As booze-filled “entertainment zones” where people can buy to-go cocktails spread across San Francisco, now the Fillmore has one too, or rather, it has one big entertainment zone and another small one.
Ever since then-Mayor London Breed passed her "entertainment zone” legislation allowing bars to sell to-go cocktails and open container drinks during events when the streets are shut down to cars, seemingly every neighborhood in SF has been clamoring to get their own entertainment zones. And the latest of these is the Fillmore, as on Tuesday, the SF Board of Supervisors unanimously approved granting entertainment zone privileges to the Fillmore District, or at least, two parts of the Fillmore District.
“We have not devoted enough resources or the right resources to help the [Fillmore] neighborhood thrive,” the district’s Supervisor Bilal Mahmood said at a Monday committee meeting while discussing his entertainment zone proposal. “The focus at the start will be around larger events like the annual Juneteenth celebration, but the business community will explore other events to activate the corridor.”
The supervisors did not approve making all of Fillmore Street a boozy entertainment zone. Instead, they approved to-go alcoholic drinks (and again, only when streets are shut down) on Fillmore between Sutter and McAlister streets, as seen above.
That span would include popular nightclubs like The Boom Boom Room, The Progress, and Sheba’s Jazz lounge. Much of this stretch would also fall under the current map of the Fillmore Jazz Festival, should that be returning next year.
There is also this second very small area that is a new designated entertainment zone in the Fillmore District, this little one-block stretch of O’Farrell Street between Steiner and Fillmore Streets. That block is slated to host a Holiday Night Market in mid-December, so that kind of thing maybe explains why this block is included too.
As a reminder, while you can take your to-go drinks outside an entertainment zone when the rules are in effect, you cannot actually leave the designated entertainment zone with your drink. And again, these privileges only apply during events where the streets are shut down to cars.
Image: Fillmore Street via Facebook
