Looking for the Booker T.
By: Ben Zotto
Tags: Jazz, History, San Francisco, Urban Planning, The Fillmore

San Francisco’s Western Addition is so-called because it was a westward expansion (to Divisadero) of the earlier boundary of the city (which ended at Larkin). That was in 1856 and encompassed a large area. The part of the city referred to today as the “Western Addition” is smaller and spans from lower Pacific Heights in the north down to Hayes Valley in the south. This area was built out in the late 1800s and mostly survived the fires following the 1906 earthquake. By the time the Federal Housing Administration commissioned the infamous “redlining” maps and studies, it was a dense and aging urban center; the 1937 Home Owner’s Loan Corporation report described it as “the nearest approach to a slum district in San Francisco. It has a highly congested population consisting of Japanese, Russians, Mexicans, Negroes, etc. having a very low income level.” The area was shunned by lenders, and illegally subdivided old Victorians became small apartments, rooming houses, and underground commercial spaces.

In the spring of 1942, the long-established Japanese population north of Geary Street was evacuated and interned by the federal government (mostly in Utah), not to return until the end of the war. The sudden vacancies were taken advantage of by an influx of Southern Blacks, who were part of the second Great Migration and drawn by wartime work in San Francisco’s shipyards and similar. The Black population of San Francisco, which had been under 5,000 in 1940 (less than 1% of the city’s population at the time) would swell almost tenfold to over 43,000 by 1950. Most of the arrivals, with few options for housing that would welcome them, landed in the Western Addition and Bayview/Hunter’s Point areas.

Following the war, much of the relocated Black population remained in San Francisco, to “make the best of it in a city where housing was rigidly segregated and the employment market was contracting” according to Paul Miller. The “Harlem of the West” era started taking shape, with Fillmore Street in the Western Addition as its nexus. The Fillmore Auditorium at the corner of Geary (still a famous venue) was in its pre-Bill Graham days and hosted big band, jazz, and other live music. Jimbo’s Bop City on Post St was another spot to hear the biggest names.

The Emperor Room at the Booker T. with local impresario Charles Sullivan and associate Fats Corlett in the center. Photo: The Hall Family, via The New Fillmore.

And the Booker T. Washington Hotel, of course. It was opened by a William Bush in August of 1951, taking over from the former Edison Hotel at that location, but sporting an expensive remodel and a new cocktail lounge, the Emperor Room. The hotel was ably managed by C. R. Lane, an Oklahoman who’d been working his way up in hospitality since leaving the shipyards.

Jacqueline Chauhan, who spent time at the Booker T. as a child when her mother was employed there, recalls encounters with Jackie Wilson and Little Richard. She says that musicians would rehearse at the hotel during the day, sometimes before gigs elsewhere in the neighborhood later that night. Maya Angelou’s mother was a clerk at the hotel.

C. R. Lane, manager of the hotel. Photo: San Francisco Sun-Reporter, November 1952.

Not limited to just musicians, baseball player Willie McCovey stayed there, and so did the Harlem Globetrotters.

While the jazz era got underway in the Fillmore, forces downtown were already conspiring to completely redevelop the neighborhood. Across America, cities were looking to see how they could use federal dollars for so-called slum clearance and the removal of “blight”. The Western Addition was targeted for the first, and most substantial, of San Francisco’s such projects, and two phases were proposed: A-1, designed to widen Geary St into an expressway and create the all-new Japan Center; and A-2, which would level the rest of the area to replace aging Victorians with new cooperative living complexes, and the Fillmore Street strip with a new commercial center.

A-1 began execution in the 1950s and and was completed first. A-2 was larger, but was approved with minimal community input by 1966. Sixty blocks were cleared. Some Victorians considered worth saving were physically moved around. And everyone was displaced, some temporarily, most permanently. Those who did return, in some cases went from being small property or business owners bought out by eminent domain, to being merely renters in their old neighborhood without the equity they’d worked for.

Demolition in the Western Addition. Photo: San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library

The Fillmore Street commercial district itself was demolished in about 1970, and the blocks left vacant while intended centerpiece Fillmore Center went through development challenges. The destruction of the heart of the neighborhood without immediate rebuilding meant the end of the flourishing cultural and commercial center of gravity there. And swept away with that swath of destruction was the Booker T.

Let’s see if we can find it.