The original listing price for 2901 Broadway was $65 million.
Curbed SF visits four pedigreed properties now for sale on Billionaire’s Row, the stretch of Broadway between Lyon and Divisadero that’s home to some of San Francisco’s grandest homes and wealthiest occupants.
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Photographs of 2500 Steiner Street by Erik Anderson
GARDENS | DEMI BOWLES LATHROP
At the crest of Steiner and Jackson Streets rises a 12 story cooperative apartment building — each floor a full flat — designed in the Mediterranean Gothic Revival style in 1927 by prominent San Francisco architect Conrad Meussdorffer. Crowned with a penthouse at the top and a maisonette with a separate entrance on the ground level, the apartments overlook their neighbor, Alta Plaza Park, and offer sweeping views in all directions.
A small garden surrounds 2500 Steiner, running north toward the bay along Steiner Street, then around the corner down Jackson. To fix the building to its site, a simple, traditional garden of small trees and evergreen shrubs was installed when the tower was built, and it remained unchanged for nearly 80 years.
Then, in 2006, star landscaper Topher Delaney — who bills herself as a creator of “dynamic physical installations” — was commissioned to design a new garden. Her creation was radically different: 19 angular steel planters ranging from 30 inches to four feet in height that marched in both directions from the corner, each carefully calibrated to compensate for the slope of the street so that every tree was planted at a uniform height.
The modern makeover became a subject of considerable discussion among the residents of 2500 Steiner. Earlier this year, they decided they’d had enough. The modern garden was removed and traditional evergreen trees that mimic the original planting returned. “It was fun while it lasted,” said Michael Lazarus, president of the building’s board of directors, “but it didn’t match the architecture of the building.”
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Photograph of Julian Guthrie on Fillmore Street by Chris Hardy
FIRST PERSON | JULIAN GUTHRIE
Having lived in San Francisco for nearly 20 years and worked as a reporter first for the Examiner and now for the Chronicle, I have come to see the different ways neighborhoods in the city are defined. For many, the center of a neighborhood is a coffee house, or a park, or a commercial strip to stroll. For me, it’s all those things.
The area around Fillmore Street has long been my home. I jog the steps of Alta Plaza and spend countless hours at the playground with my son. We love the yogurt at Fraiche, the pastries at the Boulangerie and the Fillmore Bakeshop — and we adored its predecessor, Patisserie Delanghe. We’re regulars at Delfina and Dino’s and Florio and SPQR.
This neighborhood works, with its mix of young and old and in between, its families and dogs, its parks and shops. And while countless amazing stores and restaurants have come and gone (Fillamento, the Brown Bag and Bittersweet, to name a few), the relaxed character of the neighborhood remains the same. It’s what drew me here, and what keeps me here.
In recent years, I’ve learned of yet another way people define their neighborhoods: by a house of worship. My new book, The Grace of Everyday Saints — published August 18 — is about a group of people who found a strong sense of community through their spiritual home, St. Brigid, the muscular stone church at the corner of Broadway and Van Ness Avenue.
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Photographs of the Boom Boom Room by Susie Biehler
SALOONS | CHRIS BARNETT
A t the Boom Boom Room, the divey-looking 78-year-old live music club on Fillmore at Geary, the best seat in the house is off limits to customers. The tufted red leather booth, with its perfect view of the band and dance floor, is permanently reserved for legendary blues guitarist John Lee Hooker, who some claim once owned the joint. Yet it’s unlikely he’ll show up these days, for even the hottest act. John Lee died in 2002.
“Well, maybe to you he’s dead. But not to me,” insists Hooker’s longtime business partner and the Boom Boom Room’s current owner, Alexander Andreas.
Andreas claims clubgoers have offered as much as $600 for Hooker’s booth — instead of the red vinyl bar stools or the 35-foot leather banquette that runs along the south wall. But the bids all fall on deaf ears. “It’s not for sale,” he says.
John Lee may now be strumming at the Big Bad Blues Bar in the Sky, but his Boom Boom Room on Fillmore is very much alive and kicking it every night except Monday.
Opened in 1933 as Jack’s Tavern at 1931 Sutter Street, across from Cottage Row, it was the first live music club that welcomed blacks in what would become, during World War II, the Fillmore jazz district. The music has since strayed far and wide from the original wailings of Chicago and New Orleans style jazz and blues. Soloists, duos, trios and full blown bands today belt out everything from R&B, funk, soul, boogie, salsa, rock, hip-hop and boogaloo to booty-shaking sounds that defy classification.
Andreas distills it down to “soul-centric, on-your-feet roots music.”
One thing is certain: The Boom Boom Room has the best happy hour — make that happy hours — on the street. At 4 p.m., 10 draught beers start flowing at $3 a pint. No taps for boring Bud or puny Miller Light here; they’re mainly Northern California microbrews sporting names like Arrogant Bastard, Downtown Brown, Dead Guy Ale and White Lightning. The same three bucks will get you a bottle of Pabst, Heineken, Corona, Negro Modello, Amstel Light and non-alcoholic O’Doul. Well drinks and wine are also priced at $3, but don’t look for Far Niente or Jordan; the wines here are a step up from the stuff that comes in a box. Happy hour ends at 8 p.m. and prices revert back to about $5 to $7.
The Boom Boom Room isn’t really a cocktail bar, although it does mix the classic martinis, sazaracs and manhattans.
But the stand up and shake it clientele here is a beer and whiskey crowd, anyway. When they opt for something stronger, it’s usually bourbon, scotch, vodka or rum straight or with a mixer. Barkeeps have no time to tinker with six or seven ingredients and customers don’t have the patience to wait for it. The creativity is on stage, not in the glass.
The best time to drop into the Boom Boom Room is around 6 p.m. when the band performing for the night will be tuning up and riffing, the crowd has not yet gathered, happy hour prices are in effect and no one is collecting admission. The cover charge, ranging from $5 to $20 depending on the day of the week and the performers, starts at 9 p.m. along with the show. There’s no cover on Sundays and Tuesdays.
Three hours before showtime is a lot like dress rehearsal; you see the room in all its naked glory. Beer boxes are strewn around. The house lights are tested, sound checks are taken, the mood of the place keeps changing. The band itself seems to shrink and expand before your very eyes. It often does. Andreas says musicians playing the Fillmore Auditorium and other clubs will frequently swing by and sit in with the band, often unexpectedly, for a song, a set or for the night.
Before the first downbeat is also a good time to check out the art: faded black and whites of greats from another era, recent color photos, some paintings of John Lee Hooker himself and a potpourri of photos of national treasures and local heroes, randomly hung. Among them are Buddy Miles, Fillmore’s own Etta James and Muddy Waters and his band, who were snapped at a recording studio that once stood on the corner of Pierce and Bush. Andreas himself took some of the photos, and others are by the great San Francisco rock photographer Jim Marshall.
When the music starts, the Boom Boom Room roars to life. Candles flicker in squatty red hurricane lamps on every table and along the bar. The overhead spots bathe the rich velvet stage drape in blood red and give the musicians a soft amber glow. The powerhouse sound system sounds like Dolby on steroids. The spinning disco ball throws off a kaleidoscope of mirrored images. Two Sputnik light fixtures over the bar radiate an odd but soothing turquoise. The sensation is just this side of psychedelic.
On a recent Saturday night, Andreas, 43, sporting a black T-shirt, was drinking in the scene along with a Maker’s Mark on the rocks, clearly pleased.
“You’ll notice everything’s curved here — the bar, banquettes, the leather upholstered automobile bumpers over the backbar,” he notes. Amazingly, the car bumpers fit right into the decor. So do the two dozen small brass plaques affixed to the bar in front of every stool — tiny tributes saluting some of Fillmore’s colorful characters by their street names: Chili Joe, Trumpet, the Lawman, Cable Car Joe, Nash, Mashed Potato George and Big Earl.
“Trumpet carried a trumpet case but he never played the trumpet,” Andreas recalls. “He was a bartender when this was Jack’s Bar on Sutter.” He also recalls the case was packed with loaded dice for the pick-up games he always had going in an alley near Jack’s — that is, until one of the perennial losers examined the “bones.”
The brass plaques, the framed photos, the tales of yesteryear, the DJ station just inside the front door and the juke box that hangs on the wall at the east end of the backbar are all ways the Boom Boom Room is doing its part to make sure the giants and the unknowns of jazz and blues and their music will never be forgotten.
Andreas puts it his way: “This place is dedicated to the pioneers, originators and legends, both old and new — the famous musicians and the up-and-coming artists.”
Read more: “Was it really John Lee Hooker’s joint?“
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John Lee Hooker’s red leather booth at the Boom Boom Room is still reserved only for him.
SALOONS | CHRIS BARNETT
So did swashbuckling blues guitarist John Lee Hooker really own the Boom Boom Room as a side gig? If you believe the sign above the door, he did. And if you listen to the current owner, Alexander Andreas, he did.
But don’t bet your booty on it.
Fillmore jazz genealogists Elizabeth Pepin and Lewis Watts, authors of Harlem of the West, say the bar opened in 1933 as Jack’s Tavern and was originally located at 1931 Sutter Street. It was one of the first nightclubs in the neighborhood to cater to African Americans. It was also called Jack’s of Sutter and the New Jack’s Lounge in days gone by.
In 1988, Jack’s Tavern moved to its current spot at 1601 Fillmore, hard by the Geary bridge. A year later, Alexander Andreas — born and raised just off Fillmore and a wannabe filmmaker — landed a bartending job there.
A Marquette University grad, he used to trek during college from Milwaukee to Chicago to hang out at the city’s blues bars and jazz clubs. But his bartending gig at Jack’s quickly proved he would rather be an owner than sling pints and shots. “I was also doing production coordination for TV commercials,” he says, “but if I asked my boss at Jack’s for a day off, he’d give me a permanent vacation.”
Andreas met the legendary John Lee Hooker in 1990.
“It was just after he cut a single with Bonnie Raitt and he walked in the front door with his small entourage — a couple young girls and his driver. John Lee was enjoying himself and I told the doorman to make sure no one bothered him,” he says.
The Jackie Ivory Quartet — which had opened for Junior Walker and the All-Stars — was Jack’s Tavern’s house band. Hooker and his ladies came in every weekend to watch them perform. Andreas saw that the group got the best seats and strong drinks quickly served. “He always dressed in sharkskin suits and wore a Homburg hat,” Andreas recalls.
An unabashed fan who was quickly becoming a groupie, Andreas went to Foster City to catch a Hooker show and the guitarist spotted him.
“You want to come to my shows?” Hooker asked. “Fine, you can carry my guitar.”
He did, carrying the case to every Hooker performance at many venues in the Bay Area. “It was cool. I was part of his entourage,” Andreas says now.
Meantime, Andreas says, the owner of Jack’s Tavern was gutting the club, getting rid of the dance floor, extending the bar. “He was trying to make it a beer bar with 50 taps and an Irish balladeer standing on a soap box. It was just gaudy and tacky, with lots of neon signs from Budweiser and Coors,” he says. “Plus, he was kicking out all the old-timers like Mashed Potato George, Big Earl and Trumpet.”
Disgusted, Andreas quit and looked around for a place of his own. After 18 months of searching the city, he heard Jack’s Tavern’s owner owed back rent and couldn’t get his lease renewed.
Andreas rustled up the money, went around his old boss to the landlord and won the lease. But Jack’s Tavern was by then a tired and tainted name. The new proprietor remembered that Hooker had recorded a song called “Boom, Boom.” Suddenly, Andreas had a name — the Boom Boom Room.
But he needed a partner, preferably one with visibility. “I went to John Lee and said, ‘Wouldn’t you like to have your own club?’ And his answer was, ‘Hell, yes, I would.’ But his business manager shot me down, saying, ‘Suppose someone slips, falls and sues. Hooker would be liable and it could besmirch his name.’ ”
Andreas, whose father is a lawyer, came up with a canny solution. They would use John Lee Hooker’s name and likeness, but he wouldn’t actually invest a dime.
The celebrated guitarist was thrilled. He had his own club with all the perks of ownership — a private booth, fine bourbons — but none of the perils and problems of running a club. Andreas in turn netted plenty of promotional capital that’s still paying dividends today, nearly a decade after John Lee Hooker died.
Photographs by Susie Biehler
MORE: “Booty-shaking at the Boom Boom Room“
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WHILE 30 YEARS can be more than a lifetime in San Francisco’s ever-changing restaurant world, Fillmore’s venerable Elite Cafe on July 14 will celebrate three decades of serving up New Orleans cuisine in its historic Art Deco home.
And that’s only its third incarnation.
The woody, warm and welcoming spot at 2049 Fillmore is rich in history. It was built in 1932 as a home for the Lincoln Grill, which opened across the street in 1928. Later it was transformed into The Asia Cafe, a chop suey house known to locals as a front for a gambling joint. Dozens of telephone lines were said to run into the basement.
It was also cheap.
“I remember getting a four-course meal — soup, salad and a meat dish with potato and vegetable, finished off with coffee and a dish of ice cream — all for a total cost of 85 cents,” recalls local resident Joe Beyer of his arrival in the neighborhood in the 1950s.
Times have changed, and so has Fillmore Street.
In 1981, Tom Clendening and Sam Duvall — a serial restaurateur who now owns Izzy’s Chop House in the Marina, renovated the space and opened it as The Elite Cafe. The neon sign that had hung out front for decades proclaiming The Asia Cafe was revised and rewired to announce The Elite Cafe. An enduring image is the raw bar with oysters and clams on ice beckoning to passersby in the front window.
The Elite was one of three businesses that opened in 1981, heralding the renaissance of Fillmore Street as a major shopping and dining destination. The others were Fillamento, the home design emporium that closed in 2001, and Vivande, Carlo Middione’s Italian restaurant, which closed last year.
Peter Snyderman took over as managing partner in 2005, doing away with the beckoning bivalves in the front window, but restoring the original mahogany details and adding outdoor seating. Chef about town Joanna Karlinsky revamped the menu, bringing along her signature Meetinghouse biscuits, which were born just up the block, and which remain on the menu still.
EARLIER: “There’s a reason they call it the Elite“
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St. Dominic's School was dedicated in 1929.
St. Dominic’s School closed for the final time at the end of the school year after more than a century of educating economically disadvantaged children in the neighborhood.
Yet the future for both the school and its Gothic home on Pine Street, erected in 1929, seems filled with promise.
The school has been known as the Megan Furth Catholic Academy, for a major donor, since it merged a few years ago with the Fillmore’s Sacred Heart School, rescuing both from probable closure. Yet even as St. Dominic’s Church leaders increased enrollment and steered the independent school in a more dynamic direction — at a rent of $1 per year — they’ve had their eyes on the building, which sits next door in the church’s parking lot.
Now another merger is in the works. The school will join forces with Mission Dolores School, another endangered Catholic school with declining enrollment, which happens to have an expansive and historic home next to Mission Dolores.
And the church gets control of the school building, which it plans to transform into a new parish hall and community center.
“It’s a win-win-win,” says Father Xavier Lavagetto, pastor of St. Dominic’s.
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Bella the swan — who returned last Sunday to lagoon at the recently restored Palace of Fine Arts after recovering from an injury to her foot — is moving to Petaluma, the city’s Rec and Park Department announced today.
While Bella was away, her sister-in-law Blanche gave birth on Memorial Day to a baby swan named Marta. On June 12, Bella rejoined her brother Blue Boy, Blanche and Marta. But like many family reunions, feelings of resentment and anger soon surfaced. There was sibling rivalry and bickering. Aunt Bella was not welcomed home.
Though park staffers and volunteers tried to help the swans adjust, they recognized that it is not uncommon for the new parents to become protective of the baby swan and aggressive toward outsiders. To ensure the swans’ quality of life would not be jeopardized, staff and volunteer swan caretakers found Bella a vacation home in Petaluma.
“I hope they can at least enjoy visits over the holidays,” said Phil Ginsburg, general manager of Rec and Park.
The family of swans did not welcome the return of Aunt Bella (above).
UPDATE: More bad news for a troubled family
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Schools of the Sacred Heart are in the Flood Mansions on Broadway.
DISPATCH | Elizabeth Moore
Last year the New Fillmore reported on the reversal of the decision to close Stuart Hall High School in San Francisco in the July 2010 article, “Elite private school will live on.” Just short of a year later, there is another tremendous example of the same community coming together, this time to celebrate a Schools of the Sacred Heart educator, who after 38 years of service to the community has had her contract terminated, apparently without cause. Like last year’s decision regarding the closing of Stuart Hall, this decision was made without input from the community, and it has attracted a similar outcry.
At the same time that young people are using social media to instigate social movements in the Middle East, young people at 2222 Broadway (and beyond) are using social media to instigate a social movement at home. This is a story about a little school with a big, big heart.
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The film crew at the snowy Swedenborgian Church, with Nicole Kidman in the doorway.
Hollywood is in the neighborhood and they’re going to church — the Swedenborgian Church at Washington and Lyon. It snowed on the little church this week — or appeared to — when Nicole Kidman was filming scenes for Hemingway & Gelhorn, a new HBO film directed by Philip Kaufman, who lives just over the hill. It’s a drama centered on the romance between Ernest Hemingway and war correspondent Martha Gellhorn, Hemingway’s inspiration for For Whom the Bell Tolls. The film also stars Clive Owens and is expected on HBO in 2012.
A preview:
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