FILLMORE BEAT | CHRIS BARNETT
Frozen in time, the Palace Cafe at 1843 Fillmore Street has been shuttered for decades. It’s said still to be set up just as it was the last time the door opened many years ago, but it seems a safe bet the tiny cafe will not re-open any time soon.
Now that the big ficus trees out front have been chopped down, the sign for the cafe is visible again, complete with its bright Dr Pepper logo. People are taking notice — and city officials are, too. A sign was posted on the front door of the cafe a few weeks ago by the Department of Building Inspection declaring it “unsafe and/or a public nuisance.” A new city ordinance penalizes property owners who leave storefronts empty — and this one has been empty for decades.
In the 1940s, it was the Fillmore Chop Suey Cafe, a hotspot with a towering neon blade. By the ’50s, Dr. Leonal V. Dickey had acquired the building, which housed three apartments plus his dental practice over the cafe. His family still owns it, and his son, also a dentist, still has a dental office there. Family members still live in the flats upstairs, but are private about past and present.
When the Fillmore was ravaged by urban renewal in the 1960s and ’70s, the neighborhood “was desolate with windblown empty tracts of land,” the younger Dr. Dickey told a visiting reporter last year. He said the Palace Cafe “became a meeting place for healthcare professionals and community stakeholders whose goal was the improvement of health, education and housing for the underserved population,” including displaced residents, small business owners and public school children in the Western Addition.
Today, neglected and tomb-silent, the cafe, with its old-style slatted glass windows, looks like days gone by. Dr. Dickey said the family had thought of remodeling and reopening the cafe, but the cost and effort of getting it up to code derailed the idea. Perhaps the new city ordinance tightening the screws on empty storefronts will change that.
— Francine Brevetti contributed to this report.
Filed under: Neighborhood History