"Jazzing Up the Fillmore: Groundbreaking Held for Yoshi’s San Francisco, Jazz Heritage Center"
Thanks to the owners of a famous Oakland jazz club, sounds of the improvisation art form will be played again in a neighborhood that once hosted jazz legends.
Yoshi’s, the Oakland Japanese restaurant and jazz club owned by Yoshie Akiba, Kaz Kajimura and Hiroyuki Hori that has hosted Dizzy Gillespie, Branford Marsalis and Harry Connick, Jr., among others, will open a San Francisco location as the anchor of the Fillmore Heritage Center, scheduled for completion in March 2007.
Mayor Gavin Newsom and dozens of prominent members of San Francisco’s jazz community attended the official groundbreaking for the center, located on the corner of Fillmore and Eddy streets, just south of San Francisco’s Japantown.
“We’re finally seeing it happen,” said Newsom. “It’s about bringing the heart and soul of San Francisco back to life.”
The $68 million mixed-use complex, located on 1.2 acres of land, will also host a Blue Mirror Restaurant and Lounge featuring French Southern Caribbean cuisine, 68 market rate and 12 below market rate condominiums and an underground parking lot.
The San Francisco Yoshi’s will be a 26,500-square-foot, two-story venue with 420 seats in the jazz club and more than 300 in the restaurant and lounge.
The original Yoshi’s began in 1972 as a small, 25-seat Japanese restaurant in Berkeley. Five years later, with business booming, Akiba, Kajimura and Hori moved their restaurant to Claremont Avenue in Oakland and began presenting jazz shows in addition to the restaurant.
Yoshi’s continued to grow and prosper and by the time the doors of its new location in Oakland’s Jack London Square were opened in May 1997, it was considered by many to be one of the best jazz clubs in the world.
The Fillmore location is a dream come true, says Kajimura.
“We were telling ourselves that one of these days we’d like to make a presence in San Francisco.”
The Fillmore Heritage Center will be “the jewel that goes in the crown on this neighborhood,” said Dwayne Jones, director of the Mayor’s Office of Community Development.
The project was hailed by many at the groundbreaking to be the most important of the Fillmore Jazz Preservation District’s revitalization projects.
The Fillmore area, prior to World War II, had been largely a Japanese and Jewish neighborhood. With the forcible removement of the Japanese American community, the area was repopulated by an influx of African Americans who came to San Francisco to fill war-related jobs.
The involvement of Yoshi’s creates important ties in the Fillmore District, says Michael E. Johnson, president of real estate developer Em Johnson Interest, Inc., which is managing the project.
“On a local, cultural level, it helps connect two important ethnic groups of the area, Japanese and African Americans. Music, especially jazz, has been a universal language that connects people from all over the world. It is truly fitting that the multi-cultural population of the Fillmore area will have a venue like Yoshi’s.”
A previous plan for the center proposed by a different developer, included an AMC movie house and a Blue Note jazz club, a world-famous chain with locations in New York and Tokyo. However, when the movie house component of the center fell through, so did the entire project.
New developer Johnson approached Yoshi’s owners almost three years ago.
“(Michael) came to us ‘cause he was really looking for a local operator, not someone from New York,” said Kajimura. “He’s a jazz lover and he came to Yoshi’s many times and he really got us into it.”
Johnson is equally excited about the new Yoshi’s.
“The synergy that we have formed with Yoshi’s owner Kaz Kajimura is something I will cherish for the rest of my life,” he said to a standing-room only crowd on Tuesday. “The opportunity to have Yoshi’s as our anchor tenant is truly an accomplishment. Can I get an ‘amen’ or a round of applause for Yoshi’s and their commitment to the project?”
Kajimura eagerly anticipates the opportunities that two locations in the Bay Area might bring.
“We can probably go get many bigger names since we can present each musician more days of gigs, between San Francisco and (Oakland),” Kajimura explained. “I think it’s very possible to have back-to-back concerts.”
Although exciting, the journey has been a long and steady one.
“The most important thing is just to keep doing it everyday. That’s what we did for 33 years, everyday we opened the restaurant, and 23 years, jazz every night, that brought us here,” said Yoshi’s namesake and co-owner Akiba.
Although admitting to feeling overwhelmed, “fate took me this way, so I accept.”