Grab Bag #74
The Domino Club, wet streets, neon, and being a kid in San Francisco.
Guess Where
The Grab Bag always starts off with a guess-where photo quiz and we are hide-bound traditionalists here at San Francisco Story, so...
Answer revealed at the end for dear Friends of Woody, (which you can become if you want.)
Speaking of Friends, I’m working on the 2026 San Francisco Story annual print journal for you right now, which got me thinking I should share some of the photos and stories from a previous journal to whet the appetites of the newer folks. Below you will find a couple of excerpts from the 2023 edition, which was very Grab-Baggy.
Friendship Lives On
Photographer Phil Mezey made a compositional comment in her shot looking south on Octavia Street in the Western Addition in 1961.
The neon sign of the Friendship Institutional Baptist Church (1257 Octavia Street) holds space with a slouched pedestrian and a bleak landscape thanks to the Redevelopment Agency’s eradication of a big chunk of the neighborhood for “urban renewal.”
Friendship Missionary Baptist Church was organized in a storefront at 1545A Post Street in 1946, one of many African American congregations formed in the neighborhood in the 1940s. (San Francisco’s black population rose from around 4,000 to over 40,000 in that decade thanks to World War II.)
From those humble beginnings, Friendship built its own building at 1257 Octavia Street and moved in with a procession from the Post Street store on November 4, 1951.