Peoples Temple in San Francisco - San Francisco Start

San Francisco Start

When the Peoples Temple expanded its operations into the Bay Area in the 1970s, its staff concentrated on advertising the Temple's bus caravans to attract new converts, including handing out free trinkets. While in 1972, the Temple was still calling its Redwood Valley facility the "mother church" of a statewide movement, moving the seat of power to an urban area seemed a strategic necessity. It had held services in San Francisco and Los Angeles since 1970.

In 1971, the Temple established a permanent facility in an old San Francisco building that used to be the Albert Pike Memorial Scottish Rite temple on 1859 Geary Boulevard in San Francisco's Western Addition, and followed in 1972 with a facility in Los Angeles. The Temple purchased the Geary Boulevard building for $122,500 in 1972. The San Francisco building was damaged in the 1989 earthquake and has since been demolished and the location turned into a post office. While the Los Angeles branch started with a larger mostly African-American membership, the Temple later enticed hundreds of devoted Los Angeles members to move north to San Francisco to attend that facility.

By August 1975, Jones had completely abandoned prior plans to make Redwood Valley an internal "promised land." The reversal of the direction of Temple efforts from rural areas back into urban areas, where it had focused when located in Indiana, was complete. San Francisco was a more realistic political fit and permitted the Temple to show its political stripes.

Problematic for the Temple was that Jones' "healing" ceremonies in San Francisco, as in all places, also drew some right-wing religious zealots less likely to join a socialist organization. Because of that and the Temple's constant fear of conspiracies attempting to destroy "the most promising hope for world socialism", new members were carefully screened. Entrants to the San Francisco facility were not permitted free access to the inner areas of the buildings. Rather, they were greeted by an amicable covert interrogation party that sized up visitors, with "suspicious" figures told to wait indefinitely in the lobby. The Temple assigned admitted attendees an "interpreter" of sorts to watch their reactions to the meetings and "explain" Jones' statements. If the attendee seemed non-objectionable, a five-week period of observation began, which usually involved sifting through the attendees' trash by the third or fourth week.