Elizabeth Pepin Silva + Lewis Watts

Author Spotlight

Elizabeth Pepin Silva is an award-winning documentary filmmaker, photographer, writer, and former day manager of the historic Fillmore Auditorium. She holds a degree in journalism from San Francisco State University. 

Lewis Watts is a photographer, archivist, and professor emeritus of art at UC Santa Cruz with a longstanding interest in the cultural landscape of the African diaspora in the Bay Area and internationally.

Featured Work

Harlem of the West: The San Francisco Fillmore Jazz Era

In the 1940s and 50s, a jazz aficionado could find paradise in the nightclubs of San Francisco’s Fillmore District: Billie Holiday sang at the Champagne Supper Club; Chet Baker and Dexter Gordon jammed with the house band at Bop City; and T-Bone Walker rubbed shoulders with the locals at the bar of Texas Playhouse. The Fillmore was one of the few neighborhoods in the Bay Area where people of color could go for entertainment, and so many legendary African American musicians performed there for friends and family that the neighborhood was known as the Harlem of the West. Over a dozen clubs dotted the twenty-block-radius. Filling out the streets were restaurants, pool halls, theaters, and stores, many of them owned and run by African Americans, Japanese Americans, and Filipino Americans. The entire neighborhood was a giant multicultural party pulsing with excitement and music. In 220 lovingly restored images and oral accounts from residents and musicians, Harlem of the West captures a joyful, exciting time in San Francisco, and reveals a momentous part of the country’s African American musical heritage.

Visit their Harlem of the West website for extra history information there just wasn’t room for in the book. This includes all of the oral interviews conducted by Silva and Watts in their entirety, hearing the history in that person’s own voice.

You may purchase your very own copy of Harlem of the West through the Museum of African Diaspora. 

Featured Fun

Harlem of the West: The San Francisco Fillmore Jazz Era presented by the San Francisco Public Library

Co-sponsored by Museum of African Diaspora (MOAD) and Heyday Books

Elizabeth Pepin Silva and Lewis Watts present an illuminating slide show and talk about the new edition of Harlem of the West: The San Francisco Fillmore Jazz Era.

Through dozens of archival photographs and oral accounts from the neighborhood residents and musicians who experienced it at its height, the Harlem of the West SF Project celebrates this unique and rediscovered chapter in jazz history and the African-American experience on the West Coast. The Project is a platform for the Fillmore’s musicians, nightclub owners and residents of the 1940s and 1950s to tell the neighborhood’s history in their own words, as well as feature rarely seen photographs and memorabilia. The new edition of Harlem of the West: The San Francisco Fillmore Jazz Era book has been recently republished by Heyday Books. The edition features newly discovered photographs and memorabilia, as well as additional interviews with those who lived and played in the Fillmore at the height of its glory.

This free event was presented as part of San Francisco History Days 2020 on Friday, September 25, 2020 at 12:00pm. You can find more programs on the Library’s YouTube Channel.