Photograph of Vasilios Kiniris at Zinc Details by Drew Altizer

Q & A | Vasilios Kiniris

Zinc Details has turned 20. How did it all begin?

I was fresh out of the College of Environmental Design at the University of California at Berkeley and simply had an idea and some very strong feelings. At the university, Wendy Nishimura and I had developed an understanding and shared a passion for the modern classics of furniture design. In travels to Europe and Japan, we came face to face with new styles hatched from traditional forms. And naturally, we began to form strong relationships with young artisans and designers in the San Francisco Bay Area who were creating excitement with simply styled, highly functional and innovative pieces.

What led you to put your architectural education to use in a retail design store?

It takes a long time for architecture to actually be realized and influence a person’s life. Retail design is a lot more immediate. You can touch people on an everyday level. Personally, we love to collect, admire and interact with beautifully designed products and the store is a reflection of our vision and taste. Having the knowledge of history of architecture and art is also a great reference when dealing with modern design products. All products designed today have references to the past. We can appreciate all the thought process put in to develop the products. And even when creating a display, we can visualize space relations to the products better.

Were you always focused on modern design — and didn’t that put you 10 years ahead of the curve?

From the beginning, the idea was to offer home and office furnishings that had integrity and lasting value. Pieces were selected not because they seemed trendy, but because they had the potential to be contemporary classics, things that carried the elan of treasured modern design — the best of Scandinavian, Italian, Japanese and American ideas.

Now mid-century modern is all the rage. You told us so?

Historically, in the ’50s and ’60s, new appreciation for home design developed and was popularized all across America. It’s no surprise that now mid-century design is back in style and ever more popular because many people are already familiar with the style from when they were young.

What led you to locate on Fillmore Street?

Our first store was on Post Street — well into the Tenderloin, to be exact. It was a tiny 200 square space, and then this freakish accident happened: a huge gas explosion right across from the store. We lost a lot of merchandise and that was the wake up call to look for a larger and safer space. Also, at that time we were invited to create a “shop within a store” at the Macy’s Union Square location. Because of the wider exposure, we attained a larger audience and they wanted to see a larger selection from us.

In 1994, the store moved from Post Street to its present location at 1905 Fillmore Street. The move to Fillmore brought Zinc into one of the most popular shopping streets in San Francisco, with vastly increased foot traffic and an additional 1,000 square feet of showroom space. In the enlarged Zinc Details, we were able to increase the product range to include work from both national and international talent and to expand the in-house product line.

And then you doubled down on Fillmore by expanding next door into the Big Pagoda space.

Correct. In 2003, we took over the retail space next door, more than doubling our retail space, allowing us to add further lines of internationally known furniture such as Knoll, Kartell, Herman Miller.

And then you doubled down again and opened a second store around the corner on California Street, just when other home design stores were closing. What were you thinking?

We went through many shifts in our business during the past 20 years. In 2001, manufacturing was changing and the major production was moving overseas, so we had to decide to focus on retail or wholesale business. That’s when we opened our second location on Fourth Street in Berkeley. Again our business was shifting and we wanted to create a space of mainly a furniture showroom. We had the opportunity to obtain the 2410 California location at that time and it made sense for us to have two stores closer to each other than across the bay, so we closed the Berkeley store.

But after opening the California Street location, we found that many of our customers didn’t want to make a trip to visit two stores, even though we were only two blocks apart. And after acquiring many designers and architect clients through the California Street location, we decided to shift our business once again to focus on furniture. So last summer we closed our California Street location and packed and moved everything back to our original 1905 Fillmore Street location. Now we can offer a great furniture collection and home accessories at one location, but with more curated visions. Our customers enjoy the convenience of one-stop shopping and it’s much better for me as owner to be in one location and to get to know everyone who comes through the door.

What’s special about Fillmore?

It’s a unique neighborhood with small, independent stores and restaurants. Having a neighborhood store allows for closer ties with customers, many of whom live, work and shop in the area. In fact, I’d say 60 percent of our clients are from the neighborhood, 25 percent are from the rest of the city, 10 percent from the Bay Area and 5 percent are visitors.

Any plans for the new year?

We’re planning to have design movie night, do-it-yourself classes and design discussion panels.

Self Portrait (1977) by Joan Brown

ART | Jerome Tarshis

Joan Brown (1938-1990) may have thought of herself as an unclassifiable artist. “This Kind of Bird Flies Backward,” the survey of her paintings at the San Jose Museum of Art through March 11, positions her as one who portrayed women’s lives, beginning with her own. Curators need to say something, but it’s an idea that hardly narrows things down. A woman is called upon to play many parts — and Brown tells us that she enjoyed most of them.

Joan Brown (nee Beatty) was born in San Francisco and received a Catholic education through high school. Her teachers seemed to offer her a choice between becoming a nun or becoming a 1950s wife and mother. By sheer chance, she saw an ad for the California School of Fine Arts, now the San Francisco Art Institute, visited its campus, saw people with beards and sandals, and thought an entirely different world had been opened to her.

As a child, she had played with paper dolls, putting different costumes on a single figure, and as a teenager she had copied photographs of glamorous movie actresses. When she applied to art school, the drawings of actresses were enough to secure her admission. They were girlish rather than feminist, but they prefigured much of her career, which was dedicated to making a body of work that was a journal of a woman’s life far more than it was a product offered for sale.

For a time Brown considered herself the least qualified of art students and thought of dropping out until one of her teachers, Elmer Bischoff, changed her sense of what she could do. Bischoff told her that she didn’t need to master academic drawing — that experience would teach her what she needed to know. And as for what to paint, a cup of coffee in her studio was a perfectly legitimate subject for art.

She became enormously successful. The paintings of her student years, much admired at school, brought her to the attention of an outstanding gallery in New York, where she sold a painting to the Museum of Modern Art in her early twenties. In San Francisco at that time, being a woman artist was no great handicap; in lifetime career terms, both Brown and her next-door neighbor on Fillmore Street, Jay DeFeo, outstripped their artist husbands, Bill Brown and Wally Hedrick.

Brown was notable for getting paint on herself; she seemed almost eager to look like a mess. But she also enjoyed being pretty and dressing up, and the show includes a painting in which she and her third husband, Gordon Cook, are on their way to a performance of San Francisco Opera.

One of the most teasing works in the show, a summation of cliches about women and women artists but also an example of her refusal to be only one thing or only another, is Self-Portrait (1977). In it, Brown sits in her studio, painting a still life of a flower, and instead of wearing a paint-stained artist’s smock, she is wearing a handsome dress and high-heeled shoes and looks as if she has dressed for
a party.

Her paintings tell us that she could embrace the most varied possibilities: she could be physically strong, as a long-distance swimmer; she could be a painter; she could be a wife or mother or lover; by the 1980s, she could be a spiritual seeker in India. For her, at least, there was never any contradiction between looking terrific in high heels and being a serious, successful, and, if one wants to use the adjective, feminist painter.

Photograph of Joan Brown by Jerry Burchard

JOAN BROWN: PART OF THE FILLMORE SCENE

Joan Brown’s involvement with the art scene along Fillmore Street began with exhibitions, while she was still an art student, first at the Six Gallery, at 3119 Fillmore, then at the Spatsa Gallery, on Filbert Street near Fillmore.

In 1958, Brown and her husband Bill Brown moved into the apartment building at 2322 Fillmore, where their next-door neighbors were the painters Wally Hedrick and Jay DeFeo. Famous as some of them are today, San Francisco artists of the 1950s had little hope of being exhibited by major galleries or museums. Bruce Conner once said that the art of that time was not made to last because nobody needed it to last. Brown herself has said, “It was important for that day, for that week, or for that moment.”

The seeming lack of any path to success encouraged a deliberate hostility to the art market and its institutions. Life at 2322 Fillmore was characterized by heavy drinking, resourceful parties and the view that making artwork was something like a meditative exercise, to be enjoyed in the present with little thought for the future.

Joan Brown had come a long way from her Catholic high school days. After a time, however, the hard partying became oppressive; quiet and privacy began to look good. In 1959, she separated from Bill Brown and moved to North Beach to live with the artist Manuel Neri, who became her second husband.

Theophilus Brown, Self Portrait, 1994

Neighborhood resident Theophilus Brown — one of the great figures in 20th century California art and one of the pioneering members of the Bay Area Figurative Movement — at 92 is still in his studio every day. A new exhibition opening tonight, “Theophilus Brown: An Artful Life,” presents work from throughout his long and successful career. The exhibition begins with an opening reception from 5 to 7 p.m. tonight at the Thomas Reynolds Gallery at 2291 Pine Street, near Fillmore.

Read more: “A friendship with Theophilus Brown,” by Matt Gonzalez

Murals at Fillmore and Geary were overtaken by graffiti after a new bus shelter was installed.

By Kellie Ell

A once vibrant mural on the south side of the Boom Boom Room at Fillmore and Geary is now covered in gold, hot pink and white spray paint and other graffiti. Looming above, the next-door National Dollar store has painted its name and a parade of products it sells — soda, crackers, ketchup, sugar and toilet bowl cleaner — all intermixed with graffiti.

Alexander Andreas, owner of the Boom Boom Room, says the mural depicting jazz musicians on his building went undamaged for six years. But now it is “totally tagged,” he says, and vandals have also etched graffiti into the glass walls and top of the new designer bus shelter and smashed its back wall.

Andreas blames the rise in vandalism on the recent repositioning of the 38-Geary  bus shelter. Before it was at the curb. Now it is backed up against the wall of the Boom Boom Room, providing shelter for taggers to deface property out of sight.

“It’s absurd,” he says. “The city did a disservice. The move has triggered an onslaught of graffiti hitting my mural.”

A spokesman for the Municipal Transportation Agency says the shelter was moved to provide the sidewalk access required for the disabled.

The owner of the National Dollar store, who would give his name only as Freddy, says graffiti has been “a really big problem” in the five years since he opened at 1633 Fillmore. He says vandals have repeatedly climbed on the roof of the Boom Boom Room to tag his wall, so he had it partially painted with different products he sells.

“Murals are beautiful works of art, and people appreciate that,” he says.

But art is in the eye of the beholder, and some say his attempt to create a mural may actually be attracting graffiti.

“It looks like a lot of noise at that corner,” Andreas says of what he calls the dollar store’s “cheap-o job” of depicting the commercial products it sells. “The mural looks so tacky. I don’t think they care about the beautification of the Fillmore.”

Noisy or not, apparently it’s legal. According to the city’s billboard ordinance, general advertising of commercial products is allowed on billboards — or murals — on a store if the items are sold on the premises, according to John Purvis of the San Francisco Planning Department.

Above the Boom Boom Room's mural is a parade of products sold at the dollar store.

But graffiti, however artful, is not legal.

Andreas says he recently received a letter from the city directing him to clean up the side of his building or risk a fine. According to a 2004 graffiti removal measure, property owners and landlords are required to clean up graffiti within 30 days or face a penalty of up to $500. Those charged must remedy the problem or pay the city to do it.

The dollar store owner says he has repeatedly repainted the south wall of his building, only to have it “graffitied again and again and again” by people climbing onto the roof of the Boom Boom Room.

“I clean it up and two weeks later I have to climb up there again,” he says. “My job is to clean it up or I get fined by the city.”

Andreas says he has tried to collaborate with his neighbor on a more attractive mural that would cover both walls, to no avail.

The owner of the dollar store says he is working with Melonie Green of Infin8 Sync, a production company and art space in the Fillmore, to find the right artist to paint a bigger mural.

Green says something as simple as lettering saying “The Fillmore” could be enough to deter vandalism — and promote the neighborhood as well. Some murals created as a way to deter graffiti have worked, she says, but others have not.
Green says some taggers don’t understand the unwritten rules that say street artists shouldn’t touch murals.

Law enforcement officials are also equivocal. Officer Martin Ferreira, of the police department’s graffiti abatement program, says he has noticed a decrease in vandalism on walls with murals. He admits, however, that it’s hit and miss. “No matter how beautiful a piece of artwork may appear, if it’s unwanted, it can cause people a lot of stress,” he says. Graffiti is most effectively deterred, he says, by proper lighting, surveillance cameras and foot traffic.

One success story — at least so far — is nearby at Les Croissants Cafe, located behind the Boom Boom Room at 1840 Geary. Owner Tommy Ly says his eatery has had no tagging in the months since he hired a well-known local graffiti artist to paint a mural on the cafe.

A mural by a graffiti artist at Les Croissants Cafe has not been vandalized.

Photograph of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas in Paris by Cecil Beaton

By Wanda M. Corn

Alice Babette Toklas met Gertrude Stein in the fall of 1907. She had come to Paris from San Francisco with her next-door neighbor, Harriet Levy, and had enough money to last her a year, although she hoped an inheritance from her grandfather’s estate would allow her to stay longer. Little did she know that she would remain in Paris for the rest of her life and see San Francisco briefly only one more time, 28 years later.

Toklas had reason to seek adventure abroad. She had enjoyed a comfortable childhood — a trip abroad when she was eight, a few years in Seattle — but when her mother was diagnosed with cancer and then died in 1897, her personal life atrophied.

At 20, unmarried, Toklas was deemed by her father mature enough to raise her 10-year-old brother and take over her mother’s job of managing the household, duties she had already undertaken because of her mother’s illness. The threesome moved into [822 O’Farrell Street, near Van Ness Avenue] the home of her grandfather Levinson, her mother’s father, now widowed, and Toklas ran a household of three men, with relatives dropping by for meals.

Harriet Levy, a friend from the house next door, was appalled to see how hard Alice worked and how little she was appreciated. “In spite of her youth she existed to them only as a housekeeper,” she recalled, a “provider of food and of general comfort. Any opinion that she might venture at table was ignored or sponged out by a laugh. . . . Each night she sat at the long table, unnoticed among the repetition of relatives. . . . Alice was odd, they said, and forgot her.”

In 10 years, the “odd” Toklas acquired the consummate skills in housekeeping, meal planning and managing servants that she brought with her to Paris and to the homes she shared with Stein.

•

Toklas and Levy looked up the Steins, with whom they both had connections, when they visited Paris, as did several other young Jewish women from the San Francisco Bay Area. Harriet Levy had studied art with Sarah Stein at the Mark Hopkins Institute of Art, and Toklas’s cousin Annette Rosenshine had accompanied Michael and Sarah Stein when they returned to France after a quick trip to San Francisco in 1906 to assess earthquake damage [to rental flats they owned at Washington and Lyon Streets in Pacific Heights].

When Toklas arrived, she found her cousin closely attached to Gertrude, who had volunteered to be Annette’s psychological counselor. In exchange, Annette was typing Stein’s manuscripts and joining her on afternoon walks. Annette had already shown Stein some letters to her from her cousin Alice; these were Stein’s first introductions to the woman who would change her life.

•

Struck by her appearance, Picasso painted a small gouache study of Alice’s head within the first months of her arrival in Paris. The Steins had introduced Picasso and his circle to Toklas and Harriet Levy, who then hired his lover, Fernande Olivier, to tutor them in French conversation three mornings a week.

Gertrude was not taken with Alice at first, but by the summer of 1908 they were in love. When the Steins made their summer sojourn to Fiesole, Levy and Toklas went with them, renting and setting up their own housekeeping unit in a nearby villa. Stein was 33 and Toklas 30 years old. Toklas was the first woman who fully returned Stein’s love; for Alice, it was a greater love than she had ever experienced, including the one she seemed to have then been sharing with Harriet Levy. Alice began to replace her cousin Annette on Gertrude’s daily walks, to type Stein’s manuscripts and to prepare American dinners for her on Sundays, the cook’s night off.

At first there was the three-way love entanglement between Alice, Harriet and Gertrude that had to be resolved. Toklas and Levy shared quarters in Paris for two and a half years, and only when Levy returned to San Francisco with Michael and Sarah Stein, in July 1910, was Alice free to move into 27 rue de Fleurus.

•

When Gertrude and Alice got the surprise news that Harriet was returning to San Francisco, they made a special trip to Venice to celebrate their union, posing in their summer hats for a tourist photographer in Saint Mark’s Square, their first formal portrait together. Stein and Toklas’s gendered poses are those they would perform for the rest of their lives: Gertrude, as the dominant figure in the relationship, in the foreground, and Alice modestly behind her.

— Excerpted from Seeing Gertrude Stein, published by the University of California Press, the catalog for the exhibition of the same title at the Contemporary Jewish Museum at 736 Mission Street. It continues through September 6.

Read more: “Michael and Sarah Stein: from Pierce Street to Paris“

ART | Jerome Tarshis

“The Steins Collect,” the excellent exhibition now at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, focuses on Gertrude Stein for understandable reasons: She was one of the most celebrated writers of the 20th century and, together with Alice B. Toklas, was also the dominant half of the most famous lesbian couple in history. Hers is the most recognizable name in the family.

Her brother Leo, a gifted explainer of the art he and his sister collected, and himself an occasional painter, was in his own way equally pyrotechnic until he almost willfully burned himself out and broke with Gertrude in 1913.

Their brother Michael and his wife, Sarah, presented themselves less brilliantly. Unlike Gertrude and Leo, birds of passage who left the Bay Area at an early age for Harvard, Johns Hopkins and then Paris, Michael and Sarah were deeply established in the city’s commercial and social life.

Sarah’s father was the chief operating officer of The City of Paris, a major department store. After graduating first in her class from high school, she took lessons at the Mark Hopkins Institute of Art, a predecessor of today’s San Francisco Art Institute. It was an appropriate thing for a young woman in her position to do, and she continued as a serious amateur painter for years to come.

Michael, though never a practicing artist, had been walked through the museums of Vienna and Paris in his childhood, and tutored in foreign languages. That reflected the cultural aspirations of his father, a German-Jewish immigrant, who upon moving to the Bay Area invested in streetcar stock and dreamed of uniting all of San Francisco’s streetcar lines in one company. Michael eventually put together the Market Street Railway, where his father had failed, and built what is described as San Francisco’s first rental flats in a building that still stands at the corner of Washington and Lyon Streets. He moved in with his young wife not far away at 707 Pierce Street, near Fillmore, in the heart of the city’s Jewish district.

Michael and Sarah Stein collected art in a fairly conventional way: paintings by early California’s great landscape painter, William Keith, and quintessential establishment painter Arthur Mathews; plus the Chinese and Japanese art that offered a Bay Area alternative to great European art, which could seem culturally or economically out of reach.

In 1901 the San Francisco Chronicle reported: “Mrs. Michael Stein, a very modest collector, has some of the best bits of pottery in the city, among them a piece of very old and genuine Satsuma unequaled in color and shape.”

Soon after Leo and then Gertrude settled in Paris, Michael sold his interest in the streetcar company and, with Sarah and their young son, Allan, left San Francisco, found an apartment in Paris in 1904, and continued acquiring art.

The rental flats at Washington & Lyon Streets helped fund the Steins' art collection.

The first truly radical purchase in “The Steins Collect” was Gertrude and Leo’s acquisition of Matisse’s Woman With a Hat. They did not immediately fall in love with the painting, which was disliked by nearly everyone, conservative or avant-garde, who saw it exhibited at the 1905 Salon d’Automne. Leo described it as “a thing brilliant and powerful, but the nastiest smear of paint I had ever seen.”

Matisse afterward contended that it was Sarah who persuaded Leo to buy it; she and Michael couldn’t afford it at the time. Therese Ehrman, who came with them from San Francisco as their au pair, later wrote: “I still can see Frenchmen doubled up with laughter before it, and Sarah saying ‘it’s superb’ and Mike couldn’t tear himself away.”

The Steins didn’t buy art on the scale of the truly rich, but they did exhibit their own prescient collections and offer hospitality and conversation. On Saturday evenings they opened their apartments to visitors, Gertrude and Leo (and later Alice B. Toklas) at 27 rue de Fleurus, and Michael and Sarah nearby at 58 rue Madame. Saturdays with the Steins attracted a shifting group of artists, writers, public figures and potential collectors; the two salons quickly took on major importance in the cultural life of Paris.

By the end of World War I, Michael and Sarah found their interests gradually shifting. Sarah was attracted to Christian Science and eventually qualified as a Christian Science practitioner. Together with a friend they made through Christian Science, Gabrielle Colaco-Ossorio, also originally Jewish, they commissioned Le Corbusier to design and build a suburban villa; in 1928 they moved in.

Although Michael and Sarah could no longer afford to be major patrons of Matisse, the two families went on as great friends. Matisse showed Sarah new work and valued her opinions. Their face-to-face relationship ended in 1935, when in response to the deteriorating situation in Europe, threatening to Jews and almost equally to non-Jews, Michael and Sarah moved back to the United States, settling with Gabrielle and her family in Palo Alto. Matisse proclaimed himself desolated by her leaving, and the two continued to correspond almost until the end of their lives. She died in 1953, he in 1954.

Although Sarah had some thought of giving her collection to San Francisco’s new modern art museum, she instead began selling off paintings to finance her grandson, Daniel, as a breeder and trainer of race horses. She may have been imprudent, but it was not wholly unmotivated: Daniel had been outstandingly supportive in the dark time after Michael’s death, in 1938.

To avoid the irretrievable dispersal of the collection, Sarah’s friend Elise Stern Haas joined with a group of friends, many of them like her residents of Pacific Heights, in buying Sarah’s paintings one at a time with a view to their eventual acquisition by the new museum. “Of course, I should have bought the whole collection,” she later reflected; unlike many, she could have. Her piecemeal efforts succeeded, however: Many of Michael and Sarah’s paintings did go to SFMOMA, and Woman With a Hat, which began it all, is today one of the crown jewels of the museum’s collection.

It is reunited with many other works of art once owned by the family in “The Steins Collect,” which continues at the museum through September 6.

Woman With a Hat by Henri Matisse

The rental flats at Washington & Lyon Streets helped fund the Steins' art collection.

A rt patrons Michael and Sarah Stein lived in the Fillmore, then primarily a Jewish neighborhood, before they joined his sister Gertrude and brother Leo in Paris in the early 1900s. So did Gertrude Stein’s longtime companion, Alice B. Toklas.

The Stein family owned and operated some of San Francisco’s many cable car lines, which Michael consolidated and sold. He also built the first rental flats in the city at the corner of Washington and Lyon Streets. It was the income from these investments that enabled the family to collect art and live abroad for many decades. Together they created a legendary collection of modern art and helped establish Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso as two of the most important artists of the 20th century.

The Stein collection has since been dispersed to museums around the world. But it is reunited in “The Steins Collect,” an exhibition now on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which highlights their local connections.

Bay Area Bird Encounters is Walter Kitundu's new interactive art piece at SFO.

Travelers through the swank new terminal two at San Francisco International Airport will find friends from the neighborhood to bid them hail and farewell. Birds from Alta Plaza Park are part of an ingenious new piece of interactive musical art created by longtime neighborhood resident Walter Kitundu for a children’s play area.

It’s intended for children of all ages.

“If you don’t feel like playing the benches, you can always sit on them,” says Kitundu of the two wing-shaped wooden seats that are also xylophones tuned to play the song of the golden-crowned sparrow.

The benches are part of a project he calls Bay Area Bird Encounters. They sit in front of a 28-foot-long mural of birds Kitundu photographed, then printed on sheets of veneered plywood and hand-carved into a wooden mosaic of 147 separate pieces. There’s a third sparrow in the mural, also a xylophone.

A few years ago, Kitundu spent months in Alta Plaza photographing a red-tailed hawk he named Patch, who grew up in the park. Patch was in the initial drafts of the mural, but didn’t make the final cut because the photographs weren’t of sufficient high resolution. But the mural includes three young red-tails, along with an Anna’s hummingbird Kitundu photographed in Alta Plaza with a new, more advanced camera.

“That added a whole new dimension,” he says. “I had to go back out into the field and have the birds cooperate.”

For several years he lived in the Fillmore and worked at the Exploratorium. But after he was named a MacArthur Fellow and received what is often called a “genius grant” ­— including $500,000 over five years with no strings attached — he moved to West Oakland, where he has more room to make photographs, build instruments and compose music, among many other creative pursuits.

“I shy away from genius talk,” he says. “I’ve been trying not to believe the hype, but to take advantage of such a generous gift.”

Kitundu says he still haunts the Fillmore, but not as much as he would like. “I never go through the area without taking a detour to Alta Plaza,” he says. “The minute I see a bird, I’m a local again.”

Walter Kitundu: trying not to believe the hype, but seizing the opportunities.

EARLIER: “A red-tailed hawk at Alta Plaza”

Naturally they’ll have a green living roof on the new eco-conscious assembly building now nearing completion behind Drew School at California and Broderick Streets. But they’ll also have a vertical garden created by Parisian botanist-artist Patrick Blanc — a rock star among gardeners credited with inventing the concept and planting gardens on walls around the world.

Blanc was in the neighborhood recently to unveil Drew’s new vertical garden, which consists of thousands of plants that are all native California species. First the dirt was removed from the roots of the plants, then they were stapled to a three-story felt wall that is automatically watered several times daily. The 1,720 sq. ft. garden — Blanc’s largest in the U.S. — faces Broderick Street and is visible from the sidewalk.

“What was very interesting for me,” Blanc said, “it was a school much involved in artistic work. For me, it was important to have receptive students for a new kind of work with plants.”

Blanc spoke to students about the project and also lectured to a sold-out crowd at the Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park, which has its own living roof. The firm that completed the academy’s roof is also creating a 2,630 sq. ft. green roof on the school’s new building.

Read more: “The Dirt”

The vertical garden (left) is on a new wing that replaces a three-story Victorian.

PHOTOGRAPHY | Thomas Reynolds

Singer James Brown may have been the hardest-working man in show business, but David Johnson is surely the hardest-working 84-year-old in the photography business.

In recent months he’s had four major exhibitions — mostly photographs from the heyday of the Fillmore’s jazz era — including one in Atlanta and another at the San Francisco International Airport. He’s featured in a new book, The Golden Decade, celebrating the circle of post-war photographers who studied with Ansel Adams at the California School of Fine Arts. He’s just returned from the screening of “Positive Negatives,” a new documentary on his photographic career, at the San Diego Black Film Festival. And he’s newly married for a second time.

“I can’t believe this is happening,” he says with the warm and easy smile of a man who realizes that fate is treating him kindly. “It’s been a long journey. You never know what life is going to bring, but sometimes it’s an opportunity.”

Johnson grew up in a foster home in Jacksonville, Florida, and became fascinated by photography after he won a camera in a contest when he was 12. He took pictures throughout his school years. Then war got in the way. He passed through San Francisco on his way to a stint with the Navy in the Philippines. After a taste of the wider world, he knew when he got back home to Jacksonville that he couldn’t stay. “I wanted to get the hell out of the South,” he says. “No more back of the bus for me.”

He saw a notice in Popular Photography magazine that Ansel Adams was beginning a first-of-its-kind photography program at the California School of Fine Arts, now the San Francisco Art Institute. “I knew nothing of Ansel Adams,” he says. “But I knew the school was in San Francisco, and that was good enough for me.”

So he wrote to Adams and expressed his interest. “I told him I was a Negro,” he says. “I didn’t want to come all that way and find I wasn’t welcome.” Adams replied that race was irrelevant and invited Johnson to stay at his house on the edge of Seacliff until he found a place to live.

He’d explored the city when he came through town earlier as a sailor. He remembers: “I asked at the Greyhound bus station, ‘Where’s the colored part of town?’ They told me to take the B car out to Fillmore and Geary.” That was his first taste of the Fillmore. “It was a wonderland,” he says. “People were everywhere. I walked up and down the streets. There was lots going on.”

So after he returned and settled in to pursue his dream of becoming a photographer, he rented a room in the Fillmore, which would become a central part of his work. In the ’50s he had a studio on Divisadero Street, between Bush and Pine, with an apartment in the back. He photographed the people and the jazz joints and later the social struggles of the civil rights movement and the upheaval of redevelopment.

He also got a day job at the post office, and later at the UCSF Medical Center. He became an activist and a union leader. He married and had a family. Decades passed. But all the while he kept taking photographs.

By the turn of the century, he was living in Miami. His daughter called one day and said she’d heard that KQED was planning a documentary on the Fillmore and was looking for pictures from the old days. So he called the producer and offered his.

“They just went ape,” he says. “Many of the photographers had died. But I had all that stuff — I even had the negatives, just as Ansel taught me.”

Johnson’s photographs were prominently featured in the documentary, which won rave reviews and still is occasionally rebroadcast. His work was on the cover of Harlem of the West, the book that grew out of the documentary.

At the same time, the Fillmore Jazz District was finally becoming a reality. New clubs opened, including the Fillmore location of Yoshi’s. When 1300 on Fillmore restaurant opened next door, its lounge included dozens of historic photographs from the earlier Fillmore jazz era — including a mural-size enlargement of an image Johnson captured in 1949 at Fillmore and Post that crackles with the vitality of the time.

“There’s interest, now that the community is changing, in what its history was like,” Johnson says. “It’s exciting. I feel like it’s a rebirth.”

Fillmore and Post Street, San Francisco, 1946, by David Johnson