News from the Heart & Soul of San Francisco
A rt patrons Michael and Sarah Stein lived in the Fillmore, then primarily a Jewish neighborhood, before they joined his sister Gertrude and brother Leo in Paris in the early 1900s. So did Gertrude Stein’s longtime companion, Alice B. Toklas. The Stein family owned and operated some of San Francisco’s many cable car lines, which Michael…
Travelers through the swank new terminal two at San Francisco International Airport will find friends from the neighborhood to bid them hail and farewell. Birds from Alta Plaza Park are part of an ingenious new piece of interactive musical art created by longtime neighborhood resident Walter Kitundu for a children’s play area. It’s intended for…
Naturally they’ll have a green living roof on the new eco-conscious assembly building now nearing completion behind Drew School at California and Broderick Streets. But they’ll also have a vertical garden created by Parisian botanist-artist Patrick Blanc — a rock star among gardeners credited with inventing the concept and planting gardens on walls around the…
PHOTOGRAPHY | THOMAS REYNOLDS Singer James Brown may have been the hardest-working man in show business, but David Johnson is surely the hardest-working 84-year-old in the photography business. In recent months he’s had four major exhibitions — mostly photographs from the heyday of the Fillmore’s jazz era — including one in Atlanta and another at…
ARCHITECTURE | ERICA REDER Every year thousands of people visit a building designed by California’s most celebrated female architect, Julia Morgan. Some seek out her work by taking a tour of Hearst Castle or the Berkeley City Club. Others have incidental encounters while walking around the Mills College campus, swimming at UC Berkeley’s Hearst Pool…
FOR MONTHS the temple on California Street that is home to Congregation Sherith Israel has been shrouded in scaffolding as the historic building undergoes a seismic retrofit. This week much of the scaffolding came down and the stained glass windows were re-installed — and the temple was no longer pink. EARLIER: At long last, temple…
ARCHITECTURE | Jacquie Proctor Soft-spoken British architect Harold G. Stoner quietly left his distinctive artistic mark on San Francisco, and one of his most important buildings stands proudly at the corner of Fillmore and Pine Streets. The Osada Apartments — including 15 residential units and two storefronts now home to Paolo Shoes and The Grove…
ARCHITECTURE | THERESE POLETTI In one of the more unusual examples of architectural ornament in San Francisco, a circle of lady bugs surrounds what appears to be a 1915 Ford Model-T Roadster. They adorn the facade of the architecturally significant 94-year-old garage that is home to Hayes Auto Repair at 2401 Bush Street, between Pierce…
Neighborhood artist Veerakeat Tongpaiboon has a new exhibition of his dynamic cityscape paintings this month at the Thomas Reynolds Gallery, his longtime artistic home at Pine and Fillmore. It’s the 16th year he has shown at the gallery. But this time he won’t be shuttling between his art and his day job at his family’s…
[nggallery id=5] By Tessa Williams “Serendipity,” reads an assemblage of vintage letters affixed to a wall at Timeless Treasures, Joan O’Connor’s antiques store on Sutter Street near Pierce. “Bananas,” reads another. “Slow down,” a third. An establishment that celebrates the relationship between words and objects, Timeless Treasures specializes in vintage letters, available in a vast…