News from the Heart & Soul of San Francisco
BELOVED BROWSER BOOKS will say goodbye this week to Hana Metzger’s brief and shining five months as manager. Metzger took over in the spring after working closely for the past six years with the usually smiling Jordan Pearson. Pearson stepped down after ensuring Browser’s future by guiding its transition into the Green Apple Books empire.…
“RESTAURANT DOCTOR” Faith Wheeler, a longtime neighborhood resident, is touring the country with her beautiful and spirited new book — and, like the author herself, it’s a winner. She acknowledges that Chickens Don’t Fly is “a puzzling name for a coffee table book, cookbook with few chicken recipes, or even a memoir,” but says she…
GOV. GAVIN NEWSOM’S new book, Young Man in a Hurry, is a surprisingly engaging and introspective book, especially coming from a politician. Much of it takes place along Fillmore Street, where Newsom opened his first businesses and became the neighborhood’s representative on the Board of Supervisors — before moving up to mayor and then governor.…
FIRST PERSON | WILLIAM SAURO After living in the neighborhood for more than three decades, I’ve learned that San Francisco has a way of encouraging reinvention. People arrive here to start companies, launch careers or try entirely new lives. In my case, the reinvention came later than most: After years working as a newspaper reporter,…
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.…