Billie Holiday singing at the Champagne Supper Club; Dexter Gordon hanging out at Bop City; Dizzie Gillespie, Lionel Hampton, Charlie Parker, Duke Ellington, Chet Baker and John Coltrane all dropping in for jam sessions. A nostalgic snapshot of the New York or Chicago jazz scene? No: this was San Francisco's Fillmore District in its musical heyday.

The Fillmore in the 1940s and 1950s was a swinging, eclectic, and integrated neighbourhood, streets full of restaurants, pool halls, theatres, and stores - many minority-owned. It boasted two-dozen active nightclubs and music joints within its one square mile.

Although it has been commemorated in songs, poems, and in Maya Angelou's I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, few people today know of the rich musical history of the Fillmore. This is because it virtually vanished, abruptly and thoroughly, due to redevelopment in the 1960s.

Through archival photographs and oral accounts from the neighbourhood residents and musicians who experienced it at its height, Harlem of the West celebrates this unique and rediscovered chapter in jazz history and the African American experience on the West Coast.

ELIZABETH PEPIN is a photographer, writer, public television producer, and former day manager at the historic Fillmore Auditorium. She lives in San Francisco.

LEWIS WATTS is a photographer and professor of art at the University of California, Santa Cruz, with a longstanding interest in African American history in the Bay Area and nationally.

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