They left an indispensable local book

NEIGHBORHOOD AUTHOR Arthur Bloomfield for years lived alone, surrounded by books and music, in a classic Victorian in the Webster Street Historic District — the city’s first historic district, created by his late wife, the architectural historian Anne Bloomfield.

He wrote seven books, mostly on music and food, and scores of reviews as classical music critic for the San Francisco Examiner — and one book on the neighborhood where he was born and educated and at home for most of his 94 years before he died earlier this month.

“Gables & Fables: A Portrait of San Francisco’s Pacific Heights,” also was created by his late wife Anne, even though Arthur published it a decade after her death. It’s a collection of her column, “Great Old Houses,” published monthly for many years in the pages of the New Fillmore. Her name comes first, but there’s a heavy dose of Arthur as well. He revisited and revised her columns, adding a dollop of musical notes and musings of his own.

He called it “a phantasmal composite, if you will, of her cabernet and my merlot. It was all her idea, and it’s mostly Anne’s material, but I wrote the book.”

It remains a must for neighborhood bookshelves.

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EXCERPT

On Fillmore, everything is as yesterday or tomorrow

By ARTHUR BLOOMFIELD

Chicken saute with Balsamic Vinegar, Garlic and Tomato is a variant on a dish served at Jackson Fillmore, a noisy San Francisco trattoria suitable for use in Moonstruck. How lucky for us to live two blocks from this foodie’s moonbeam.

Eating at the counter here, the epiphany level is high. Six platters of antipasti —tousled smoky red peppers, soft charred muffins of eggplant and so on — sit at attention on a display shelf, ready for ordering. Our enthusiastic waiter, brisk in apron-over-jeans, brings crisp fat toasts topped with tomato, onion and garlic. A neighbor meanwhile attends to a melange of prawns, mushrooms and an enticing cream-toned sauce we must command on our next visit.

And the padrone, some godfather’s nephew it seems, strides toward the kitchen with a worried look, as if the roof of his culinary excellence might fall in. But worry not, neither the gastronomy nor the dancing vibrations of this trattoria will fail: The place runs like a skilled fantasist’s clockwork, style and abundance and imagination all about.

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NOW I’M ON MY WAY to my favorite coffee house/sidewalk cafe in the neighborhood — Royal Ground, not one of the big chain coffee houses! — because I have my usual afternoon date to scribble on paper napkins.

Yes, the cocoa is lovely; those Moroccan fellows make the best this side of Cazenave in Bayonne, and you can order it in English, French or Arabic. But it’s this inscribing on napkins that matters: a book has to be conceived somehow. Well, the regulars are at the next tables, maintaining their privacy and observing mine. It’s study hall, of course, with medical and dental schools not far off; I suppose I might learn some anatomy if I listened carefully. But the confessions of lovers are more interesting.

Then there’s the distinguished looking woman who works so assiduously on Greek. When she has fellow students of Plato at her side, I call her group the Spanakopita Brigade.

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MEANWHILE, ON FILLMORE STREET, everything is as yesterday or tomorrow: one’s likely to run into Fred the Mahler-loving bookseller with the marvelous muscles, macho Dino the Greek will be eyeing the girls outside his pizzeria, the pleasant beggar will be saying “Greetings!” in a bright C major. I will cringe at the dental school security officer armed like a task force for an invasion by Buck Rogers and his Naughty Martians bent on stealing a drill or two, and I will pity the distracted lady at another coffee house who spends her day bumming cigarettes.

But I’ll rejoice in meeting sassy Mrs. Dewson, who sells fedoras to the mayor; I’ll discuss the state of the world with Phil, the mellow maestro of pots-pans-nuts-bolts as he waters the plants outside the hardware store; I’ll happily line up at the French bakery that magnetizes to its door every French-speaking person in the next nine counties, seems to enlarge its repertoire of tarts-croissants-brioches-baguettes-batards every day and even makes a gateau Basque.

And I’ll kibbitz with the jolly butcher from Puglia who sells me sausages and lamb and seems to have sprung from a 1935 Hollywood musical and doesn’t mind my flamboyant fractured Italian; and I might run into an elegant friend with a zesty poodle who announces, in quietly imperial tones, “I’m taking you to lunch at Galette.”

I will, in short, enjoy my Fillmore.

— from The Gastronomical Tourist, by Arthur Bloomfield.