It begins with land.
It begins with the first people of this place.
It begins with the Yelamu, who fished this bay and gathered on this shore before any stage was built, whose descendants carry that responsibility still.
That sounds obvious, but it is easy to forget. The blocks you walk, the streets you cross, the building you are looking at — all of it sits on a landscape shaped by water, not by human design. Before the landfill, before the streets were mapped and the lights put up, this was the edge of the bay: cove and shore, hill and tule marsh, fog rolling in off the Pacific, the sound of water in every direction.
The Yelamu lived here. They were one of the groups of the Ramaytush Ohlone — the original peoples of the San Francisco Peninsula — and they knew this place not as a district with a name but as a set of responsibilities. The land required care. The bay required attention. The seasons required work. They understood what every generation of people who have gathered in this building has had to learn again: that a place holds you, and that being held requires something in return.
This building has carried many names. Garibaldi Hall. The Dimas-Alang Temple. On Broadway Theatre. Mabuhay Gardens. Each name was the mark of a community that claimed this space, that made it a home for music and gathering and whatever the neighborhood needed that particular decade to be.
But the land carries an older name, an older claim.
BRICKS & SWEAT: WHY IT MATTERS
The Ramaytush Ohlone did not disappear. Colonization, displacement, and decades of official erasure did not end their relationship to this place. They are still here. Their sovereignty is not a historical fact — it is a present one.
A room devoted to memory has to hold the deepest memory first. That is the honest position for a venue that claims to care about history: to acknowledge that the story does not begin with the building, does not begin with Broadway, does not begin with any of the names on the sign.
It begins with land.
It begins with the first people of this place.
It begins with the Yelamu, who fished this bay and gathered on this shore before any stage was built, whose descendants carry that responsibility still.
