San Francisco’s Fillmore District, by Robert F. Oaks. Arcadia Publishing, 2005.
128 pages, $19.95. Illustrated.

For the last few years Arcadia Publishing has been the specialist in local histories. It has documented American cities from New York to Seattle in attractive books as part of series it calls “Images of America.” All of the books are lavishly illustrated with vintage and contemporary photographs of neighborhoods from Chicago’s State Street to Brooklyn, the Seattle waterfront and San Francisco’s own Sunset district. And now, they’ve gotten around to our beloved Fillmore district.

Robert F. Oaks did a lovely job putting together this slim volume about our neighborhood. Working from archival photographs and an obviously vast personal collection, he has shown how the Fillmore district went from a relatively sleepy street in the then-new Western Addition, to the bustling, lively street it is today.

Our neighborhood got a huge boost from the great earthquake of 1906. With downtown destroyed by fire that finally stopped at Van Ness, Fillmore became the commercial hub of The City as it rebuilt. Many businesses temporarily relocated their offices in the Fillmore district, and some stayed a while.

Oaks is very good at laying out the outlines of the development of the Fillmore area. He devotes one chapter to amusements in the area. The existence of an amusement park along Fillmore was news to this reader. He also illustrates the jazz scene, the ice shows at Winterland, and of course, the rock and roll at the legendary Fillmore Auditorium itself. He covers the interwar years deftly, and shows how the Japanese relocation of World War II radically changed the demographics of the neighborhood. After the war came the trauma of redevelopment that led to the Fillmore district we have today.

The Images of America series is not long on text. These are mostly picture books. Oaks supplies a few introductory paragraphs for each chapter. The prose is crisp and concise. After that, he lets the pictures tell the story. And what pictures they are! Beginning with a stunning photo of the Ladies Protection and Relief Society building that was erected in 1865 among the dunes at Franklin and Geary, then moving through the earthquake and boom years, he shows us our street in loving detail. Until the middle of World War II our intersections were lighted by elaborate iron arches that were amazingly graceful (they were melted down to help with the war effort). We are shown the empty streets of Japantown during the war, and the vast swaths of emptiness that preceded redevelopment in the 1960s. Oaks provides captions that let a reader truly get to know the neighborhood.

The Images of America series is a lovely project. Each book is handsomely made and wonderfully informative. Almost any of these books is worth seeking out if you are at all curious about any area. When the book is about a place where you live, and that you love, it is something you simply must have.

Mark J. Mitchell has lived and worked in the Fillmore district since 1978.