News from the Heart & Soul of San Francisco
FIRST PERSON | RYAN TONKOVICH When libraries closed in the spring of 2020 due to the pandemic, my sister Natalie and I wondered how families with young children would get access to books. We contacted a family friend who was a principal at a local school in San Francisco. She told us many of her…
FIRST PERSON | CHARLES BUSH My latest novel, The Boy with the Jade, published today, is historical fiction set in 18th century China. It tells the story of Baoyu, a boy growing up amidst the extravagance, tumult and cruelty of a high aristocratic family. Trapped by expectations that he pass the Imperial Examination and continue…
By ALISON OWINGS A few months ago, I called 911. I am not often an alarmist, but in front of my apartment building at Fillmore and Washington, I reported, was a pair of legs sticking out from under a pile of left-behind furniture. Lacking the moxie to find out on my own if the legs…
NEIGHBORHOOD AUTHOR Arthur Bloomfield for years lived alone, surrounded by books and music, in a classic Victorian in the Webster Street Historic District — the city’s first historic district, created by his late wife, the architectural historian Anne Bloomfield. He wrote seven books, mostly on music and food, and scores of reviews as classical music…
A NEW BOOK for children celebrates neighborhood culinary icon Cecilia Chiang — who, as the subtitle says, “revolutionized Chinese food in America.” Her pioneering restaurant, The Mandarin, opened in 1961 in Ghirardelli Square. It “rejected the American cliches of thickly sauced stir-fries served in pseudo-exotic settings,” reported The New York Times on her 99th birthday.…
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.…
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…
BOOKS | MARK J. MITCHELL “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…
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…
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…