Hollow City

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One Friday night a few weeks after Fly opened, I go there with a friend and look at the crowd. Clean-cut but aspiring to be cool, the women in very tight clothes and the men in very loose clothes drink big glasses of beer and saki cocktails. The name Fly, written in ’70s-style fat round letters on the illuminated plastic sign outside, evidently refers to the 1970s blaxploitation Superfly films, an unsettling reference for an upscale bar in a formerly African American neighborhood.

The nearby Church of St. John Coltrane exemplifies culture in every sense: It’s religious, artistic, ethnic, political, and social at the same time. It feeds the poor three times a week and serves as one of the last remaining links to the golden age of the Fillmore District before it was gutted by urban renewal. And as an eccentric, individualist cultural hybrid—making free jazz a sacrament—it represents what has always made San Francisco distinctive, while Fly is a commercial enterprise that could be anywhere people old enough to drink and affluent enough to appreciate hip decor congregate. But last year a new owner bought the building where the church is housed and doubled the rent, forcing them out. (Thanks to an outpouring of community support, they have found temporary digs in the neighborhood.)

The Sunday morning after my Friday night excursion to Fly, I bike the few blocks from my home of nearly two decades to the Coltrane church, which honors the peerless free jazz saxophonist and composer. One of the church’s walls is lined with glossy paintings in the Eastern Orthodox style of angels, saints, and the Madonna and child, all with dark skin. The other wall features the text of Coltrane’s classic composition, A Love Supreme. Off by itself is a smaller painting of Coltrane in Byzantine-icon style, with delicate flames inside the mouth of his saxophone. Front and center on the altar is a painting of Jesus with neat dreadlocks.

Bishop Franzo King appears, puts on what looks like a red yarmulke, and the service begins with the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer and other prayers in a formal style. But after the prayers, he begins to preach like his fellow African American Baptist and Methodist ministers in the neighborhood, fervently, rhythmically. Bishop King asks God to soften the hearts of those up high and to care for the needy below, and he says that heaven is the true home of this church that is becoming homeless. Turning sideways, I see a young Asian couple has come in and we’ve got all the races represented, if the guy with the soul patch is as Hispanic as he looks. "The strongest argument for San Francisco over, say, Dallas," my friend Catherine e-mails me from the Mission District that day, "is that here people still mix."

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