Holding her cane and shuffling carefully down the sidewalk in the city’s Jazz Preservation District, 88-year-old Leola King stopped and looked at the words stamped in concrete: Leola King’s Birdcage, 1505 Fillmore.
Today, the site of King’s 1960s nightclub is a Starbucks on the ground floor of a condominium tower.
A half-century ago, this neighborhood was nicknamed “Harlem of the West” and hundreds of black-owned businesses thrived here. At night its gritty streets were filled with the sounds of jazz and blues drifting from nightclubs.
Then the government, using race as a factor in its decision, decreed the area blighted and forced thousands of people, including King, from the neighborhood by way of eminent domain. The din of bulldozers and wrecking balls replaced the saxophones and snare-drum raps with the promise of a better neighborhood.
It was a scenario that played out across the nation in black communities in Chicago, Atlanta, New York, Boston, Kansas City, Mo., and others, as the federal and local governments undertook urban renewal projects that reshaped and, some say, ruined redevelopment areas like the Western Addition, where the Fillmore District is.
Its work done, the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency — the state-and-federally funded agency that managed the project — will without fanfare end one of the nation’s longest-running urban renewal projects on Jan. 1. Redevelopment displaced almost 900 businesses in the Western Addition and more than 4,700 homes, including blocks of grand, historic Victorians. It is not known how many residents ever returned.
The city’s black population was growing rapidly when redevelopment began in the 1950s. By the mid-1970s, however, blocks sat vacant and the black population had started its decades-long slide from about 13 percent to half that in 2005 — the biggest percentage decline of any major city.
On the block where King’s Birdcage used to be, the New Chicago Barbershop is the only black-owned business that returned after development. “Basically, everything’s been lost,” said barber Reggis Pettus, standing beneath photos from the neighborhood’s heyday. “They put up a big old high-rise that two-thirds of the people who lived here can’t afford.”
AP
