It was a sunny day in November when San Francisco police stormed the 500 block of Haight Street. Two squad cars blocked the intersection at Fillmore, with two more at Steiner, and officers flushed more than 100 people out of apartments and swept them off front steps and stoops.
Television news crews were there, tipped off by police, as were photojournalists whose pictures ran in the SF Chronicle and Examiner in the following days. In 90 minutes the cops arrested 54 people, some of them bystanders or folks who happened to be passing through, on suspicion of selling heroin. The day was Nov. 2, the year was 1977.
At the time, the Lower Haight was the southern tip of the Fillmore district — and often called the Haight-Fillmore — and was still an almost entirely Black community.
But the urban renewal that started 30 years earlier in the Fillmore had begun a process that would ultimately decimate the Black population in the Harlem of the West. Some folks who were around in 1977 see the raid as part of the same process.
Another perspective, represented by a plaque that adorns a grocery at the corner of Haight and Fillmore, is that the sweep saved the neighborhood.
I’ve lived nearby since graduating college, often stopping at the market for a carton of eggs or a lemon, and only recently read the unobtrusive plaque, which went up just before the grocery won legacy status in 2018.
According to its text, the raid put an end to the rampant heroin dealing and “resulted in the neighborhood’s eventual recovery.”
Nearly 50 years later, the area and the city are in some ways unrecognizable, yet San Francisco still struggles with similar issues. Open-air drug dealing has spurred emergency measures in the Tenderloin, and the fear of gentrification figures into all kinds of policy discussions and decisions.
Despite fears of police sweeping through today’s Tenderloin — and Mayor London Breed talking tough about the desperate street scene — it’s also clear that this is not 1977. There are no longer raids that close down city blocks, detain bystanders, and culminate in dozens of arrests.
Conventional thinking about addiction and drug dealing has changed too. If not for state and federal law, SF by now would have likely opened safe-injection sites, and its district attorney was elected promising to use restorative justice programs that emphasize reconciliation between perpetrator and victim, and rehabilitation over incarceration.
But in 1977, when George Moscone was mayor, “harm reduction” was not even in the vocabulary, and the approach to drug use was more military than medical.
‘Military precision’ in ‘enemy territory’
Eight weeks before the raid, Chris George and Garth Galon sent Mayor Moscone an ultimatum. The business partners had just purchased the large building on the southwest corner of Haight and Fillmore with a storefront (which would become the Haight-Fillmore Whole Foods Co. the following year) and apartments above. They were less than thrilled with their block, which had earned the nickname “Needle Alley.”
“We had no police protection, we had no city services whatsoever. It was basically a forgotten part of the city,” recounts Chris George, now retired and living in North Beach. “There was gunfire in the streets. If we called the police, they would come, look around, and drive off.”
George recalls reading that it was legal for property owners in his position to withhold property tax, place the money in escrow, and release it only when they received city services. So he tried it. Moscone, according to George, was amenable: “He said, ‘Don’t say anything to the press for 60 days, and something will happen.’” That was early September.
Over the next two months, George and Galon allowed police officers to photograph drug deals on the street from vacant apartments above the market. (In later years, the Whole Foods chain would unsuccessfully try to make the market’s owners change the name of the business.)
Using these photos as evidence, SFPD wrote 35 arrest warrants. Meanwhile, police captain George Eimil and his lieutenants began planning an operation that would employ a total of 50 cops. On the day of the raid, Eimil told the Chronicle that the 500 block of Haight Street had “the heaviest concentration of narcotics pushers in the city.”
Following the sweep, the American Civil Liberties Union told the same newspaper that “there is simply no justification for a police cordon that sweeps innocent persons into a net, and subjects each of them to the harassment and ignominy that the Fourth Amendment is designed to prevent.”
Despite this condemnation, media coverage largely heralded the sweep as a victory and the officers as heroes, describing their “military precision,” the meticulous planning leading up to “D-Day,” and, perhaps most strikingly, their brave infiltration of “enemy territory.”
Keys to the neighborhood
Locksmith John Henry White has lived in San Francisco his whole life. The same year of the raid, his father opened the shop at 376 Fillmore, steps away from the 500 block of Haight, and John took over 20 years later. From my bedroom window, I can see him come and go, flipping the sign in the door when he steps out to do a job.
In the 1970s, he says, the neighborhood was different — full of children, families stopping to talk to one another on stoops and street corners, neighbors showing sympathy to the bereaved when someone died.
White also notes that there was violence, especially on the northwest corner of Haight and Fillmore at a bar called Hank’s 500 Club: “Shit, somebody would get shot in there every day, almost.”
Despite his proximity, he would avoid that part of Haight except to get a haircut at William’s Barbershop. White’s locksmith shop never had trouble; as he points out, everybody needs keys.
John Henry White’s locksmith shop never had trouble. As he points out, everybody needs keys.
Neon sign engineer and Burning Man cofounder John Law has a different Lower Haight story. As a 19-year-old who moved from the suburban Midwest to the Upper Haight in 1976, he remembers looking out the bus window when he rode down Haight Street.
“The area between Divisadero and Fillmore, on the north side of the street” was full of folks “hanging out, playing three-card monte, smoking,” recalls Law, who is white. “There were a lot of guys in doorways, sitting on stoops, talking. It was a real street scene.”
Shortly after arriving in SF, Law was waiting for the 22 Fillmore bus at Haight when a man who appeared to be mentally ill tried to whack him with a milk crate. He fought back, and two more guys on the street joined the scrum. Hank’s 500 Club had closed in 1975, and in its place was Henrietta’s, the area’s first gay bar, where Law took quick refuge.
“The owner and a friend of his were yelling at the guys assaulting me that they had called the cops, convincing them to leave,” Law tells me over the phone. The cops never came. Law then spent an hour chain-smoking and drinking with his rescuers.
‘Inner city suburb’
He never caught the names of the Good Samaritans, but the bar owner was likely Donald Lipper, who is heralded in bronze on the Haight-Fillmore plaque. Lipper, who dabbled in real estate dealing while apparently dodging the taxman, opened Henrietta’s shortly after Hank’s 500 Club closed, and based on what White and George say, his reputation was similarly tough.
“I didn’t associate with him,” White says. “But I knew what people said about him: He’s ruthless and the drug dealers don’t mess with him.”
Lipper might have also been a vigilante and an arsonist. Though Chris George never witnessed it himself, he says Lipper bragged about burning down neighborhood drug houses. George included this detail in the text of the plaque, which he wrote. The Frisc could not find any archival or anecdotal evidence to support the arson claims.
There is no doubt, though, that Lipper was both a racist and a major factor in the neighborhood’s transformation. When a Chronicle reporter asked about his real estate speculation, Lipper responded: “Why the hell should this gem of a city be given over to welfare Blacks? Put them in Idaho, or at least Oakland.”
In the same story, from Sept. 1, 1979, Lipper described the “pioneering spirit” with which he bought seven Lower Haight apartments and evicted all the tenants, turning off the water to force a Health Department condemnation. He also spoke openly about his goal to turn the Lower Haight into an “inner city suburb.” Fellow speculator Matthew Wilson, who owned a brunch restaurant in the neighborhood called Daddy’s, told the Chronicle that gentrification was not only profitable but easy:
“Before 1977, you could pick up anything, kick out the Blacks and put in gays, unload it in three months and make $30,000. What do you think ‘good tenants’ means in the multiple listing books? It means the dirty work’s been done. It’s what I’ve done, what everyone’s done.”
This blatant gentrification campaign engendered plenty of pushback, including multiple letters to the Chronicle from angry readers and a 1980 flyer calling out “white gay ‘pioneers’” in the Haight-Fillmore.
According to George, Lipper died “many years ago” of HIV. (The Frisc could not find an obituary or other notice of his death.)
The Black population of San Francisco was about 13 percent in 1980. According to the 2020 U.S. census, it is now 5.6 percent. The census doesn’t define the Lower Haight as its own neighborhood, but in the three census tracts that hug the eastern part of Haight Street, the Black population is 6.4 percent.
These days, the average monthly rent for a one-bedroom apartment in SF is nearly $2,900, according to Zumper. For the Lower Haight, it’s slightly higher at $3,045. In these and other ways, the current neighborhood resembles the “inner city suburb” that Lipper imagined 40 years ago.
Funk and Two Jacks
John Law did not witness the raid, but the next day, he saw the streets desolate. Gone were the people chatting on corners, the men smoking on stoops, the cars idling at the curb. Everything was quiet.
John Henry White says he and other business owners were relieved, and that after the sweep, “responsible people” started buying neighborhood property. He characterized the raid as the single event that most changed the area.
Chris George said that although he didn’t agree with the method, he was satisfied with the result: “The people who bravely stood by and held onto their property in that neighborhood were trying to run businesses from behind broken plate-glass windows with cyclone fencing nailed onto it,” he says. “So I didn’t condone how [the raid] was done, but I think it helped a lot of people out when it all got cleaned up.”
If the 1977 raid was what tipped the Lower Haight from a Black neighborhood into something else, it took a long time to tip, according to Nik Cooper.
She was born in 1976, and her parents opened Two Jacks Street Food on Haight, just east of the Needle Alley block, in 1977. Through the 1980s, it was a vibrant Black neighborhood, and Cooper remembers walking up from the French American International School to work at the family restaurant once school let out.
“You could always hear funk coming out of car stereos; there were smells of good soul food, the community, everyone knew everyone,” Cooper remembers. “It was really a great place to spend my days after coming from an environment like French American,” where, she adds, she often felt like an outsider among her white, wealthy peers.
Raid or no raid — our conversation was the first she had heard of it — Cooper, who owns and operates the restaurant now known as Two Jacks Nik’s Place, doesn’t think the Lower Haight gentrified when she was a kid. Open-air drug markets and violence resumed in the ’80s and continued through the ’90s, she observes, but this time it was crack instead of heroin.
The Tenderloin this time
A generation later, San Francisco still wrestles with open-air drug markets, street violence, and worries about gentrification. There are major differences, though. Right now in the Tenderloin and elsewhere, fentanyl has flooded the streets, and overdose deaths have taken a grim toll, rising from 441 in 2019 to 711 in 2020. (The 2021 tally just landed, and it’s “only” 650.)
Like the old Lower Haight, the Tenderloin isn’t just a war zone or a scourge; it’s a real place, dense with families and small businesses, as well as people suffering from addiction. Three weeks before Breed’s emergency declaration, Tenderloin residents delivered a letter to her office with details of the dangers surrounding their daily lives.
The emergency measures just got going. The tactics to end open-air drug dealing are so far different than 1977 — targeted arrests, not dragnet sweeps. It’s not even clear if the city can afford the extra police presence the mayor has promised.
While Breed’s law-and-order rhetoric has made some advocates nervous, services are a big part of the plan too, with a new “linkage center” to offer short-term help — showers, food, clothing — and longer-term help to get people housed and into substance abuse programs.
As Nik Cooper of Two Jacks sees it, Lower Haight gentrification started not with urban renewal or the 1977 raid, but with the dot-com boom of the early 2000s.
We don’t know yet if any of this will work. And if it does, we don’t know if this more humane response will, in turn, push out long-standing residents and businesses, but there are other differences between the Lower Haight of the 1970s and today’s Tenderloin.
Thousands of low-income units in the neighborhood’s single-room occupancy buildings cannot be altered, thanks to city policy. Beyond the SROs, some supervisors cited the threat of gentrification when blocking two projects, one in the Tenderloin, the other just across Market Street in SoMa, that would have created 800 new homes, dozens of them below market rate, without tearing down existing housing. (In doing so, they triggered lawsuits and a state investigation.)
Neighborhood rookie
Dick Vivian’s first years in the Lower Haight were a microcosm of how the neighborhood was and wasn’t changing. He opened Rooky Ricardo’s, his celebrated record store, in 1987. Vivian, who is white, initially only sold vintage 45s, many of which were recorded by Black artists in the 1950s and ’60s.
Though he didn’t observe much crime, Vivian noticed that his customers were wary. That didn’t stop them from coming in to browse 45s. “Record people would go into the worst part of the world to buy records,” he chuckles.
On a drizzly afternoon at his shop, punchy soul and doo-wop are playing while Vivian tells me that when he arrived, “there was an energy that …” His voice trails off before he continues: “Other people didn’t really come on this block.”
A white person with cultivated tastes finds a cheap place to cater to a hipster clientele. Signs of a gentrifying neighborhood, right? But Vivian says that’s not the whole story. Rooky Ricardo’s soon became a community center for Black folks in the neighborhood as well. Now, Vivian notes, those customers’ grandchildren come in to visit.
While I was in the store, a handful of regulars came by to say hi, ask about new arrivals, and indulge in Vivian’s playful teasing. One woman even brought him cookies. Despite this loyal circle, Vivian says he doesn’t like San Francisco anymore: “The way people drive, the way people are dismissive and irritated and anxious — it’s so different.”
Keeping tradition alive
As Nik Cooper of Two Jacks sees it, Lower Haight gentrification started not with urban renewal or the 1977 raid, but with the dot-com boom. It wasn’t until the early 2000s, she says, that other long-standing businesses started closing and moving en masse.
Other than John Henry White, all the Black business owners Cooper knew from the “golden age” are gone, and she doesn’t know the people now running the breweries, cafés, salons, boutiques, and restaurants all around her.
Faithful customers have buoyed both Cooper and Vivian through the pandemic, even though Two Jacks Nik’s Place has been open only for takeout since 2020. Still, longtime customers come by to chat with Cooper while they wait for fried fish plates and collard greens.
Cooper can’t deny that the neighborhood has changed, but she also thinks the Lower Haight maintains some classic SF flavor. “That’s the tradition I’m talking about — the spiritual tradition of being connected, respect, honor, and having a community,” she says. “Having people feel safe and loved when they come here.”
White is confident Cooper will carry on that tradition for as long as she wants: “[Two Jacks] ain’t going nowhere.” Some of his neighbors have not fared as well — the liquor store next door to his shop closed in 2020 when the landlord doubled the rent after 20 years, White says. The former Abe’s Liquor is now the Haight Bourbon Shop.
“For all you know, I might not be here,” White adds. “That’s the way it is.”