Darlene Roberts first moved to the Fillmore in 1965 from Tulsa, Oklahoma at 19, back when the neighborhood was known as the “Harlem of the West.” Over the decades, Roberts said she has watched the neighborhood morph into a place that is almost unrecognizable.
“It feels the same way it did during urban renewal,” Roberts told Gazetteer SF. “Like they’re pushing us out all over again.”
She has seen financial resources and governmental priorities shift away from the Lower Fillmore, even as Upper Fillmore has undergone a bit of a revival. Those in the Upper Fillmore “have access to all kinds of money and we don’t,” she said. It’s a neighborhood divided.
Case in point: the controversial $100 million Upper Fillmore Revitalization project backed by billionaire venture capitalist Neil Mehta. Described by then-Supervisor Aaron Peskin as a “hostile takeover” of the neighborhood, Mehta insists that the plan entails renovating the Clay Theater and sprucing up storefronts. Though, 46-year-old sushi restaurant Ten-Ichi was pushed out of its storefront on Fillmore as part of the project.
The Upper Fillmore also has the support of the Fillmore Merchants Association, which puts on the annual jazz festival. After the association announced it could no longer afford to put on the event, Avenue Greenlight, a nonprofit created by crypto billionaire Chris Larsen, stepped in to give the Fillmore Merchants Association a grant.
But over in Lower Fillmore, “we have to struggle for everything,” she said. “Everything we’ve ever tried to do is always taken from us.”
At 78, Roberts is still fighting to revive that spirit for all of the Fillmore through her organization, the Fillmore Jazz Ambassadors. She created the organization in 2019 to bring jazz back to the neighborhood. That was her plan then and it’s her plan today, despite the city this month canceling $14 million in funds to Dream Keeper Initiative recipients, which included $210,000 for her organization. (The Dream Keeper Initiative, designed to support Black communities and organizations, has been under scrutiny as of late due to the scandals surrounding former Human Rights Commission head Sheryl Davis.)
She was later notified, during our conversation, that she’d still receive a paltry sum. But that’s how it goes.
The story of the Fillmore today is one of attempts at revival. It’s one of Black business owners, longtime residents, and those with deep roots in the area trying to reclaim its legacy, while city resources increasingly flow toward the revitalization of downtown.
Now, Roberts, as well as other local business owners in the Fillmore, are trying to take matters into their own hands, while still hoping the city will do more to help.
‘We thought that it was going to boom’
The Fillmore was once the epicenter of jazz and Black culture in San Francisco and beyond. At one point, there were more than two dozen nightclubs in a square mile, including Jimbo’s Bop City and the Champagne Supper Club, home to Billie Holiday’s stage debut in San Francisco. Roberts remembers those days fondly.
“It was going on,” she said.
Charles Sullivan, known fondly as the “Mayor of the Fillmore,” was a big-time promoter in the neighborhood. He owned Jimbo’s and was responsible for organizing major shows throughout the Fillmore for a number of big artists, Roberts said.
“We did not need the city’s money,” Roberts said. “What would happen is musicians could come to San Francisco and the reason they came was for him.”
Sullivan, however, was killed in 1966, but the exact circumstances of his death are unknown. In and around that time, meanwhile, the Fillmore became the focus of the city’s redevelopment agency. Under the guise of “urban renewal,” the city relied on eminent domain to acquire properties in the Fillmore, shutting down jazz clubs, tearing down businesses, and forcing people out of their homes.
“A lot of people lost and this feels the same way,” Roberts said. “What the mayor is doing to us, taking all of our money as we were getting ready to bring our community back in order. It feels the same way as the eminent domain. I’m just so — I’m so frustrated. And, at 78, it’s probably not a really good place to be, but here I am.”
Neither the mayor’s office nor District 5 Supervisor Bilal Mahmood, who represents the Fillmore, responded to Gazetteer’s multiple requests for comment.
The city has tried and failed to bring Black culture back to the Fillmore before. In 1986, the late Agonafer Shiferaw, opened a second location for Rasselas Jazz Club, but this time in the Fillmore. Shiferaw already ran the legendary jazz club on California and Divisadero streets, did so with the encouragement of San Francisco’s redevelopment agency, according to Netsanet Alemayehu, the co-owner of Fillmore staple Sheba Lounge and Shiferaw’s widow.
“The redevelopment agency at that time, when they were planning to revive the jazz district, they invited him,” Alemayehu told Gazetteer. “So he came to the Fillmore and opened Rasselas Jazz Club. It became a destination for a lot of African-American people. They gathered there, they held birthdays there, he allowed all the political meetings there.”
Shiferaw invited other Black people to open small businesses in the Fillmore, and Alemayehu and her sister, Israel, ended up being some of those business owners. The sisters opened Sheba Lounge in 2006. In 2007, the Fillmore Heritage Center opened. That space included the upscale dining restaurant 1300 on Fillmore and the music venue Yoshi’s.
“The hope at that time was really, very high,” she said. “When we came in, we had this really big vision.”
She envisioned that Sheba Lounge would be part of helping the Fillmore reclaim its status as a jazz destination.
“It has so much history, Black history in there,” she said. “Relating to business, we thought that it was going to boom there.”
But things didn’t go according to plan, and multiple city efforts to re-occupy the vacant building have fallen apart. Rassela’s closed in 2013, Yoshi’s, which had been rebranded as the Addition, closed in 2015, and 1300 on Fillmore closed in 2017. With those closures, the dream of reviving Fillmore’s status as a jazz destination disappeared, Alemayehu said.
“Now you don't see that many Black businesses on Fillmore,” she said. “I can’t blame here and there but the way it’s handled and the way the monies are allocated to bring it back, I don’t know. I’m wondering if it could have fulfilled the dream of everybody who opened.”
A couple of months ago, Mayor Daniel Lurie walked through the Fillmore corridor with local business owners, including Ericka Scott, founder and owner of Honey Art Studio on Sutter and Fillmore. They had conversations about safety, foot traffic, and the closure of prominent spaces like the Fillmore Heritage Center and more recently, Safeway, Scott told Gazetteer.
Since then, Scott said she’s had some conversations with City Hall but that there is ultimately “no sense of urgency.” She added, “it just seems like it’s not a priority, honestly.”
‘A very resilient people’
Growing up in San Francisco, Scott remembered there being more Black-owned businesses on the Fillmore corridor than there have been over the past 10 years, she said. I remember that, too. My late grandfather, from the early 1950s through the early ‘90s, ran his dental practice on Fillmore and Bush streets. (The Fillmore was also a lively hub for Black professionals, but that’s another story for another day.)
That same building, which survived the days of urban renewal, is where my father runs his own dental practice. As a kid, I spent a lot of time at the office, sitting in the waiting room while my dad finished up with a patient. There were certainly more Black people in the neighborhood then than there are today.
The data proves it.
San Francisco’s Black population reached its peak in 1970, with around 96,000 residents accounting for 13.4% of the city’s population, according to the U.S. Census. Since then, the numbers have steadily declined. By 1990, that number had dropped to approximately 79,000, about 11% of the city’s Black population post-urban renewal.
In 2020, just 47,000 Black people remained, making up only 5% of the city’s population. As of July 2024, Census estimates put the figure slightly higher at 5.7%.
Scott, meanwhile, moved to the Fillmore in 1984, and her maternal and paternal grandparents raised their families there, she told Gazetteer. There are a lot of people with multi-generational ties in the community. During our conversation, we realized she knows some members of my extended family.
She recalls being around a lot of Black people growing up, but once she returned to the city around 2019, after she attended UC Berkeley and moved to Los Angeles, she “kind of had a meltdown,” Scott told me.
“Like, ‘oh my God, there are no Black people around.’”
With a background in business and entrepreneurship, Scott saw an opportunity for her to contribute to the Black community in the Fillmore.
“That’s what led me and what was a driving force for me to have a business here,” she said.
Scott and Alemayehu are working alongside Fernay McPherson, owner of Minnie Bell’s Soul Movement, to determine how to increase support for businesses in the Lower Fillmore as Upper Fillmore thrives.
McPherson, who was born and raised in the Fillmore, told Gazetteer she opened her business to honor the legacy of what was once a thriving Black cultural hub, and ultimately wants to revitalize that legacy.
That’s why she’s working alongside Scott and Alemayehu, she said.
“I want to see us all thrive,” McPherson said via email.
But in order for that to happen, business owners in the Lower Fillmore need more support in driving foot traffic to the area, she said. And according to Alemayehu, there’s an opportunity to attract people from the Upper Fillmore to Lower Fillmore.
“Upper Fillmore, they are doing really good,” Alemayehu told Gazetteer. “They’re so organized up there, there are so many businesses. They organize themselves, they have representatives and it’s going much better than the Lower Fillmore.”
That might be changing.
Alemayehu, Scott, and McPherson meet regularly to discuss how to further develop the business merchant corridor, Alemayehu said. The big vision is for the Fillmore to once again be a place that is bustling with Black food, Black culture, and Black people.
Alemayehu shared a memory of some Black tourists from Georgia who visited San Francisco and wound up at Sheba Lounge. They told her they had heard all about Fillmore being a jazz district and being rife with Black-owned businesses. They asked her where all the Black businesses were, she said.
“And I said, ‘well you’re sitting in here, this is it.’ Hopefully you know, it could be done.”
One of their ideas was to establish a separate merchants association for the Lower Fillmore, Alemayehu and Scott told Gazetteer. But after speaking with Fillmore Merchants Association President Tim Omi, who requested she not start a separate organization, Scott said they will try to work together in unison.
“I proposed unifying the whole corridor and having Ericka [Scott] come on the board of the Fillmore Merchants Association,” Omi told Gazetteer. “The goal is to just bring the corridor from Lower Fillmore all the way up to Pac Heights all together. The more that we can be unified, I think, is good.”
Scott, whose business sits smack dab in the middle of Upper and Lower Fillmore on Sutter and Fillmore, agrees that working together is the right move. But she wants to make sure there’s awareness and action around the “invisible line that has already existed between Upper Fillmore and Lower Fillmore.”
Omi told Gazetteer he couldn’t “speak to the division,” but emphasized the opportunity for the Fillmore Merchants Association to highlight the vibrancy of the entire corridor.
With the Fillmore Jazz Festival on the horizon, Scott sees that event as an opportunity for the Fillmore Merchants Association to prove that they “really want to work with us, and then we can go from there, because obviously, we’re stronger together.”
Overall, Scott said she’s feeling optimistic about the collaboration, even though she doesn’t rule out the possibility of a merchants association dedicated to Lower Fillmore.
“We’re really going to see how we can work together to collaborate with the existing Fillmore Merchants Association, where businesses south of Geary will feel just as supported as businesses on the other side,” she said.
“We are a very resilient people and we do a lot with minimal resources. That’s what we’ve done in the past and that’s what we’re doing now.”
