News from the Heart & Soul of San Francisco
FILM | CLASSICS SHOT LOCALLY Walking north on Buchanan Street across Sacramento, you hardly notice the home on the corner. Built in 1900, this sheepish three-story house seems to endeavor not to draw attention to itself. But Alfred Hitchcock saw it differently. It was here that he filmed climactic scenes of his very last film,…
THESE STORIES almost always turn out wrong: the beloved neighborhood small business — especially if it’s an independent bookstore — shuts down. But not this time. Browser Books, at 2195 Fillmore, got a new lease on life October 1 when the owners of Green Apple Books took the keys. Green Apple — the new and…
ON OCTOBER 17, 1989, the Loma Prieta earthquake shook the Fillmore and the rest of the Bay Area. The neighborhood was spared major damage, but felt the effects of the quake in ways large and small. The most visible local damage was at St. Dominic’s Church, where the top of the tower was lost and…
By THOMAS REYNOLDS Behind the crowds queueing up outside the hot new restaurant Noosh, on the corner of Fillmore and Pine, is a small brass plaque recalling an earlier incarnation of the space when it was home to the late and much-lamented Pacific Heights Bar & Grill. The PacBag, as it was known, was a…
REAL ESTATE | PATRICK BARBER A PAIR OF recent home sales, both on Washington Street, highlight the fact that buyers are willing to sacrifice extra square footage for a highly walkable location. The single-family homes at 2561 Washington Street and 3990 Washington Street each sold for $9.1 million during the second week of September. Though…
LOCAL HISTORY | Story & Photographs by JOAN HOCKADAY On the southwest corner of Fillmore and Jackson, the modern new home of Blue Bottle Coffee serves long lines of coffee lovers from early morning through late afternoon. Customers enter by stepping over vintage black and white tiles that spell out Shumate’s — a reminder that this…
FLASHBACK | THOMAS REYNOLDS IT WAS ONLY a few months after the 1989 earthquake when Mikhail Gorbachev, still president of the still superpowerful Soviet Union, made a swing through San Francisco in early June of 1990. It was a brief 22-hour stay, which included sleeping late on Monday morning, June 4. Gorbachev and his wife…
NEARLY FOUR YEARS after it was first proposed, a new garden honoring the founders of Japantown will be dedicated this weekend at the foot of Cottage Row, near Fillmore and Sutter. It began as a celebration of the creation of Japantown in 1906 after the earthquake and fire. Cottage Row was occupied primarily by the…
Like any street in any great city, Fillmore is always changing, always dying, always being awakened By RICHARD RODRIGUEZ Growing old on Fillmore Street has taught me how much a city can change, how much I have changed — and how a city continues despite it all. Lately, if I have any sort of errand…
NEW RELEASE | SCOTT YANOW Sonny Lewis is a jazz legend who almost slipped away into history. A superior tenor-saxophonist and flutist based in the San Francisco Bay Area since the early 1960s, Lewis made relatively few jazz recordings during his career. He can be heard with Smiley Winters (playing next to altoist Sonny Simmons…