Album: 1553 Fulton St,

     Album:1553 Fulton St,

The house I used to live in has an interesting history.

1553 Fulton St was built during the "Western Addition" expansion, when San Francisco started building into the sand dunes that were found West of Divisadero Street / Van Ness Ave, an area known in the 1800s as the "Great Sand Bank". Evidently the house was built before 1906, because it has a brick foundation, a practice that stopped after the big earthquake in 1906.

Previously the Malcolm X Unity House and Patrice Lumumba Publishers, for a while it was a halfway house and then for many years was somewhat abandoned (although may have been a drug house of some sorts?).

The city forced the owner to fix the house up, and he decided to start renting it out - that's when I moved in in 2000. During that time it becamse home to LindyBooty, which was not only the largest house party of the contemporary partnered Blues Dancing scene, but also considered to be part of the beginnings of this scene.

It also became the SF Lindy Hotel, a new "halfway house" of sorts for Lindy Hoppers and Blues dancers visiting or moving to San Francisco, and hosted more of these dancers than any other place in the world:

  • Number of "guest-stays": approximately 500+
  • Number of "guest-nights": approximately 2000+
  • Most guests for one event: 35 @ Blues Rising 2007, 34 @ SFLX'08
(The last record is unconfirmed, let me know if anyone has hosted more people for one event - at one point the record was held by Warehouse Dan in Sacramento and FireMark in San Diego, props to them both!)
Plants
Many things grow at the house.
6 folders , 1 image
I visit the house in 2016,
right after a fire almost destroys it!
4 images
1553 Fulton
( comments)
Patrice Lumumba Publishers
in the garage ( comments)
Also the "Malcolm X Unity House"
according to this old flyer which I found in an SF bookshop. "Well the big fat pig cannot scare us...We must move to take control of our lives, and build our own educational institutions. RALLY and MARCH at 3pm sunday, nov 26th - meet at the Malcolm X Unity House 1553 Fulton Street - San Francisco" The Southern University incident mentioned happened on 1972/11/16 (students Denver Smith and Leonard Brown), so this flyer must be from 1972 (the next Nov 26th on a Sunday was 1978) ( comments)
Ballroom,
shortly after moving in. (from two photos, obviously) ( comments)
Front Ballroom
( comments)
Bert Wave
( comments)
Flag
8/28/2001 A flag that I found on ebay, it was given to a man in Texas by his friend who was the original owner of the flag back when there were 48 states. ( comments)
New Friends:
Mr. Peterson meets a neighbor that visits us often. ( comments)
Old Friends
( comments)
Project-a-Cat
Mr Peterson runs the projector ( comments)
SunSitting
( comments)
Tree Bert
We buy a tree ( comments)
Tree Dave
( comments)
My wall of hats
[photo Luke H] ( comments)
Aerial view (South)
of my block ( comments)
Aerial view (North)
of my block ( comments)
Satellite view
of my block ( comments)
The whiteboard
and it's collection of scribblings of a decade. ( comments)

I had previously (mysteriously) lost this album from my hard drive, but was able to restore it thanks to the wonderous web archive.
Powered by album tool from Dave Madison's Marginal Hacks on Fri Nov 11 22:49:51 2022