The Excelsior District street that was the 1940s boyhood home of Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia just got City Hall approval to be renamed ‘Jerry Garcia Street.’ It’s currently called Harrington Street, but new signage will shakedown this street.
San Francisco loves to celebrate our favorite homeborn rock and roll icon Jerry Garcia, co-founder and guitarist for the legendary Grateful Dead (who are currently enjoying yet another cult-hit resurgence in the form of Dead & Company after the runaway blockbuster success of their recent Las Vegas Sphere residency).
We’ve got the annual Jerry Day concert coming up August 2 to honor Jerry’s birthday, and this year’s lineup features Melvin Seals and JGB, Mads Tolling, and Stu Allen & Mars Hotel. (There is also a Jerry Nite pub crawl with live performers at various Excelsior District bars.) And that free August 2 daytime concert of course takes place at the Jerry Garcia Amphitheater in McLaren Park, which is barely a mile from the Excelsior house that Jerry grew up in on Harrington Street.
But most of us won’t be calling it Harrington Street much longer. On Tuesday, the SF Board of Supervisors unanimously approved a resolution to add the commemorative street name “Jerry Garcia Street” to Harrington Street.
Okay, where even is Harrington Street? I admit that I had not heard of this street until just now, and I used to live out that way! As seen in blue above, Harrington Street is a one-block street between Alemany Boulevard and Mission Street.
Google Maps even identifies the home in question.
And here’s the block Jerry grew up on. The house he lived in is the yellow one in the foreground.
It was actually Jerry’s grandparents’ house. Garcia moved in with his grandparents after his father died during his boyhood, and while living on Harrington Street, he attended the nearby Monroe Elementary School. He would go on to attend Denman Middle School and Balboa High School, but after his mother remarried, she moved he and his older brother to Sonoma County. Garcia did not particularly like living there.
After a failed stint in the Army, Jerry returned to SF and formed a band called Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions. That band would become The Warlocks, and would then become the Grateful Dead in 1965. The gang took over a certain house on Ashbury Street, and the rest is rock and roll history.
The district’s new Supervisor Chyanne Chen was the sponsor behind this street renaming proposal.
Very interestingly, Jerry Garcia actually published a memoir of his childhood called Harrington Street, describing his time in that very house. Or rather, Garcia’s estate had the book published in 1995, shortly after his death from a heart attack.
Image: SAN FRANCISCO, UNITED STATES - JANUARY 31: Jerry Garcia performing at the Warfield Theater in San Francisco on January 31, 1991. (Photo by Clayton Call/Redferns)
