AN EXHIBITION FEATURES NEVER-BEFORE-SEEN IMAGES SHOT BY TWO ARTISTS WHO CREATED A MORE VIVID, SOULFUL, MOVING VISUAL RECORD THAN THAT OF THE GOVERNMENT’S OFFICIAL PHOTOGRAPHERS

Published on January 22, 2025

“We Were There: Views of San Francisco’s Urban Renewal”
San Francisco Historical Society
608 Commercial Street, San Francisco CA 94111
Telephone: 415-537-1105

by Edward M. Gómez

In 1967, a feel-good pop hit that became the theme song of that year’s hippy-trippy “Summer of Love” reminded listeners, “If you’re going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair.”

It could easily have added, “And wear your hard hat, too.”

That’s because, since 1959, a massive urban-renewal project that would end up displacing thousands of residents of San Francisco’s Western Addition area, whose historic center was known as the Fillmore District, had been under way. Dramatically upturning the lives of the population of a section of the city that had become known, with a nod to New York City, as the “Harlem of the West,” that government-backed renewal effort destroyed thousands of buildings, including architecturally rich, single houses; multi-unit dwellings; and a wide range of businesses and public-sector structures.

The scope — and the severity — of the destruction that effectively wiped out the entire built environment in an urban zone that had been home to an ethnically varied population of blacks, Japanese-Americans, and residents of other ethnic/cultural backgrounds, among whom assorted communities had existed and overlapped, comes into sharp focus in the exhibition “We Were There: Views of San Francisco’s Urban Renewal.”

Organized by the artist Ernest Burden III and the curatorial staff of the San Francisco Historical Society, the exhibition is on view at that museum through January 31, 2025.