The New Fillmore

FIRST PERSON | Lucy Gray

AUGUST 2013: I take our younger son, Zachary, to New York, where he will be a freshman in college. While I’m there my husband, David, calls to tell me we must sell our house. I promise to have this accomplished by October 1.

This may sound rash, but on our block of Pacific Heights, houses regularly sell before going on the market. One house sold in half a day. Nothing seems to last more than a week. This was true all through the financial crisis. Prices for homes in our area kept steadily increasing. I bet on this three years earlier, taking the last of our line of credit and renovating the kitchen and reshaping the interior to create two new bathrooms and a bedroom. It was frightening to the core to spend that money. But one reason we bought the house in 1994 was to improve it.

I am still hoping we’ll find a way out of selling. David and I love living here — even more after the improvements. We both work freelance — he a writer and I a photographer — which is another way of saying we practice the art of the long shot. Still, we both work every day as many hours as we have in us and have taken maybe four vacations since our children were born. Every time we went to Europe. A friend suggested we could go away more if we lowered our expectations.

Of course that could also be applied to our buying a home. Perhaps instead of settling in San Francisco we should have moved to a place with great public schools. Or maybe it would have been smarter to sell when we lost our sons’ college fund in one month during the tech bubble. We were still strong earners when our older son, Nicholas, got into the University of Chicago and they told us we made too much for financial aid, while banks told us we didn’t make enough to refinance.
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FIRST PERSON | Chuck Smith

Strange. I feel as if I’ve always been a San Franciscan, even though we’ve only lived here for 16 years. The city was in me before I was in it.

As soon as my wife, Lorna, and I arrived in San Francisco, we were drawn to this neighborhood, and a few years after we got here we were able to buy a condo on Sutter Street. We moved in on the Fourth of July weekend in 2000 during the Fillmore Jazz Festival. What a welcome.

From there we made friends up and down the street, never tiring of trekking down the hill to the bay and then back up. Along the way we stopped in every restaurant and shop, new and old — Fillamento, we still miss you! — never passing up a chance to sit outside in the sunshine at The Grove. 
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FIRST PERSON | John Maccabee

I recently moved to the East Bay and had to leave behind an office I had rented for 20 years upstairs at 2001 Fillmore Street. Leaving the neighborhood was wrenching, although I joked that I was ready to go; I had wrung every cubit of creativity from my 200-square-foot studio. The space had a bay window that faced Pine Street. From where I sat, I could see the Boulangerie sign — not the entire sign, because trees overhung it in a way that revealed only the letters a n g e r. I tried not to take that personally, although my chosen field, writing and game design, does offer plenty of opportunities for anger.

But I was productive there. I wrote two novels, dozens of screenplays and treatments — a dozen sold into the LA film and television markets. And I began a game design practice, CityMystery, creating what is referred to as transmedia games for the Smithsonian, for parks, schools and brands. While that much productivity increases the odds of selling projects, it also comes with a fair share of rejections, which brings me back to a n g e r.

Rejections, although inevitable, are frequently fraught with rage or despair. And early in my tenancy, during a protracted raging, despairing span of bad luck, I was persuaded that the space itself was at fault. Someone close to me recommended that I have it cleared of bad spirits by two practitioners from Berkeley she knew who were experienced in Feng Shui, the ancient Chinese art of placement.
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Photograph of Gaston by Susie Biehler

“We’ve begun to long for the pitter-patter of little feet — so we bought a dog. Well, it’s cheaper, and you get more feet.”
— Rita Rudner

FIRST PERSON | David Landis

It all began when we put up the Christmas tree in December. My partner Sean Dowdall is a cafeteria Catholic and I’m a Jewish wannabe. Neither of us is very religious, but we love a good celebration. So each year we deck our gay Christmas tree — a white one with pink balls coupled with a big pink ornament from a Parisian department store that always makes our Scott Street neighbors stop and stare.

This year, after the tree was trimmed, Sean turned to me and said, “I just can’t go through Christmas without a dog.”

About four months earlier, we had lost our beloved American Eskimo dogs, Shasta and Whitney. Not only were they part of the family, but they were also fixtures in the neighborhood. Having lasted almost to 18 (Shasta) and 17 (Whitney), they outlived many generations of dogs at Alta Plaza Park, their daily dog park of choice. We had seen many of Alta Plaza’s dogs come and go: Simon, Latte, Regina, Ruff, Molly, Bruiser, Panda, Banks and old Rose, to name a few. But Shasta and Whitney rallied on. And at Peet’s on Fillmore, while we sipped our cappuccinos, passersby couldn’t help but be seduced by their gorgeous white manes and fox-like smiles.

When they passed away, we found ourselves living a very different life: no daily walks to the park, no romps on the beach at Crissy Field — and nobody paying attention as the two of us sat on the bench outside Peet’s. The quiet in our house was deafening.

Then came Gaston.
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