesses that wanted to establish a business inside the Film or Heritage Center but unfortunately they had a funeral repass and someone really did get shot which I think people pretty much expect that to happen when you get a lot of young people around that just might have happened and that's what exactly happened and there's been an effort we're trying to see about getting it reestablished again because we have nowhere to go in the Film or there's nowhere to go to entertain yourself your family and this is why it's so important about what you're doing in the effort to try to bring back the jazz district in San Francisco that is what's been missing is we have nowhere to go after hours especially anymore no such thing as Bob City but I'd like to get in touch with you to let you know that I know the nephew of Jimbo and his wife and a suitcase full of cassettes and you can hear people singing like Diana Washington Billie Holiday and that's the first time I met Miles Davis I'm a singer and a songwriter but I met Miles Davis at Jackson Oaks which was more in the 60's I'm more of a 60's guy but thank you very much for your work I think San Francisco has always been a jazz center it's always had a strong jazz scene I mean the SF jazz seems to be functioning pretty well maybe there in North Beach jazz and film work right but the other thing about San Francisco has a diminishing African American population every year it's been less because people can't afford to live here unfortunately alright we finished so please come up and sign and thank you very much for your attendance and you're welcome to look at the books