Westbrook Court at Hudson Avenue, San Francisco 94124
Here on Hunter’s Point Hill, on streets that many San Franciscans have never traversed, the names of women who transformed the neighborhood glint in the sun.
The street names represent neighborhood self-determination—or at least the potential for it. Urban memory is marked and kept alive by naming. When names aren’t focused on what geographer Paul Groth calls “useful trees” (like Oak, Pine, Lombard, Ash), evocative place names (Yosemite, Sonoma, Nevada), or numbers, street names record the values of a community at the time of naming. They are our everyday monuments to power and history. As in most US cities, many San Francisco streets inscribe a good deal of local history into residents’ everyday language, commemorating early Spanish explorers, nineteenth-century mayors, city surveyors, and gold rush heroes. The vast majority are male, typically representing top-down power through race or class position.
These Hunter’s Point streets were named in the early 1970s as this hill was transformed through a massive redevelopment effort that installed hundreds of affordable housing units on curvilinear cul-de-sacs. The housing resulted from a multiyear campaign to redirect city redevelopment after a similar effort produced widespread demolition and displacement in the Fillmore District (see Buchanan Mall, p. 135). Hunter’s Point activists, led by a group of women known as The Big Five, advocated for community-driven change, lobbying a Nixon-era Congress to fully fund neighborhood development plans. But the development funds focused almost entirely on housing, leaving out the other institutions needed for jobs and community development. Hunter’s Point thus followed a path of economic decline, even with the new hilltop housing. This became particularly poignant as the nearby naval shipyard shuttered (see Hunter’s Point Shipyard, p. 152).
The streets that recall the era of The Big Five include Westbrook Court, named for Elouise Westbrook, who was the lead matriarch of the movement and who is also recognized in other parts of the city for her work on affordable health care (including a South of Market health clinic). Ethel Garlington, Julia Commer, Marcelee Cashmere, Oceola Washington, Bertha Freeman, and others are represented in these streets; they worked on the redevelopment effort and also fostered a culture of activism in the community, which continues today, often with African American women providing the leadership. Espanola Jackson, who spoke of herself as a daughter of The Big Five, described being a young mother who, under Westbrook’s tutelage, sharpened her analysis of government assistance and the complexities of the welfare state. She later also worked on housing and environmental justice struggles; her street is around the corner from Westbrook Court. Other streets on the hill recognize national figures involved in civil rights, like Whitney Young, who ran the national Urban League, and the writer and social critic James Baldwin.