Peoples Temple in San Francisco

The Peoples Temple, the organization at the center of the Jonestown incident, was headquartered in San Francisco, California, from the early to mid-1970s until the Temple's move to Guyana.

While the Temple originated in Indiana in the 1950s, after leader Jim Jones predicted an apocalypse that would create a socialist Eden on earth, it moved to Redwood Valley, California in the late 1960s. Its headquarters later moved into San Francisco, where Jones remained until July 1977, when Jones fled with almost 1,000 Temple members to Jonestown, Guyana following investigations by local media.

The Peoples Temple was an organization founded in 1955 by Reverend James Warren Jones (Jim Jones) that, by the mid-1970s, possessed over a dozen locations in California, including in San Francisco and Los Angeles.

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.

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