It also happens that they have the cheapest rent in their buildings. And that a landlord can't legally get you out of an apartment unless he decides he wants the place for himself. Only a few of us are left, we black males who kept jobs and paid bills. We referred to it as the Fillmore, after the main street of black commerce. They lived in these Victorian houses before the gingerbread paint jobs, before the cafes, before the tour buses and the German tourists.
Young people fill the cafes morning, noon, and night.
With six of them packed into a three-bedroom flat, the cafes become their living rooms. We enjoy the new mix, but this isn't the kind of diversity that will let my friends remain my neighbors. Spacious lawns and warm weather across the bay seduced the Victorian-owning black families. All my life I've heard these transplanted Southerners complain about San Francisco's foggy summers. My former neighbor, a debonair man of eighty-plus, sold his home and used the profits to buy two homes for his daughters 40 miles away in sunshiny Vallejo.