The Fillmore Holiday Night Market Wants to Bring Back SF’s Old ‘Harlem of the West’

San Franciscans who are too young to have lived through the Fillmore District’s heyday, during the 1940s and ’50s, have probably heard stories about the “Harlem of the West.” Back then, Fillmore Street was packed with Black-owned restaurants, barber shops and nightclubs, and jazz legends like Billie Holiday routinely swung through the neighborhood to perform during their West Coast tours.

And anyone who’s paid attention to the long and steady displacement of the city’s Black population, now dwindled down to something like 4 or 5%, knows that today’s Fillmore doesn’t look anything like that.

Tamara Walker is one of many Black San Franciscans who would like to change that. For the third year in a row, Walker’s event production company, Burge LLC, is organizing the Fillmore Holiday Night Market, a night market and block party centered on the local Black community. The idea, she says, is to bring back a slice of that old Harlem of the West — at least for one night.

“A lot of people moved out of the city, and now they live in the East Bay and other places,” Walker says. “This particular event drives them back here to the Fillmore.”

This year’s holiday market will take place on Friday, Dec. 20. Co-sponsors include the nonprofit Livable City and Citizen Film, a documentary film company, with some additional funding from San Francisco’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development.

The holiday block party has always been set up as a night market. Even before it became trendy to brand big community events that way, Walker says, Black folks were gathering together in the streets for big reunions or celebrations: “It was just something that we did as a culture. You dressed up; you wore your finest. You came out so everybody could see your family.”

This year’s market will feature free cookies and hot chocolate, a toy giveaway and live snow and arts and crafts for the kids. For folks looking to pick up last-minute holiday gifts, a variety of Black- and brown-owned retail businesses will have booths set up to sell their wares. And, of course, there will be plenty of food, with vendors selling everything from oxtails and fried fish to banana pudding. Minnie Bell’s, a fried chicken restaurant that opened in the neighborhood this past summer — explicitly because the owner wanted to revitalize Black business in the area — will be open for business right on Fillmore (though it won’t have a booth at the market).

Live performances will include a local jazz band, line dancing and, the headliner, the R&B singer Lyfe Jennings.