News from the Heart & Soul of San Francisco
“THERE’D BEEN A rainstorm,” says longtime neighborhood resident Monte Travis, a respected San Francisco attorney. “I looked out the living room window and saw this. I grabbed my camera, opened the kitchen window and took the picture. My timing was very lucky, as the rainbow proved quite ephemeral.” Travis is far more than an amateur…
AT THE TOP of Fillmore Street, the renovation of a penthouse is nearly complete. An art treasure is coming home. VIDEO by Jonathan Pontell for The New Fillmore.
NEIGHBORHOOD HISTORY | WOODY LaBOUNTY In the 1930s, the WPA’s Federal Writers’ Project put unemployed authors to work on guidebooks. The contributor to the architecture section of California: A Guide to the Golden State, had some opinions on the architectural tastes of the moneyed classes in the late 19th century: “[W]ealth meant even larger buildings with more and…
DAVID JOHNSON, who took the most famous photograph ever taken on Fillmore Street, looking south from Fillmore and Post in the late 1940s, died on March 1 at age 97. Johnson, a Florida native, first came through San Francisco on his way to serve in the navy during World War II. He returned after the…
By WOODY LABOUNTY The story: the imposing Calvary Presbyterian Church on the corner of Fillmore and Jackson streets — which seems like an ancient temple that has stood on its plot for time immemorial — was moved there from Union Square. Let’s play detective and take a before-and-after look. Read more: “One Million Bricks“
AT THE TOP of the Fillmore hill on a beautiful December day.
IT’S NOT EVERY DAY that a photo from the neighborhood is published in The New York Times. But today is that day. Alongside a review of Cosmic Scholar, a new biography of anthropologist/artist/filmmaker/mystic/music collector Harry Smith, is a photograph of Smith before one of the murals in the legendary Fillmore jazz club Jimbo’s Bop City.…
ART | JEROME TARSHIS “JOAN BROWN,” a new exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, celebrates the colorful life and work of a deeply imaginative painter and independent spirit who got her start on Fillmore Street and went on to international acclaim. The expansive presentation of Brown’s work features 80 paintings and sculptures spanning…
By GARY KAMIYA San Francisco Chronicle The most famous event in the history of avant-garde literary San Francisco was Allen Ginsberg’s reading of “Howl” at the Six Gallery at 3119 Fillmore Street on Oct. 7, 1955. That frenzied reading, the subsequent publication by Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Books of “Howl and Other Poems,” and the…
ART | JEROME TARSHIS In this year’s Venice Biennale, the world’s preeminent art fair, a kind of 21st century surrealism is said to be the dominant artistic tendency. One of the most admired exhibitions of our time is “Surrealism Beyond Borders,” now packing them in at Tate Modern in London after months as a smash…