News from the Heart & Soul of San Francisco
FIRST PERSON | ROGER BOAS I’ve been a resident of Pacific Heights for almost a century. I grew up in the 1920s, living with my folks in an apartment on Pacific Avenue. Then I bought my own place on Washington Street in 1959, raised four kids there with my wife Nancy — and we’ve lived…
FIRST PERSON | JOANNE WEIR When I was 6 years old, a feisty little thing with a mop of red hair spiraling every which way, my mom made me a simple sandwich for lunch. Not peanut butter and jelly or tuna fish salad, mind you; my mom was a professional chef, after all. Mom’s version…
LOCALS | THOMAS REYNOLDS He’d lived in the flat on California Street near Steiner for 37 years. Suddenly late one afternoon Jim Scott realized something was wrong. He called 911 and tried to answer all the dispatcher’s questions. Finally he told her: “Look, I have to get out of here. My room is full of…
BOOKS | FLORIANA PETERSEN For the last few years, Miles, my beautiful Rhodesian Ridgeback, and I would walk through the neighborhood every morning. Down to Fillmore, up to Broadway, over to Lyon, back to Sacramento. I would point things out to him. I am a designer, by trade and by nature, and I am finely…
JAZZ | MEAGHAN M. MITCHELL In 2006, internationally acclaimed photographer and professor Lewis Watts and Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker and writer Elizabeth Pepin Silva published Harlem of the West: The San Francisco Fillmore Jazz Era. From cover to cover, Harlem of the West is filled with vintage photos documenting San Francisco’s historic jazz era during…
LANDMARKS | BRIDGET MALEY The terra cotta clad treasure that sits at the southwest corner of Green and Octavia Streets is often mistaken for a bank. This exquisitely designed building was built in 1918 as San Francisco’s fifth branch library funded through the Carnegie Corporation’s Library Program. Designed by architect Ernest Coxhead, known primarily for…
PHOTOGRAPHY | LUCY GRAY When I was 10, my parents divorced — and I watched with fear and admiration as my mother got her first job so she could support five children. That made me sensitive to the subject of working mothers. It wasn’t surprising that later, as a photographer with children, I would try…
BOOKS | ERIN C. MESSER In 1981, the poet Latif Harris was working at — and living above — Browser Books in its former location a block up from the current store on Fillmore Street. Harris was behind the front counter when, he says, “the most beautiful woman in the world” walked into the store.…
FIRST PERSON | CAROL FIELD Juicy News is moving down the hill to 2181 Union Street — the very place, longtime locals will remember, where Minerva’s Owl Bookshop was located for many years. Minerva’s Owl was actually created three blocks east at 1823 Union in 1964 from what was originally a coal yard. I founded the…
AFTER A SUCCESSFUL and rewarding career as a bookseller, he’d settled comfortably into retirement in his book-filled flat on Bush Street across from St. Dominic’s Church. Then disaster struck Richard Hilkert. He was walking home from a 78th birthday massage early on the afternoon of August 29, 2006, when a rampaging driver ran him over…