News from the Heart & Soul of San Francisco
By GARY KAMIYA San Francisco Chronicle Fifty years ago this weekend, police prevented the San Francisco Mime Troupe from performing a play in Lafayette Park, arresting the company’s founder as 1,000 people jeered. The dramatic encounter expanded the frontiers of artistic freedom in San Francisco and indirectly launched the career of legendary rock promoter Bill…
IT HAS NOW cost more than $18 million in city funds to build the Fillmore Heritage Center and keep it afloat. There is no new tenant in sight for the huge empty spaces formerly occupied by Yoshi’s jazz club and restaurant. The garage is losing $10,000 a month now that the building has few visitors. The…
ART & FILM | PAMELA FEINSILBER Toward the end of Plastic Man: The Artful Life of Jerry Ross Barrish, we see Barrish, San Francisco’s most famous bail bondsman, at his 50th high school reunion. He is shocked to find most of his Lincoln High classmates retired — “playing golf or something” — while he is…
By CHRIS BARNETT As a gaggle of City Hall lawyers and bureaucrats scramble to sort out a massive financial debacle of their own making, the cavernous jazz club, restaurant and bar complex at 1330 Fillmore formerly known as Yoshi’s San Francisco, dark for the last six months, isn’t likely to come alive again anytime soon.…
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…
HOLLYWOOD COMES to the neighborhood April 10 when a new film, Man From Reno, has its San Francisco premiere at the Sundance Kabuki Theater. Actually, Hollywood is coming back to the neighborhood, since much of the film was shot nearby at the Majestic Hotel and on the streets of Japantown. It’s the story of a famous…
“YOU HAVE TIME for one more before this joint closes forever?” asked the vocalist for the Hot Sardines, who performed on January 14 — the final night at Fillmore’s jazz showcase, which had opened to great fanfare seven years earlier as Yoshi’s San Francisco. The end came quickly. Just the day before, the new owners announced…
FLASHBACK | BOB MINKIN After my summer trip to San Francisco in August ’77, I was itching to get back to the Bay Area. The Grateful Dead provided the perfect excuse — their fabled year-end concerts at Winterland. As a young Deadhead who never got to see shows at the Fillmore, Fillmore West or Avalon…
MUSIC | BARBARA KATE REPA The Fillmore Auditorium has existed as the neighborhood’s dance hall and rock emporium for more than a century. And in all that time, there has been one common characteristic among those performing and running the shows: All were men. That will change on January 31, with The First All Lady…
Q & A | MICHAEL BLYTHE Michael Blythe has worked at the venerable Clay Theater at 2261 Fillmore Street for nearly a decade. In that time he’s had the opportunity to lavish his love of old theaters on the Clay, which is now more than 100 years old. On New Year’s Eve he helped launch…