Fillmore Street north from Pacific Heights, June 2017

Fillmore Street is a street in

San Francisco, California San Francisco (; Spanish for " Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the fourth most populous in California and 17t ...

which starts in the Lower Haight neighborhood and travels northward through the

Fillmore District The Fillmore District is a historical neighborhood in San Francisco located to the southwest of Nob Hill, west of Market Street and north of the Mission District.Oaks, Robert F. San Francisco's Fillmore District. lectronic resource n.p.: Char ...

and Pacific Heights and ends in the Marina District. It serves as the main thoroughfare and namesake for the

neighborhood. The street is named after American President

Millard Fillmore Millard Fillmore (January 7, 1800March 8, 1874) was the 13th president of the United States, serving from 1850 to 1853; he was the last to be a member of the Whig Party while in the White House. A former member of the U.S. House of Represen ...

Culture

The part of Fillmore Street that runs through the Fillmore neighborhood reflects the neighborhood's diversity: family-owned neighborhood-serving retail mixes with chain stores, jazz clubs, ethnic restaurants of many varieties, and empty storefronts. Some of the stores, restaurants, and clubs lost to redevelopment are memorialized by plaques on the sidewalk. Other ties to the neighborhood's past remain as well; for example, the building that once housed Jimbo's Bop City—a nightclub frequented by noted jazz musicians of the 1940s and 1950s—was moved during redevelopment to Fillmore Street, where it now houses an Afrocentric bookstore, Marcus Bookstore. Fillmore Street is also known for "the Triangle", which is where Fillmore meets Greenwich street. Triangle is an infamous area, describing 3 corners of the intersection with the bars Balboa Cafe, East Side West, and City Tavern.

History

The street grid west of Larkin was laid out in the 1880s and soon acquired the name "The Fillmore" after the street hosting a new core commercial area.

Streetcar A tram (called a streetcar or trolley in North America) is a rail vehicle that travels on tramway tracks on public urban streets; some include segments on segregated right-of-way. The tramlines or networks operated as public transport a ...

service on Fillmore started in July 1895; the following month the

Fillmore Counterbalance The Fillmore Counterbalance was a streetcar device operated by the Market Street Railway (transit operator), Market Street Railway (MSRy) in San Francisco. It aided the company's 22 Fillmore line in traversing the steep northern slope of Fillmore ...

was installed to traverse the steep 24.54% grade of Pacific Heights between Green and Broadway. Following the

1906 San Francisco earthquake At 05:12 Pacific Standard Time on Wednesday, April 18, 1906, the coast of Northern California was struck by a major earthquake with an estimated moment magnitude of 7.9 and a maximum Mercalli intensity of XI (''Extreme''). High-intensity ...

, Fillmore was left largely intact. The first

streetcar A tram (called a streetcar or trolley in North America) is a rail vehicle that travels on tramway tracks on public urban streets; some include segments on segregated right-of-way. The tramlines or networks operated as public transport a ...

to run after the fires ran on Fillmore and several of the city's

theater Theatre or theater is a collaborative form of performing art that uses live performers, usually actors or actresses, to present the experience of a real or imagined event before a live audience in a specific place, often a stage. The perfor ...

s and

department store A department store is a retail establishment offering a wide range of consumer goods in different areas of the store, each area ("department") specializing in a product category. In modern major cities, the department store made a dramatic appe ...

s relocated to the road following the disaster. Between 1907 and 1943, several decorative arches lined the street's intersections — these were removed and used as

scrap metal Scrap consists of recyclable materials, usually metals, left over from product manufacturing and consumption, such as parts of vehicles, building supplies, and surplus materials. Unlike waste, scrap has monetary value, especially recovered m ...

for the war effort.

References

External links

Streets in San Francisco {{California-road-stub

Culture

History

See also

References

External links