THIS LAVISH oversized limited edition book brings together a collection of favorite photographs and stories from the pages of the New Fillmore. It tells the story of an ever-changing small town in the big city with a rich history and a strong sense of community.
Available exclusively at Browser Books on Fillmore, or order online.
THIS DOCUMENTARY — filmed entirely on Fillmore Street — tells the story of longtime Fillmore resident Kelly Johnson, who used a new California law to end his life on his own terms.
A bench in Alamo Square now honors a beloved neighbor.
JUST ABOUT THIS time of year, for decades, Joe Pecora would be throwing open the doors of his beautifully maintained Victorian home near Alamo Square for his annual Christmas pot luck. The house would be brimming with friends and neighbors and decorated from top to bottom with his collection of antique ornaments and Christmas cards.
Joe died in 2020. But he is remembered as the author of “The Storied Houses of Alamo Square” and a true friend of the neighborhood. Now he has a permanent presence in Alamo Square. Friends came together at the park in high style on Sunday afternoon, December 10, to dedicate a new bench in his honor.
Fran Moreland Johns and her new book of stories at Books Inc. in Laurel Village.
FIRST PERSON | FRAN MORELAND JOHNS
It started as a casual conversation in our old Sacramento Street kitchen.
“I can’t write stories!” I remember saying. “Real writers write stories!” This was about 30 years ago, early in my marriage to the Great Encourager. “Sure you can,” he said. “You’ve got stories that deserve to be written.”
I had written news articles, features and columns for magazines and newspapers, including the New Fillmore, plus political speeches, annual reports and a few easily forgettable books written on commission long ago because I needed the money — almost anything nonfiction you can name, but never stories.
With a lot of encouragement, I set about writing the first purely made-up story of my grown-up life. It was about a local character in a small town in Virginia in the early 1940s. “Eddie Rakeleaves” did pretty well for itself, winning an award from a respected literary journal. And it provided more encouragement to tackle a longtime dream — whereupon I entered the University of San Francisco, a short uphill walk but a few long decades since my B.A. in art from Randolph-Macon Woman’s College. The MFA Class of 2000 comprised a wide variety of people with day jobs, from young men and women just out of college to a few Vietnam vets and one senior. My fellow students never tired of kidding me about the absence of profanity in my stories — a problem the Vietnam vets did not have. But being the grandmother of the class was as delightful as the assignments were challenging.
My husband Bud,the Great Encourager, took over all the cooking, looked after home and hearth, paid the bills, fielded calls and invitations while juggling his own commitments, and took other women to concerts and gallery openings. More than a few people would look sideways at me when I reappeared after graduation with Bud at Peet’s or a gallery show, having figured I was somewhere in his past. But two years later I picked up an MFA in short fiction. I was writing stories! Soon those stories went into a dusty file drawer to languish while life intervened. I went back to nonfiction — and on to books, activism, nonprofits, talks, marches and letters to editors. Early on I occasionally pulled out a story to fire off somewhere, so a few were published in print or online magazines. But the drawer got dustier and dustier.
Then new encouragers appeared. An irreplaceable friend found an editor who knew how to drag my stories out of their dusty drawer and into the 21st century. Eventually I called her – and immediately hired her. Within a year, and with a lot of help and encouragement from people smarter than I, Marshallville Stories was born.
The time, place and goings-on are not unlike many other towns in those years. You’re invited to pick up a copy at Books Inc. at Laurel Village or Browser Books on Fillmore and take a trip back to a yesteryear seen through fond remembrance.
EXCERPT FROM THE INTRODUCTION
Marshallville, Virginia, does not physically exist. But in the United States of the 1930s and 1940s, towns just like it were home to more of the nation’s citizens than were all of the bustling cities and self-important state capitols combined.
In the Marshallvilles of those days, everybody knew everybody else, including the inhabitants of outlying farms and crossroads villages, to varying degrees of intimacy and embarrassment. Main Street was generally known also as Railroad Avenue, since the railroad traditionally ran through the middle of town. A college, mill or outlying industry often further anchored the socio-economic scene; drugstores, groceries, barber shops and the like bore a family name, and were passed along from one generation to the next.
Marshallville functioned partly as town but mostly as extended family, and life within the family moved with languorous ease. The time and place embodied a combination of uniquely American experiences: the patriotic commitment of the war years, the ebullient spirit of the immediate post-war years, the basic goodness that was seen in and expected of even the sorriest of souls, and the early stirrings of change that would simmer for another decade before erupting into the 1960s.
These stories are a fond look back. I believe that though long in the past, they still have messages for the future.
“I never intended to write a book,” Ronald Hobbs said as we basked in the warm February sun in Santino’s Vino’s parklet at Fillmore and California. “Who does that these days?”
“Well, you did,” I nudged, tapping my copy of his new book, Nearing a Place Called Home. “A pretty good one, too. How did this accident happen?”
“My editor and I — Isaiah Dufour, a very talented young man, from the Mission, a playwright.”
Conversations tend to snake around with Ron.
“We were sitting on my back porch, enjoying something red from Napa, and he knew about the little stories I’d been writing. He sort of talked me into it.”
Ronald Hobbs has been living in the Fillmore since before it was new. He arrived here in September 1970 and stayed, with many an absence, abscondage and return.
He spent some early days working in the back rooms of the legendary Minnie’s Can-Do Club, and also read poetry from time to time in the front. He worked at nearby Connie’s West Indian restaurant, too, and remembers Rev. Jim Jones handing Connie a big check after taking over her place one night. For a long time, he was a partner in Spectrum Imports, a shop near Fillmore and Pine that specialized in exotic birds. He’s always been thought of as the poet of our part of Fillmore, and he brings his poet’s eye and ear to this book of prose.
Photograph of Ronald Hobbs by Lucy Gray
“The stories seem autobiographical,” I suggested, as he sipped at his beer.
“Well, they are,” he replied, “but they’re stories. You know.”
Nearing a Place Called Home is a collection of stories, most very short (the longest one is 11 pages). They take you from the Louisiana bayou to Mexico, Japan and San Francisco. They feel autobiographical because Ron writes so well, and every event feels truly witnessed.
We talked about some of the stories in the book, as he asked which ones I liked. I mentioned “When Russell Tracy Sang Butler Yeats” because I knew he was drawn to the musical settings of that poem. The story tells me why. His eyes lit up as he remembered the astonishing voice he’d heard as a young boy when another boy sang Yeats’s words. “It was like being in church, but better,” Ron said. “And it was Ireland, and I’d never heard Ireland before.”
Most of the brief pieces offer a quick epiphany, but they paint distinct pictures. The endings always seem to leave just a little more mystery for a reader to savor or solve. The era in which many of the stories take place is long enough ago that it feels like another country, but still recognizable.
I started to suggest he had a nostalgia for lost times, then caught myself. It’s not nostalgia, but affection, and the affection is for the people, the characters.
He agreed with that description. In the pages of the book, you meet many memorable people, most living at the edges of society and the borderlines of the law. He claims the names have been changed and the incidents rearranged into fiction, but acknowledges that some version of these people did exist.
These stories feel autobiographical because Ronald Hobbs writes so well, and every event feels truly witnessed. He brings his poet’s eye and ear to this book of prose.
Ron’s personal favorite is the one called “Suzonka.” “She was a real person,” he told me, “the wife a friend. She was a beautiful woman, almost to the point of gaudiness.” He paused, remembering. “But there’s always a Suzonka somewhere. Right now, there’s probably a young man sitting in a club in North Beach watching her dance.”
We talked about the neighborhood, which we’ve both called home for decades, dropping some names of those no longer with us. I was happy to see that he’d included a local bass player in a scene in one of the stories, just in passing. Only longtime Fillmore residents would catch it. “Well, you write about what you’ve seen, don’t you?” Ron proposed.
His first love is poetry, and it’s also mine. We both share a vocation for the play of words. His must-have, desert-island anthology is Modern Poetry, edited by Oscar Williams — the 1947 edition. I have the later expanded version. The great sadness in his life is that he feels he’s failed at what he loves.
“Every day I get up and I try to write poetry, but what comes out is crap,” he says. That’s his opinion. All writers dance their own dance with the muse, but I’ve always liked Ron’s poems. If you can find a copy of Songs for Fillmore Street or Beadstringer, you should snap it up and pass it around.
Cheers were coming from the Super Bowl crowds inside Santino’s and the other bars along Fillmore Street. I slid my copy of Nearing a Place Called Home across the table for his autograph. The sun was going down at the end of California Street. I helped Ron up and walked him slowly across the street to the place he now calls home.
Mark J. Mitchell is a local poet and novelist. His newest book, Something to Be, is due out shortly from Pski’s Porch Publishing.
UPDATE: Ronald Hobbs died soon after his book was published in 2022. His son Django Runyan posted on May 26, 2022: “After a long battle with pulmonary heart disease, my father has now passed on. I thought you all should know. My father was a remarkable man. Although a man of meager means he was, to me, an Aristocrat of Being. He brought magic and grandeur to my life and to my brothers, Zack and Sonny. He provided us with a space for those less visible things. He showed us how rich ordinary life can be. He taught me to value the deepest questions above all. We have been very lucky to share his riches while he was here.”
Neighborhood poet Mark Mitchell has a new book of poems.
FIRST PERSON | MARK J. MITCHELL
I arrived in the neighborhood in September 1978, following the woman I’m still lucky enough to love. I had dreams of being a San Francisco poet.
We moved into the Preston Apartments above what is now Santino’s Vino, but was Uncle Vito’s in those days. I was fresh out of UC Santa Cruz with not-quite-a-degree in aesthetic studies and creative writing, with an emphasis on poetry. So I needed a job. I’d been unemployed a week and the rent was due. I decided to head downtown to apply at a new Walden Books that was about to open. But on the way I stopped in at Bi Rite Liquors, on the other corner of Fillmore and California, and asked if they needed any help. I was working there by the end of the day.
The new and earlier editions of Harlem of the West.
IN THE LATE ’80s, Elizabeth Pepin Silva and Lewis Watts began an archival journey to resurrect a piece of San Francisco’s cultural history that had been bulldozed into oblivion. The Harlem of the West Project sought to make visible the rich history of the Fillmore District — one of the few neighborhoods in the Bay Area where people of color could go for entertainment in the 1940s and ’50s.
More than a dozen clubs dotted the 20-block radius, cheek by jowl with independent restaurants, pool halls, theaters and stores, many of them owned and run by African Americans, Japanese Americans, and Filipino Americans.
The first book in a planned San Francisco Cozy Murder Mystery series, The Fog Ladies features a group of spunky older women and one overworked, overtired, overstressed medical intern who live in an elegant apartment building in San Francisco — and then the older ladies start to die.
The story is set in Pacific Heights in a building similar to the one I lived in years ago, minus the dying ladies. The neighborhood is as much a character in the story as the Fog Ladies themselves — with its beautiful 1920s and ’30s apartment buildings, nearby shopping streets, hills, views and pruned trees in winter.
Longtime employee Fred Martin at the front desk at Browser Books on Fillmore.
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 used bookseller on Clement Street, which added a second store five years ago on 9th Avenue — promises the Browser name and staff will stay the same and the changes will be gentle.
“We’re proud to help shepherd the beloved Browser Books into the future,” said Green Apple co-owner Pete Mulvihill. “We’re coming in confidently but humbly.”
Green Apple will bring an infusion of operating capital and bookselling backbone, but most of the initial changes will be behind the scenes.
“We do plan some gradual improvements,” Mulvihill said. “I hope that six months from now people will walk in and say, ‘I always loved this store, and it’s even better now.’ ”
Browser Books was rescued by its fans last spring when a GoFundMe campaign almost immediately raised $76,241 to pay the debts of longtime owner Stephen Damon, who has been battling a terminal illness.
That kept the books coming and provided time to work out a longer-term solution. Manager Jordan Pearson led the effort, aided by local entrepreneurs Richard and Ben Springwater.
Green Apple takes over the remaining seven years of Browser’s lease. Owners Kevin Ryan and Mulvihill will be in the store on Saturday, October 19, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. for a “Meet the New Owners” celebration and an unveiling of Browser’s new T-shirts and tote bags.
Like any street in any great city, Fillmore is always changing, always dying, always being awakened
Photograph of Richard Rodriguez on Fillmore Street by Frank Wing
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 on Fillmore, I will most often take a digressive route. I leave my apartment on Clay Street, climb the Aztec steps into Alta Plaza, then circle around Pacific Heights. I climb back up the hill on Pierce.
So much of my life has been consumed by exercise. When I could still jog, I used to run through Pacific Heights on my way to the Presidio. The great houses were blurred landmarks in those days.
Now, exercise offers more of an opportunity to pause. I have favorite houses. Many mansions have had their facades lifted. After being swathed in netting or shrink-wrapped in white plastic for months, even years, exteriors are revealed to the street in pristine turn-of-the-century clarity. I have long admired the novels of American wealth — Wharton, James, Fitzgerald — and the interior secrets they revealed. Walking along Vallejo or up Steiner, however pleasant, is not like reading novels. There is no discernible narrative.
I know the Getty house. I know the confectionary palace where Danielle Steel lives. I can tell when Nancy Pelosi is in town from the assembly of black security cars. I know the Whittier mansion, which was briefly the consulate of the Third Reich. I even know where a bitten Apple executive lives. I never see anyone in a window.
I do see Mexican construction workers feverishly employed, or lounging in the manner of Manet, following their noonday meals. The sidewalks are empty except for the occasional Filipina housekeeper walking a joyless dog.
Browser Books has been a fixture at 2195 Fillmore for decades.
THE DEAL IS DONE: Green Apple Books — the new and used bookseller on Clement Street, which added a second store five years ago on 9th Avenue — has bought Browser Books on Fillmore Street.
Green Apple will take over on October 1, but promises that the name and the staff will stay the same.
“We’re proud to help shepherd the beloved Browser Books into the future,” said Green Apple co-owner Pete Mulvihill. “Thanks to Browser’s 43-year successful run on Fillmore Street, a reasonable landlord and lease, an enthusiastic and well-read staff, a loyal customer base and a successful GoFundMe campaign [in 2018], the store is healthy.”
SAN FRANCISCO ARTIST Kit Haskell has established herself as the gold standard for pen and ink drawings of the city’s Victorian homes. The newest book to feature her drawings lets children of all ages choose their own favorite Crayola colors for the Painted Ladies.
It’s a coloring book featuring 20 of Haskell’s meticulously accurate drawings of some of San Francisco’s finest vintage homes, many of them located in the neighborhood. Each one comes with a history lesson, naturally, given Haskell’s long involvement in the Victorian Alliance and the San Francisco History Association.
Her book is available at Browser Books on Fillmore.
