The Western Addition debacle: a panel discussion on Tuesday, July 8

“Last house standing.” Photo courtesy of the Burden Archive.

Hi. Tomorrow, Tuesday July 8, I’ll be on a panel discussion about San Francisco’s “urban renewal” debacle, which resulted in the destruction of much of the Western Addition and the permanent displacement of thousands of its residents, most of them African-American. The panel, titled “We Were There: Views of San Francisco’s Urban Renewal,” is sponsored by the San Francisco Historical Society, which published a special issue on urban renewal in the Fall 2024 issue of its quarterly journal The Argonaut. That issue features an astonishing trove of superb, never-seen-before photographs by Emi Burden and Sheila Stover, who in 1960 took 4,000 photographs of the demolition of the neighborhood’s Victorians—the richest and most heartbreaking such record I know of.

The panel discussion takes place tomorrow, Tuesday July 8, at the Museum of San Francisco, 608 Commercial Street, San Francisco, at 6:30 pm. The other panelists are Western Addition residents Mattie Scott and Noah Griffin and Ernest Burden IIII, son of the photographers. In-person attendance is sold out, but you can sign up for the live stream below.

Starting on July 19, Burden and Stover’s stunning photographs will be exhibited at the Museum of San Francisco, with an open house from noon to 5 pm.

Hope some of you can join!

I’m also posting a two-part Portals of the Past column I wrote on the strange story of a mysterious building in Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece Vertigo, which weirdly illuminates not just that eternally unsettling movie but the entire Western Addition saga. Enjoy!