San Francisco’s famous Fillmore jazz lounge and hotel was lost to urban redevelopment. Where was it?
The Booker T. Washington Hotel turns up in most accounts of San Francisco’s postwar “Harlem of the West” era. It was a six-story hotel off of Fillmore Street, a mainstay for Black musicians coming to the city to perform. In a time when downtown hotels often had segregationist policies, it was also a destination for Black celebrities.
Among the luminaries who stayed or even played there were Duke Ellington, the Nat King Cole Trio, Dinah Washington, James Brown, and writers and intellectuals W.E.B. DuBois and Langston Hughes.
The Booker T, as it was known, opened in 1951. By 1970, it was gone, demolished as part of San Francisco’s blithe “slum clearance” redevelopment project that wiped the old Fillmore literally off the map.
A personal interest in music, the history of music and of San Francisco led me to wonder: if I wanted to visit the spot where the hotel had stood, where would I go?
The Booker T. stood at 1540 Ellis Street, but that address doesn’t exist anymore.
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…
