Western Addition

1550 Scott St, San Francisco, CA 94115

The Western Addition was a multicultural working-class neighborhood in 1938. It was home to a thriving Japanese American community, which took up residence there after the 1906 earthquake. After large numbers of Japanese Americans were forced out of their homes into internment during World War II, the neighborhood transitioned almost overnight into the Fillmore, the “Harlem of the West,” an African American cultural center with jazz clubs and black-owned businesses. After the war, many Japanese Americans returned to the neighborhood, settling Japantown. However, the character of the neighborhood was forever changed with the fraught legacies of urban renewal.

These scale model pieces continued to be used as a planning tool by the city into the 1950s. The red lines that run from Van Ness Avenue to Divisadero Street represents the city’s proposed Western Addition A1 Project from 1956, a redevelopment plan that destroyed hundreds of homes and displaced many more in the pursuit of “clearing blight,” an effort that inordinately targeted black residents in a neighborhood abutting the tony, mostly white neighborhood of Pacific Heights. Though the clay and foam intervention shown is not entirely what was constructed, it represents the forced dispersal of a flourishing community; as James Baldwin famously said, “Urban renewal is Negro removal.” Today, while gentrification has led to a diminished population of these historic communities, they can still find support at the African American Cultural Center and Japanese Cultural and Community Center of Northern California.