Hollow City. Rebecca Solnit

      Vacant lot, Western Addition, 2000.

      Campaigns to get rid of the poor have a long history in San Francisco. African Americans, working-class seniors, other residential-hotel denizens and the homeless have all had their turn, and other campaigns—against undocumented immigrants and refugees and against Latinos and Asians generally—have attempted to erase or undermine populations on a larger scale. As the Second World War was ending, the city came up with a master plan that featured elements of redevelopment, and by the beginning of 1947 specific proposals were being made to annihilate portions of the Western Addition. Blight was the magical word of the era of urban renewal, a word whose invocation justified the destruction of housing, communities and neighborhoods in many American cities, and San Francisco was no exception. The Western Addition had, not coincidentally, become home to San Francisco’s African-American community, and urban renewal would eventually be nicknamed “Negro removal.” Earlier in the century, according to the African-American historian Albert S. Broussard, African Americans had lived in various parts of the city, but as large numbers of southern Blacks arrived to participate in the wartime economy a backlash of discrimination and segregation had reconcentrated the Black community (between 1940 and 1950, the Black population increased ninefold, to 43,460). Broussard writes, “Blacks occupied a disproportionate share of the Western Addition’s substandard housing relative to their percentage of the city’s population. Overcrowding, unsanitary living quarters, and infestations of rodents were typical sights, particularly in the city’s Fillmore district.”¹

      The Western Addition’s eastern edge had been home to a Jewish immigrant population, and its northern side had been Japanese until the internment camps were opened in early 1942. Kenneth Rexroth was among the artists and radicals who organized to protect Japanese Americans from internment; he and his wife, Marie Kass Rexroth, hid several young people in their Potrero Hill home, and the Fellowship of Reconciliation organized a program that allowed many to go east to school rather than into the bleak internment camps (at Rexroth’s prompting, the Fellowship had already founded the American Committee to Protect the Civil Rights of Americans of Oriental Ancestry).² Maya Angelou was one of the southerners who came to the Western Addition as a child, and she writes in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, “In the early months of World War II, San Francisco’s Fillmore district, or the Western Addition, experienced a visible revolution…. The Yakamoto Sea Food Market quietly became Sammy’s Shoe Shine Parlor and Smoke Shop. Yashigira’s Hardware metamorphosed into La Salon de Beauté owned by Miss Clorinda Jackson. The Japanese shops which sold products to Nisei customers were taken over by enterprising Negro businessmen, and in less than a year became permanent homes away from home for the newly arrived Southern Blacks. Where the odor of tempura, raw fish and cha had dominated, the aroma of chitlings, greens and ham hocks now prevailed. The Asian population dwindled before my eyes…. No member of my family and none of the family friends ever mentioned the absent Japanese. It was as if they had never owned or lived in the houses we inhabited.”³