At one end of Fillmore Street, across an open patch of green that in the 1920's was an airfield for the trans continental postal service, you will find the blue waters of San Francisco Bay, the smell of the Pacific Ocean and number 3790.
At the other end of the street you will find number number 20, The Greater Saint Ellijah church of God in Christ, the international Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and the Rising Sun lundromat.
One end is more or less white, the other more or less black and somewhere in the middle Japan Town intrudes into this polarity. This middle section is now home to the Jazz Heritage Centre, but as the local reverend says (see J) ‘we ain’t heritage man, we’re ALIVE.”
One end of the street is rich and starts of as a broad avenue, the marina just behind and slowly narrows down to a less pretentious residential mix of houses and shops. Then it leaps up the side of Pacific Heights in a harem scarum way, the road almost undrivable but if Steve McQueen could do it in Bullet, why not me. I don’t know if the film was made on this hill but it could have been, and driving up them leaves you feeling the car will stop and roll back, driving down the pit of your stomach reacts. If you reach the top you are once again in a rich residential neighbourhood, with an unchallenged view of the Bay and then you start to descend through coffee house and restaurant land.
In one three block area I counted seven coffee specialists two next door to each other, eight if you consider Starbucks. My favourite so far posts a ‘thought for the day in chalk on a small blackboard’ and it was here that I met a multiple sclerosis sufferer waiting to use the toilet or ‘restroom’ to administer an injection. Seems like everyone is ready to talk to strangers and tell their life story here.
And Fillmore tells stories; it is engraved in bricks set in the sidewalk along the Jazz Heritage section, in photos on the walls of the barbershops and in the blue tinted glass (itself a homage to jazz) of the bus shelter. Bop City was here, Billie Holliday sang, Charlie Parker came through, Miles Davies Jammed and the Black Panther’s had their headquarters here. It even seems that Yeuhidi Menuin was born here. I’m not sure he was jazz though.
I’m living on Fillmore and the pavement is full of stories, so I’ll tell you some later.
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