Hollow City. Rebecca Solnit

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

      Victorian houses that were removed in the 1950s. “They were on the property where the Fillmore Center was going to be—so they were in the way. Theoretically, everyone who lived there got vouchers, so they could be the first to move back in.” Photograph by David Johnson, 1949.