Western Addition

Residential and commercial district in the centre of San Francisco. Located west of the city centre and north of Haight-Ashbury, it is also known as ‘the Fillmore’, after its busiest commercial thoroughfare.

Fashionable Victorian mansions were put up in this suburban addition to the city in the late 19th century. By the early 20th century, however, they had been converted to rooming and boarding houses, as the area took on an increasingly international flavour, especially after the influx of Jewish immigrants from Europe. With the shipyard boom in San Francisco during World War II, Black workers began to populate the neighbourhood. The Western Addition now contains a mix of housing projects and rented buildings, and some gentrification is also occurring here. The University of San Francisco (1855) is in the west of the district, and Japantown (Nihonmachi), with the commercial Japan Centre (1968), lies to the northeast. The Fillmore Auditorium, a famous 1960s rock music venue, is situated on Fillmore Street near Japantown.