News from the Heart & Soul of San Francisco
LANDMARKS | BRIDGET MALEY The apartment building at 2360 Pacific Avenue, near Fillmore Street, was built just prior to the 1929 stock market crash as an intense period of apartment development in Pacific Heights was ending. The building, with both Art Deco and Spanish Colonial Revival influences, is a somewhat schizophrenic remnant of the Roaring…
ART & FILM | PAMELA FEINSILBER Toward the end of Plastic Man: The Artful Life of Jerry Ross Barrish, we see Barrish, San Francisco’s most famous bail bondsman, at his 50th high school reunion. He is shocked to find most of his Lincoln High classmates retired — “playing golf or something” — while he is…
By CHRIS BARNETT As a gaggle of City Hall lawyers and bureaucrats scramble to sort out a massive financial debacle of their own making, the cavernous jazz club, restaurant and bar complex at 1330 Fillmore formerly known as Yoshi’s San Francisco, dark for the last six months, isn’t likely to come alive again anytime soon.…
JAZZ | MEAGHAN M. MITCHELL In 2006, internationally acclaimed photographer and professor Lewis Watts and Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker and writer Elizabeth Pepin Silva published Harlem of the West: The San Francisco Fillmore Jazz Era. From cover to cover, Harlem of the West is filled with vintage photos documenting San Francisco’s historic jazz era during…
LONGTIME CULINARY TRAILBLAZERS Margie Conard and Dana Tommasino will continue their gardening theme when they open Gardenias a few doors from Fillmore at 1963 Sutter Street, the former home of Roostertail and Cafe Kati. They previously owned and operated Woodward’s Garden in the Mission for 22 years before losing their lease last October. “We have always bowed…
By FAITH WHEELER Only a few days after it opened on the corner of the busy intersection of California and Divisadero, B. on the Go already has the feeling of a neighborhood institution. As you approach the refurbished building’s tasteful pewter-toned subway tiles and mysterious tinted windows and enter the sparsely decorated space, your eye immediately…
THE CALL CAME shortly after noon on July 1. Time’s up, Douglas Fredell was told. Do no more work in the garage of the Shell station at 2501 California, and have your tools and machinery out by the end of the month. It had appeared the neighbors were gaining ground in their battle against a big…
REAL ESTATE | PATRICK BARBER A pair of recent single-family home sales in Pacific Heights illustrate that properly pricing a home for sale can pay off on multiple levels. In the 3000 block of Jackson Street, two properties that are practically next door to each other changed hands in early June, with the transactions and…
LANDMARKS | BRIDGET MALEY The terra cotta clad treasure that sits at the southwest corner of Green and Octavia Streets is often mistaken for a bank. This exquisitely designed building was built in 1918 as San Francisco’s fifth branch library funded through the Carnegie Corporation’s Library Program. Designed by architect Ernest Coxhead, known primarily for…
A FRENCHMAN’S American dream — to open his own bakery and live above the shop, build a group of local cafes serving authentic French pastries and eventually sell it all for millions to a mega-corporation — took an abrupt twist June 16 when Starbucks announced it was shuttering its 23 La Boulange eateries in the Bay…