San Francisco’s Marcus Books is fighting to keep its home.
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Lydia Daniller / Via scratchmag.net
When Raye and Julian Richardson started selling books to friends out of their print shop in 1960, they were founding the first black bookstore in San Francisco. Since 1981, Marcus Books has been housed in a tiny storefront on the street level of an unmistakably San Franciscan purple Victorian house on Fillmore Street. Now the oldest continuously open black bookstore in the nation, Marcus Books is run by the Richardson's grandchildren, Karen and Gregory Johnson, and staffed by assorted family members. But the bookstore and the community it serves are scrambling to stay in the Fillmore as a multiyear eviction drama threatens to displace them from their building. To keep its home, the store needs to raise a million dollars. In one month.
Marcus Book Stores (the original Fillmore location has a sister store in Oakland) sells books by and about black people. Over the decades it has hosted such authors as Toni Morrison and James Baldwin, musicians including John Coltrane and Ella Fitzgerald, and events designed to support a “legacy of consciousness, strength, and creativity” in the black community.
Before it was home to the bookstore, the building at 1712 Fillmore had an epic history. It once housed legendary Fillmore jazz club Jimbo's Bop City, and narrowly missed being torn down in the 1960s urban redevelopment fiasco that razed most of San Francisco's Western Addition neighborhood. In the 1970s, the three-story building was moved, intact, two blocks from its previous location to where it now stands. But this year, if the Johnsons can't raise the money to stay in the Victorian (which is also their home), Marcus Books could go the way of Jimbo's and countless other neighborhood landmarks.
While the prospect of a beloved independent bookstore's closing is hardly new, it's actually against trend at the moment; the American Booksellers Association reported indie bookstore sales were up almost 8% in 2012. But Marcus Books happens to sit at the intersection of several concurrent crises: the ongoing need for independent bookstores to diversify their income sources and compete with online retailers; a steep rise in evictions and housing costs in San Francisco hastened by the influx of monied tech gold rushers; and the predatory loan practices that dominoed into the 2008 economic crash.
The store's customer base is also shrinking, and, along with it, the black literary and artistic community that Marcus stokes. The 2009 census revealed that San Francisco's African-American population had decreased by 40% since 1990. Rapid gentrification shows no signs of slowing in the previously middle- and working-class African-American and Japanese-American neighborhood once nicknamed “the Harlem of the West.”
The chain of events that led Marcus Books to this point of impermanence is long and often confusing, as are most eviction stories. The Johnsons say they fell victim to a predatory loan in 2006 and eventually lost ownership, with the building sold at bankruptcy court in 2013. Marcus Books — along with community groups, the NAACP, local housing activists, and civic leaders — rallied to stop the subsequent eviction of the store, hoping the new owners would recognize the store's historical importance and allow the Johnsons to buy the building back for only slightly more than its auction price. But the new owners refused, asking for the building's full market value. And that's just the basics of the situation. The past year has seen what feels like a perpetual state of emergency — rallies, meetings, city hall sessions — for those involved in efforts to keep Marcus Books in its home.
What's very clear is what the store's supporters need to do now. In January 2014, a deal struck with the new owners allows the Johnsons to repurchase the building. The catch? They need to raise the fair market value: $2.6 million. The Johnsons already have $1.6 million in assistance offered from a local nonprofit. On Martin Luther King Jr. Day they launched a crowdfunding campaign that seeks to raise the additional funds through a combination of private investors and individual donors. They have until the end of February 2014 to raise a million dollars. In the meantime, it's business as usual at the store.
Photographer Lydia Daniller and I stopped by in early January to document Marcus Books at a time when its future is uncertain.
Lydia Daniller / Via scratchmag.net
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