The New Fillmore

LOCALS | CALVIN LAU

She was the quintessential little old lady in white tennis shoes — at least that’s how relentless neighborhood activist Mary Jane Staymates, known to all as M.J., liked to fashion herself.

My first encounter with M.J., who died a few months ago, was at a Western Addition Neighborhood Association (WANA) meeting held in the basement of St. Dominic’s Church. M.J. was presiding, and I was immediately struck by her love of the neighborhood and her mission to improve it.

M.J. stood ready to confront the real estate developers who were already circling the area like hawks. That was in 1979, the year my partner and I moved into an 1877 Victorian fixer-upper on Pine Street. In those days no one would ever have thought of calling our neighborhood by the oxymoron Lower Pacific Heights. It was plainly and simply the Western Addition, with all of its good and bad connotations.

M.J. and her husband, Blair, were truly pioneers in 1972 when they bought and began renovating an 1878 Victorian at 1948 Sutter Street, mid-block between Webster and Fillmore Streets near Cottage Row. Her beautiful front garden was filled with cala lillies, roses, hydrangeas, a green lawn and a huge cascading wall of red bougainvillea, all now replaced by a driveway. When she first moved in, M.J.’s house was surrounded by empty lots, and the row of Victorians across the street from her house was still boarded up, ghostly and empty of life.

M.J. tired of seeing empty lots and abandoned buildings on her block. In a 1989 interview with the New Fillmore she said: “When we moved here in the early ’70s, we couldn’t get a taxi to come here it was so dangerous. Assaults and rapes were common, the streets were not cleaned because the manual street sweepers were afraid to come into the neighborhood, and the area was used to dump cars.”

M.J. and two other neighbors, all now deceased, started a neighborhood association to focus on one major neighborhood problem: Bill Graham’s Winterland auditorium at Post and Steiner Streets, a music venue that drew thousands of people to concerts. After concerts, some people rampaged through the neighborhood, breaking car windows, urinating on private property, tossing bottles and getting in fights. “The Police and Fire Department would not respond to our calls,” M.J. said in the 1989 interview. “We had numerous small fires set that continued to burn long after we called the station because even the Fire Department was afraid to come out to this neighborhood.”

WANA waged a concerted campaign of neighborhood pressure to convince Bill Graham to stop producing concerts at Winterland. The music venue went into decline and subsequently closed; the site was eventually redeveloped as the 2000 Post Apartments.

After Winterland closed, WANA turned its attention to fighting for neighborhood control and preservation against the powerful Redevelopment Agency, the Housing Authority and the Western Addition Project Area Committee. The Redevelopment Agency wanted to tear down the original Victorian housing in the neighborhood so that large scale projects could be built in its place. The Housing Authority’s mission was to develop large subsidized housing projects. The Western Addition Project Area Committee, a citizens group chosen by the Redevelopment Agency, wanted power and money from the ensuing construction activity. It became a major turf war.

M.J. single-handedly nurtured WANA into a powerful organization, consistently drawing scores of neighborhood residents to its meetings, attracting powerful politicians eager to appear and influencing the city’s political and planning decisions to enhance our neighborhood. Representatives of UCSF, real estate developers including Paula Collins of the Western Development Group, Senator Leland Yee (pre-prison), district supervisor candidates and even grocer Mike Stone of Mollie Stone’s all came calling to WANA for support and guidance as they sought favor in the neighborhood.

The organization wielded great clout. On three of the four corners at Steiner and Sutter Streets are condominium projects that WANA influenced by working with the developers to ensure that the new buildings would be in keeping with the neighborhood scale and built of wood, like nearby homes. WANA also convinced the developer of the Amelia condominiums on Fillmore Street to step back the project where it abutted the historical row of Victorians on Bush Street.

One of the most contested projects in the neighborhood was the sheriff department’s plan to use a residence on Sutter Street near Pierce as an experimental low-security residential-style jail. WANA and the neighbors rallied against the project and persuaded Sheriff Michael Hennessey to back off.

One of my favorite memories of M.J.: A teetotaler, she was initially aghast at the idea of Vino, a wine shop, moving into a storefront space on California Street near Fillmore. She wanted to protest a liquor license for Vino, but I told her that a nice neighborhood like ours should have a nice wine shop. She ended up agreeing with me after she spoke to the proprietor of Vino and became convinced that the store would benefit the neighborhood. Vino supplied the neighborhood with an excellent selection of affordable wines for two decades until it closed in 2017.

M.J. left San Francisco in 1991 and returned to Phoenix, where she was born. Her husband stayed behind a few years, but eventually also returned to Phoenix, where he died in 2009.

In Phoenix, M.J. found another of the loves of her life, the historic El Oeste Lodge on Camelback Mountain. She spent her last quarter of a century restoring the property and nurturing its native plants.

M.J. died in Phoenix on November 5, 2018, at the age of 97. It took a while for the news to reach her old neighborhood. I don’t think she ever came back to visit. She would have been amazed to see how it has been transformed.

Longtime neighborhood resident Calvin Lau is a former president of the Western Addition Neighborhood Association.

Filed under: Locals, Neighborhood History