Join us in the intimate Maxwell Lounge for free screenings of jazz documentaries — with popcorn!

This Month: The Fillmore (1999), a KQED-produced history of “The Harlem of the West”

The Fillmore, a PBS documentary produced by KQED in 1999, explores the rise and fall of San Francisco’s premier Black community as it faced the nationwide juggernaut known as urban renewal.

The Fillmore details the arrival of thousands of Black workers to San Francisco’s Fillmore District during World War II, which led the neighborhood to take on a brand-new character as “the Harlem of the West,” with its own churches, theaters, grocery stores, restaurants, nightclubs and newspapers. The nightspots of the era, such as Bop City, the Long Bar, the New Orleans Swing Club, the Blue Mirror, and the Booker T. Washington Hotel, put the neighborhood on the map. The documentary shines a spotlight on the jazz heyday in the Fillmore, which drew the likes of Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, and Billie Holiday into its clubs, featuring music from the jazz greats who frequented the neighborhood in its prime: Count Basie, Etta James, Thelonious Monk, Duke Ellington, and others, as well as an assembled archive of photographs, film, and music of the neighborhood.