San Francisco’s Fillmore District (The Fillmore) is among the city’s most ethnically and economically diverse communities, and is the historical center of African-American culture in San Francisco. With the opening of the Fillmore Heritage Center and other establishments, the district is experiencing a renaissance.

The Jazz Heritage Center was formed, in part, to celebrate and sustain the neighborhood’s important history and musical heritage.

As a recent special program on PBS dedicated to the Fillmore neighborhood showed, The Fillmore represents the story not only of a neighborhood, but also of a whole social history.

In the streets of the Fillmore can be found the stories of a vibrant Jewish neighborhood that resembled part of New York City; a neighborhood that served as the political and economic center of San Francisco after the devastating 1906 earthquake; the Japanese in San Francisco, from internment to integration; the jazz heyday created by the arrival of thousands of Black workers during World War II; and the legacy of “redevelopment,” an urban policy that led to the destruction of The Fillmore as it did many of America’s most culturally-rich neighborhoods.

In 1995, the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency established the Historic Fillmore Jazz Preservation District – an area bounded by McAllister, Post, Steiner and Webster Streets –to revitalize the lower Fillmore commercial corridor. The primary focus of the Historic Fillmore Jazz Preservation District is to highlight the significant historical and cultural role that jazz music played in the neighborhood and to continue the legacy of jazz by creating an entertainment district comprised and shopping opportunities. The Jazz Heritage Center is at the heart of this new effort.

For more information on the history of The Fillmore District, visit:
http://www.pbs.org/kqed/fillmore/
http://www.amacord.com/fillmore/museum/pmintun.html