An iconic former jazz club in the Fillmore is getting a new life due to the hard work of some local nonprofits seeking to revitalize small Black-owned businesses in the neighborhood.
The venue is Yoshi’s former sister location, which opened in San Francisco in 2007 as a live jazz venue and Japanese restaurant as an offshoot of the decades-old club in Oakland. But from the onset, the San Francisco venue struggled financially and was rebranded as the Addition in 2015 before closing altogether that year.
Now, the San Francisco Housing and Development Corporation, Fleming Development and Westside Community Health have joined together to lease the entire building at 1330 Fillmore St. It includes the former Yoshi’s spot, as well as some smaller commercial business space and the Fillmore Heritage Center.
The goal is to turn it into a food hall with an incubator kitchen for small culinary businesses that otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford brick-and-mortar spaces in the neighborhood.
“It’s such a difficult time, and we want to make sure that they are going to be self-sustaining,” said Pia Harris with the San Francisco Housing and Development Corporation.
Harris said the project will be different from another culinary incubator in The City — La Cocina, which is located in the Mission. Participants won’t necessarily be startups, but rather established businesses that need extra support.
“The Yoshi’s kitchen is so huge,” Harris said.
While the details are still being finalized, the project is currently working with some 30 small culinary entrepreneurs who might operate out of the space and share the cost of the rent, if they meet certain criteria.
“We’re really just trying to redevelop Fillmore back into the Harlem of the West,” Harris said. “There used to be hundreds of Black businesses, but now it’s not even an option because rent is so high.”
While music won’t be the focus in this new iteration of the business, Harris said it’s definitely a possibility that events and celebrations might be held in the space.
“The idea is to support the local entertainment and event producers,” in addition to the culinary entrepreneurs, she said. “It’s going to be really important to get experienced candidates as far as the producers and businesses that we’re supporting.”
Harris and her partners became interested in the space when the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development put out a request for proposals last year.
So far they’ve signed a letter of intent with MOHCD and are in negotiations over the lease with the Office of Real Estate, according to Anne Stanley, the communications manager for the MOHCD. The deal is expected to be finalized by the middle of the year.
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“We wanted to keep the ethos of the space being a public space with some kind of art or food or cultural activation,” Stanley said.
The length of the lease will be for five years, and could be extended for three additional five year terms. The City will still own the building while the organizations will maintain operations. Once the deal is finalized, it will go before the San Francisco Board of Supervisors for a vote, Stanley said.
In the meantime, others in the neighborhood are looking forward to the potential opportunities that reopening the club will yield for advancing the community and the history of the neighborhood.
“I’m really interested in how we’re going to reactivate that space and open that space up to the community,” said Shanell Williams, who worked for several years as a violence-prevention organizer in the Fillmore and still lives in the area. “Not only for entertainment purposes, but also for economic development.”
Many, including Williams, have said they feel that the long history of urban renewal and how it decimated the Fillmore’s business and culture from the 1960s and onward is a sore subject that has yet to be rectified by The City.
“That is the legacy that we’re dealing with in this community is that folks don’t have housing,” she said. “They don’t have those roots here anymore because of the unaffordability.”
Prior to the 1960s, the Fillmore was referred to as the Harlem of the West and was one of the more integrated neighborhoods of San Francisco, with a lively arts and music scene.
“We really created a thriving community that was becoming known around the world as a cultural haven for blues, jazz, food, and just the richness of diversity,” said Majeid Crawford, a Fillmore native and activist whose father and uncle played in the neighborhood’s jazz clubs.
But homes and businesses were bulldozed in favor of new housing and business locations, and by the time the redevelopment was over, costs were too high for former residents.
“Poverty started to set in, and then many people fled early on, because they just saw the writing on the wall,” he said. “They saw what was going on, it was too devastating.”
But the transformation of Yoshi’s and other projects in recent years have given Crawford, Williams and others hope that the neighborhood could reclaim some of its initial glory.
“I’m really hopeful that the space will continue to lift up that history and bring up even more social reform for our community,” said Williams.
