THIS LAVISH oversized limited edition book brings together a collection of favorite photographs and stories from the pages of the New Fillmore. It tells the story of an ever-changing small town in the big city with a rich history and a strong sense of community.
Available exclusively at Browser Books on Fillmore, or order online.
THIS DOCUMENTARY — filmed entirely on Fillmore Street — tells the story of longtime Fillmore resident Kelly Johnson, who used a new California law to end his life on his own terms.
Ines Wilson has become a fashion advisor and media star at Invision.
FILLMORE STREET is losing an icon this week.
After a decade, Ines Wilson is leaving Invision, the optometry office and eyewear emporium at 1907 Fillmore. She has become a valued fashion advisor, helping Invision’s clients choose stylish glasses that flatter their faces. October 31 is her final day.
Wilson’s outsize personality and star quality have made her a standout not only on the street, but also on Instagram, where she has been featured in dozens of videos.
The videos resulted from a collaboration between Wilson and Luis Quiroz, Invision’s social media director. They recently shot a final video that serves as something of an exit interview for a familiar face on Fillmore.
Photograph of Yury Budovlya in his workshop by Sharon Beals
By NIKKI COLLISTER
To step into Yury’s Lights & Beyond is to enter a palace of lights, a dazzling collection of one-of-a-kind sconces, mid-century Italian floor lamps and ornate crystal chandeliers overhead. But if you care to look a little closer, you’ll also find a truly impressive showcase of accessories, from gracefully shaped fabric shades to specialty bulbs to colorful glass finials.
The name is apt, for the shop at 1849 Divisadero Street offers much more than lamps for sale. Proprietor Yury Budovlya is also a master restoration artist, capable of bringing antique chandeliers and broken lamps back to glowing form with a skilled craftsman’s hand. Working dutifully from the back corner of his shop, amid an organized chaos of cords, switches, and lightbulbs, he spends his days deconstructing, diagnosing, and revitalizing lighting fixtures of all kinds.
An immigrant from Ukraine who had previously worked in a metal fabrication factory, Yury and his family came to San Francisco in 1989 looking for a new life. He found himself searching for a job with limited English and no job leads, but a wealth of determination. In those first uncertain months, he found Light House Lighting on Geary, whose owner saw that Yury was adept with a wire and socket and hired him on the spot.
It was an act of generosity Yury has never forgotten, and the start of a new life in lights.
After 13 years of learning the ins and outs of lighting sales and repair, Yury took a bold step and opened his own shop in 2003, just as his previous manager at Light House Lighting was looking to retire. Starting with four empty walls in a former antique store on Divisadero, he built Yury’s Lights & Beyond into a haven for all things lighting.
•
Since then, Yury’s unwavering dedication to his craft and his customers has earned him a loyal clientele, from local residents to high-end designers. He’s seen the neighborhood and his own industry change, which he accepts with grace and a dash of nostalgia. As with fast fashion and fast tech, lighting fixtures have also become more expendable, despite the shift to energy efficient LED bulbs. The lighting fixtures themselves, he explains, are designed to be replaced rather than repaired: “You just have to throw it away and buy a new one.” In contrast, older lamps, even those from the early 1900s, can be repaired and fitted with modern LED bulbs, offering both longevity and sustainability.
It’s taken Yury his whole life to build up the knowledge and skills he applies to each unique piece. “Even today, sometimes people bring in challenging questions,” he says. “I have to think: What do I do, and how do I do it?” As the shop’s sole full-time employee, there’s a risk that this knowledge will be lost when he retires. He does have a part-time assistant who helps with customers’ orders. For now he’s unsure if the shop will find an apprentice, but he’s willing to teach his ways to the right person.
One thing he does know: He’s not ready to give up the joys of his work just yet. A recent job found him fixing a lamp a customer brought in; it was for the nursery she’d been preparing for her new baby. After upgrading the lamp with a three-way light bulb and soft white shade, Yury says, the customer was so happy that she told him she would think of him whenever she turned on the light to see her baby. To Yury, who is a family man himself, comments like these “are like gold,” he says.
•
And so, the shop on Divisadero will stay lit for the foreseeable future. More than a retail and repair shop, Yury’s Lights & Beyond is a testament to the enduring value of craftsmanship in a city on the cutting edge of technology and automation — and a gentle reminder to pause and appreciate the stories of our city’s hardest-working business owners.
This article is part of a series produced by reThinkRepair, a grassroots group that has interviewed and photographed 40+ local repair businesses since 2018. Composed of a small team of eco-conscious San Franciscans, reThinkRepair celebrates the art of preservation by sharing stories of local repair shops with the broader community.
Eleanor Coppola’s 2020 film was shot on Washington Street.
REMEMBRANCE | ELEANOR COPPOLA (1936-2024)
By ALISON OWINGS
The sad news spread fast among her friends: Ellie Coppola died.
She was 87, and died at home in Napa Valley on April 12.
For years she and her creative family lived near Fillmore Street, first on Webster Street and later up on Broadway.
Late in life, Eleanor Coppola – often known as the wife of moviemaker Francis Ford Coppola – returned to shoot one of her own films, “Love Is Love Is Love,” at the handsome Victorian house at 2561 Washington Street, just steps from Alta Plaza Park. The home of her good friends Carol and John Field, it was empty after their deaths, while the Field children determined what to do with it. The film was inspired in part by a memorial lunch her writing group held after Carol Field’s death in 2017.
“Love is Love is Love,” a trilogy distributed by Blue Fox Entertainment, never gained the acclaim of her earlier documentary, “Hearts of Darkness,” about her husband’s fraught in-the-making war epic, “Apocalypse Now.”
The Fillmore segment of “Love” contained a much smaller scale drama: that of a table of women talking with intimate honesty about a cherished friend who had died. It echoes in ways a lively bunch of Bay Area writers and artists who jokingly call themselves “the Ladies Lunch Group.” They still occasionally have lunch, if not as frequently as in years past. The group included Ellie — and cherished her, too. Many lunchers responded with shock to the news of her death, and with appreciation. The consensus: Ellie was kind, inclusive, considerate, generous, caring and unassuming. Only weeks before she died, she contributed to a fund to help one of the other ladies. Typical.
At her death, she was editing a documentary about her daughter Sophia Coppola’s film, “Marie Antoinette.” Eleanor Coppola was not finished.
FROM 2020: The backstory about Eleanor Coppola’s newest film
Alison Owings’ latest nonfiction book, “Mayor of the Tenderloin: Del Seymour’s Journey from Living on the Streets to Fighting Homelessness in San Francisco,” will be published in September by Beacon Press.
Photograph of Rosalba Martinez at Silver Glass & Mirror by Sharon Beals
By NIKKI COLLISTER
In the front office of SF Silver Glass & Mirror, every piece of glass tells a story.
There’s the decorative French window with colorful stained-glass panes, made by founder Salvador Martinez for his wife, Rosalba. And a tall, narrow mirror with diamond-shaped bevels cut by Salvador’s son, German. A round, larger-than-life mirror was donated by a happy customer many years ago. Another decorative mirror on the wall came from a prominent hotelier.
The collection, mounted proudly against brightly painted walls, reflects both the longevity and family-oriented nature of the business.
In a city filled with Victorian homes, antique window and mirror restoration is high in demand. But few businesses offer what Silver Glass & Mirror does: a wide array of glass working skills with a personal touch. From large-scale public jobs to residential work, there’s no project too large or too small for this hard-working team.
Husband and wife Sal and Rosa Martinez first opened the business in 1982 at 2176 Sutter Street. A decade later they moved to 2401 Bush Street, where the shop has occupied the corner of a historic auto garage at Bush and Pierce ever since.
Since Sal died in 2001, Rosa has kept the business going strong.
•
When she and her husband — who were both born in Colombia and met in Los Angeles — first decided to open the shop, Rosa relished the opportunity. “I thought, this is beautiful, because I can work with my hands,” she says. She had previously worked at a data systems company for more than 20 years, but had always considered herself a creative person.
Her husband Sal had learned the glass trade as a young man in Colombia, and had spent many years as a union worker. He began showing Rosa how to cut and handle glass, which she learned quickly.
Rosa’s specialty is antiquing, the process of applying an artistic, vintage finish to a mirror.
“Like people, mirrors get wrinkles,” Rosa says with a smile. She can give any mirror this “aged” look by applying acidic chemicals and paint. Sometimes she’s working with a hundred-year-old mirror that needs a touch-up, other times she’s antiquing a brand-new piece of glass. It’s a precise and time-consuming process that can take up to four weeks to complete.
The result is a finish unique to each mirror, and an art form in itself.
In 2001, Sal signed a contract to restore part of the glass facade of the San Francisco Conservatory of Flowers in Golden Gate Park. But he died from prostate cancer before the project was completed.
Rosa remembers that he told her before he died, “You have to prepare yourself, because when I’m gone I don’t want anybody mistreating you.” Although glass restoration has historically been a man’s profession, both Rosa and Sal knew she could do the job. “He was a kind man,” she says of her late husband. “And a hard worker. I learned all of the ins and outs of the shop from him.”
With the deadline for the conservatory looming, Rosa got to work and finished the job, overseeing a team of 21 workers and cementing her place as proprietor of SF Silver Glass & Mirror.
•
Over the course of four decades, the business has built up a loyal customer base, taking on projects of all kinds, whether it’s designing shower doors for the Salesforce Tower gym, repairing delicate glass panels in a household lamp or installing windows in historic homes.
Rosa employs a small team of glaziers — expert glass workers — who can be found in the high-ceilinged workshop cutting, sanding, and etching glass. Many of them have been with the company for years. “We are like family,” Rosa says of her staff.
The family sentiment extends to their customer base as well. “This place could keep going on and on just from returning customers,” says German Martinez, Rosa’s stepson. “But there’s still new customers that come aboard.”
It’s a testament to both the team’s quality of work and Rosa’s unwavering dedication to her clientele. “I take good care of my customers,” she says proudly. “They are the most important.”
•
It’s been many years since Rosa came to America as a 20-year-old migrant from Colombia, but she has no plans to retire. She still works six days a week, employing the same work ethic she’s shown her entire life. She muses that her stepson may someday take over the business, but doesn’t concern herself too much with the future.
For now, she’s happy to remain at the helm.
Reflecting back, she takes pride in having employed people of all ages, genders and backgrounds. Ultimately, it’s the craft that brings them together. “Glass,” she says with a twinkle in her eye, “has its own language.”
This article is part of a series produced by reThinkRepair, a grassroots group that has interviewed and photographed 40+ local repair businesses since 2018. Composed of a small team of eco-conscious San Franciscans, reThinkRepair celebrates the art of preservation by sharing stories of local repair shops with the broader community.
A bench in Alamo Square now honors a beloved neighbor.
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.
Joe died in 2020. But he is remembered as the author of “The Storied Houses of Alamo Square” and a true friend of the neighborhood. Now he has a permanent presence in Alamo Square. Friends came together at the park in high style on Sunday afternoon, December 10, to dedicate a new bench in his honor.
U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein with 8th graders from Convent School on Broadway.
By CLAIRE FAHY The New York Times
Dianne Feinstein was laid to rest last week with a funeral service on the steps of San Francisco City Hall, a fitting backdrop for a woman who was as much a symbol of the city as the Golden Gate Bridge is.
It certainly felt that way when I was growing up in San Francisco. I went to the same high school she did, the private all-girls Convent of the Sacred Heart.
Photograph of John Gaul at the Haas-Lilienthal House by Ramon del Rosario
JOHN GAUL, 97, a fixture on Fillmore Street and in San Francisco historical circles for decades, died on July 25, 2023, at his longtime home at John F. Kennedy Towers.
He leaves a considerable legacy of celebrating and perpetuating the history of the city he loved. He was a docent at three of San Francisco’s most historical places: the Palace of Fine Arts, the Haas-Lilienthal House and the Swedenborgian Church. He led tours and helped train docents for all three, and was also active in SF Heritage, the San Francisco Historical Society and the Victorian Alliance.
Always impeccably dressed and relentlessly positive, he helped spearhead the designation of the Swedenborgian Church on Lyon Street — birthplace of the Arts & Crafts Movement in the U.S. — as a National Historical Landmark. He remained active in the church, phoning in a poem or limerick or other “wise words” during services even after he was no longer able to attend. And he worked ahead: His recorded “rhythms,” as he called them, will continue to be heard during Sunday morning services through the end of the year.
John Melvin Gaul was born on November 9, 1925, the son of Carl Joseph Gaul and Olive Mae La Brash, and raised in Tacoma, Washington. His parents and a brother, Carl Gaul, preceded him in death.
He is survived by his cat, Apollo, who has been adopted into a new home. Late in life Gaul became a spokesman for Give Me Shelter, a pet adoption agency that helped him find companionship after others turned him away because of advancing age and limited finances. He also became a supporter and poster boy for Meals on Wheels, whose delivery trucks for a time sported his bowler-hatted visage.
A memorial service will be held at the San Francisco Swedenborgian Church at Lyon & Washington Streets at 2 p.m. on September 9, 2023.
John Gaul leads a tour of the Swedenborgian Church.
Dino Stavrakikis and his son Santino: “It’s time to go.”
By CHRIS BARNETT
After a 34-year run of flipping pizzas, uncorking wine and telling stories on the northwest corner of Fillmore and California, Dino Stavrakikis is selling the longtime pizza palace known for decades as Dino’s — now renamed after his son as Santino’s Wine Bar — to the owner of Ace Wasabi Sushi in the Marina.
The ownership changes hands today [Sept. 20]. New owner Ken Lowe has announced no decision on changing the popular storefront and is likely for now to keep the wine and pizza format and the longtime employees.
“When it’s time to go, it’s time,” says the affable Dino — it seems impossible to call him anything else — on why he is pulling the ripcord. “When I bought the place, Reagan was president. We’ve been though a couple of wars, viruses, a pandemic and many mayors. Fillmore — the street and the neighborhood — has changed, and not for the better.”
Dino’s corner housed a drug store before it became a pizzeria in the 1970s, initially owned by his Uncle Vito. Dino apprenticed in another pie shop at Polk and Broadway straight out of high school. “I knew I was an entrepreneur and I wanted to own my own place,” he recalls.
At 21, he moved a few doors away to Lord Jim’s — “the greatest fern bar ever” — and worked his way up to lead bartender. Dino was behind the plank the infamous night a squad of San Francisco cops raided the saloon on a tip it was dealing cocaine out of the back. It was a bad bust. The bar was packed with lawyers that night who were enjoying their after-work cocktails. They howled. Owner Spiro Tampourantzis, like Dino a Greek, sued the city with the help of Fillmore Street criminal defense attorney Eric Safire and prevailed.
In 1988, Uncle Vito — actually a distant cousin of Dino’s — ran out of dough, and Dino bought the pizzeria out of bankruptcy for $90,000. “I moved into an apartment upstairs,” he says, “changed the name to Dino’s and worked 15 hours a day to get the place back on its feet. Fortunately, I had the gift of gab. All the best Italian pizza parlors are owned by Greeks.” Actually, Stavrakikis is half Greek, half Italian.
From the start, Dino says he loved his landlord and still does, a sentiment rarely heard from retail tenants. “We’ve had the same one from the beginning— Russ Flynn from Meridian Co.,” he says. “They’ve really been super and kind, working with me all the way through Covid.”
Dino’s fledgling pizza shop was thrust into the spotlight in June 1990 when Mikhail Gorbachev, then the charismatic president of the Soviet Union, made a 22-hour swing through San Francisco. Their motorcade was headed back to the Soviet consul’s residence at 2820 Broadway when a couple of dozen wellwishers on the corner of Fillmore and California caught the Soviet president’s eye. The procession stopped and Gorbachev leaped out of his Russian-made Zil limo and started shaking hands.
A stunned Dino said at the time that Gorbachev “was the most famous man I have ever met,” and he had met 49er great Ronnie Lott and California Gov. Jerry Brown. Since then, he met the late Secretary of State Madeline Albright, quarterback Joe Montana, actress Sharon Stone and others who dined on pizza and other dishes in his shop, many created by Dino’s late mom, Koula.
A lifelong bachelor who loves kids, Dino didn’t let his singlehood stop him from becoming a father. In 2011, he arranged with a surrogate what he considers his greatest triumph: a son he named Santino. Practically from birth, Santino became a household name in the Fillmore. The proud papa renamed his shop Dino and Santino’s. “He’s the love of my life,” beams dad.
After three remodels and a transformation into Santino’s Wine Bar, Dino decided he was ready to throttle back. He moved to Walnut Creek to be near his parents and to get Santino in a better school. He gave more operating responsibilities to his longtime lieutenants, Jesus and brother Emilio Ceidillos — both with Dino for 33 years — and Tony Santos, with him for 25 years. Dino continued his annual summer treks to Greece to visit his family, including former boss Spiro Tampourantzis, and soak up the sunshine and culture.
But he found himself wanting to spend more time with his son. So recently, he and Lowe, who Dino’s known for 30 years, huddled over glasses of wine and penciled out a deal. “I couldn’t have picked a better guy,” Dino says. “He’s bringing in an Italian chef, has his own ideas about making some changes.” Dino is tightlipped on this point, and Lowe has made no public announcements.
What’s next for Dino? “I have a gym at my house and I want to get in good shape,” he says. “I love to work. Unfortunately, I don’t have any hobbies. I just love the action. We’ll see what presents itself. But I’m going to miss my loyal customers.”
“I never intended to write a book,” Ronald Hobbs said as we basked in the warm February sun in Santino’s Vino’s parklet at Fillmore and California. “Who does that these days?”
“Well, you did,” I nudged, tapping my copy of his new book, Nearing a Place Called Home. “A pretty good one, too. How did this accident happen?”
“My editor and I — Isaiah Dufour, a very talented young man, from the Mission, a playwright.”
Conversations tend to snake around with Ron.
“We were sitting on my back porch, enjoying something red from Napa, and he knew about the little stories I’d been writing. He sort of talked me into it.”
Ronald Hobbs has been living in the Fillmore since before it was new. He arrived here in September 1970 and stayed, with many an absence, abscondage and return.
He spent some early days working in the back rooms of the legendary Minnie’s Can-Do Club, and also read poetry from time to time in the front. He worked at nearby Connie’s West Indian restaurant, too, and remembers Rev. Jim Jones handing Connie a big check after taking over her place one night. For a long time, he was a partner in Spectrum Imports, a shop near Fillmore and Pine that specialized in exotic birds. He’s always been thought of as the poet of our part of Fillmore, and he brings his poet’s eye and ear to this book of prose.
Photograph of Ronald Hobbs by Lucy Gray
“The stories seem autobiographical,” I suggested, as he sipped at his beer.
“Well, they are,” he replied, “but they’re stories. You know.”
Nearing a Place Called Home is a collection of stories, most very short (the longest one is 11 pages). They take you from the Louisiana bayou to Mexico, Japan and San Francisco. They feel autobiographical because Ron writes so well, and every event feels truly witnessed.
We talked about some of the stories in the book, as he asked which ones I liked. I mentioned “When Russell Tracy Sang Butler Yeats” because I knew he was drawn to the musical settings of that poem. The story tells me why. His eyes lit up as he remembered the astonishing voice he’d heard as a young boy when another boy sang Yeats’s words. “It was like being in church, but better,” Ron said. “And it was Ireland, and I’d never heard Ireland before.”
Most of the brief pieces offer a quick epiphany, but they paint distinct pictures. The endings always seem to leave just a little more mystery for a reader to savor or solve. The era in which many of the stories take place is long enough ago that it feels like another country, but still recognizable.
I started to suggest he had a nostalgia for lost times, then caught myself. It’s not nostalgia, but affection, and the affection is for the people, the characters.
He agreed with that description. In the pages of the book, you meet many memorable people, most living at the edges of society and the borderlines of the law. He claims the names have been changed and the incidents rearranged into fiction, but acknowledges that some version of these people did exist.
These stories feel autobiographical because Ronald Hobbs writes so well, and every event feels truly witnessed. He brings his poet’s eye and ear to this book of prose.
Ron’s personal favorite is the one called “Suzonka.” “She was a real person,” he told me, “the wife a friend. She was a beautiful woman, almost to the point of gaudiness.” He paused, remembering. “But there’s always a Suzonka somewhere. Right now, there’s probably a young man sitting in a club in North Beach watching her dance.”
We talked about the neighborhood, which we’ve both called home for decades, dropping some names of those no longer with us. I was happy to see that he’d included a local bass player in a scene in one of the stories, just in passing. Only longtime Fillmore residents would catch it. “Well, you write about what you’ve seen, don’t you?” Ron proposed.
His first love is poetry, and it’s also mine. We both share a vocation for the play of words. His must-have, desert-island anthology is Modern Poetry, edited by Oscar Williams — the 1947 edition. I have the later expanded version. The great sadness in his life is that he feels he’s failed at what he loves.
“Every day I get up and I try to write poetry, but what comes out is crap,” he says. That’s his opinion. All writers dance their own dance with the muse, but I’ve always liked Ron’s poems. If you can find a copy of Songs for Fillmore Street or Beadstringer, you should snap it up and pass it around.
Cheers were coming from the Super Bowl crowds inside Santino’s and the other bars along Fillmore Street. I slid my copy of Nearing a Place Called Home across the table for his autograph. The sun was going down at the end of California Street. I helped Ron up and walked him slowly across the street to the place he now calls home.
Mark J. Mitchell is a local poet and novelist. His newest book, Something to Be, is due out shortly from Pski’s Porch Publishing.
UPDATE: Ronald Hobbs died soon after his book was published in 2022. His son Django Runyan posted on May 26, 2022: “After a long battle with pulmonary heart disease, my father has now passed on. I thought you all should know. My father was a remarkable man. Although a man of meager means he was, to me, an Aristocrat of Being. He brought magic and grandeur to my life and to my brothers, Zack and Sonny. He provided us with a space for those less visible things. He showed us how rich ordinary life can be. He taught me to value the deepest questions above all. We have been very lucky to share his riches while he was here.”
After nearly three decades of involvement with the Fillmore Merchants Association — as board member, vice president, president and the last five years as executive director — Vasilios Kiniris, the personable man-in-perpetual-motion known to some as Mr. Fillmore and to all as Vas, is exiting stage left.
For most of that time, he’s been working — sometimes visibly, sometimes behind the scenes — to wrangle the neighborhood’s diverse coalitions into a cohesive and positive force. A lifelong merchant himself, save for a brief detour into architecture, Kiniris, 55, isn’t giving up on small businesses. He’s just crossing the street, so to speak, to a new entrepreneurial venture he calls NextSF, an agency that will offer his marketing savvy to other merchant associations and individual businesses and organizations seeking to build their brands and business.
Timothy Omi of Liberty Cannabis is the new president of the Fillmore Merchants Association. Patti Mangan is the new executive director. Continuing board members are Beverly Weinkauf of Toujours, Victorian Dunham of HiHo Silver and Chandler Tang of Post.Script.
A candid long-hauler who believes in relationships, the Greek-born Kiniris sees life as a series of “half-empty opportunities,” but he’s no Pollyanna. He doesn’t shrink from the hard facts plaguing San Francisco and the Fillmore in particular.
“Crimes are happening, no doubt about it,” he said during an exit interview this week. “Fillmore needs to be a safe place for its merchants, their employees and their customers.” The street, battered by the pandemic, has an unprecedented number of empty storefronts. But Kiniris remains upbeat. “Many are currently in contract with new leases,” he says. “They are filling up again.”
Kiniris has been swimming upstream all his life, and not without failures. “I’ve made my share,” he admits. One of his more visible ill-fated ventures was moving his Zinc Details home design emporium south to a huge vacant space on Fillmore near the Geary bridge, where an old dollar store once stood. It didn’t pan out. Zinc Details had been on Fillmore for 27 years when it closed in 2018.
•
Kiniris was 7 when he and his family arrived in San Francisco from Macedonia in northern Greece. At first they lived in public housing in the Mission “to get our bearings.” His dad Nick was a dishwasher at Nob Hill hotels, including the Fairmont and the Mark Hopkins. “My mother was a garment worker,” he says. “Dad quickly realized he had to go into business for himself.”
The family opened one, then another, small corner grocery store. Young Vas went to work there as kid and grew up stocking shelves and checking out customers while his dad made sandwiches. “We worked every Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s Day for 15 years,” he says. “For me, it was my baptism in retail. Some people call it a sacrifice, but not me. The stores, the business, the customers were my social glue, my family. I didn’t get a chance to party much, and I can’t say it was a pleasant experience. But it was a learning experience.”
So were four years at UC Berkeley, where he graduated with a degree in architecture. “But the practice was not to my liking,” he acknowledges. “And frankly, my mechanical skills were not all that good.”
He had a side job waiting tables in the ’80s at Stars, celebrity chef Jeremiah Tower’s once-glittering restaurant near City Hall. Remembers Kiniris: “I waited on people like Walter Cronkite and Mikhail Baryshnikov, and all the socialites and movers and shakers.”
He says he was first exposed to the finer things in life as an exchange student living with a prosperous German family. “Here I was, a blue-collar immigrant surviving day to day by extreme frugality and I was introduced to the extras, the intangibles of life, this joie de vive. Even now I still consider them my second family,” he says. “We all have many parents in our lives.”
•
In 1990, accustomed to living with no safety net, Kiniris and his wife, Wendy Nishimura Kiniris, plunged into retailing on their own with a small store at Post and Hyde in the Tenderloin, with drug dealers and prostitutes just outside their door. The rent: $500 a month. Their wares: contemporary furniture. The name: Zinc Details.
“We were credited with introducing modernism to San Francisco,” he says. “In those days, you were either old money or you had no money. We appealed to both. Our look was so fresh to the market, which had been dominated by Macy’s.”
From there they were thrust into the public arena. “We were both designers and highly edited curators,” he says. The couple was invited to set up a “store within a store” in Macy’s, created products for the Gap, and launched a wholesale business and private labeled to top retailers in Paris, London and Tokyo.
A recession brought them back to earth, which Kiniris now calls “a great opportunity, if you take advantage of it.” They moved upmarket, from the Tenderloin to Fillmore Street. “We looked at Union and Fillmore,” he says, “and Fillmore was coming up at the time.”
As the years passed, the Kinirises at one point had three Zinc Details stores in the neighborhood, with 20 employees, and he embedded himself as a passionate and engaged merchant. So when longtime Fillmore Merchants Association president Thomas Reynolds resigned in 2015, Kiniris stepped up to the plate. “Thomas left us a very good merchants association and his were very big shoes to fill,” he says.
•
Kiniris took some big steps in different directions. Using his social media skills, he expanded the association’s communications and membership. Pedaling on his electric bike, he integrated the small business owners on the street with representatives from the corporate and international brands that had been moving into the neighborhood. He reached out to merchants on lower Fillmore and in Japantown.
“My goal was to create a dialogue and potential collaboration among all groups,” he says, “and to help the big chain stores demonstrate good corporate behavior by engaging with the community in a meaningful way.”
Kiniris says he is proud the FMA has built relationships with many sectors of the community. “We have a strong relationship with District 2 supervisor Catherine Stefani and District 5 supervisor Dean Preston,” he says. Indeed, the supes handed him a certificate of honor when he announced he was stepping down from the FMA.
He has worked closely with the S.F. Police Department and the city’s top cops. Kiniris is a graduate of the SFPD’s community police academy, helped secure a two-officer foot patrol on Fillmore, and is co-chair of police chief Bill Scott’s small business advisory forum. Recently he helped organize a small business summit with all 10 captains of the the city’s police districts. “We had breakout sessions where each captain met with merchants in his district.” he says. “I realized the merchants don’t know what the police do, and vice versa.”
More ambitious and still a work-in-progress are partnerships between merchants with mega-companies including Google, Facebook, Uber and Spin, the city’s micro-mobility scooter renter. “We have to demonstrate how they can be true community partners,” Kiniris says. “They can’t sit in their ivory towers.” While many San Francisco streets remain dirty and littered, Kiniris has worked with cleanup groups like the city’s Department of Public Works, Together SF and Refuse Refuse.
During his years as Mr. Fillmore, Kiniris says he has sought to “reach across many aisles” to bring people together who can help Fillmore Street and other merchant corridors.
“The role of the merchants association is to provide three things to its members and the community: security, maintenance and marketing,” he says, repeating his frequent mantra.
•
Despite San Francisco’s well publicized woes, Kiniris is convinced the city — and especially the Fillmore — is on the verge of a rebirth, or “a regeneration,” as he calls it.
And not for the first time.
“It’s part of our history,” Kiniris says. “The Fillmore Merchants Association is the city’s oldest, formed 115 years ago after the 1906 earthquake. This neighborhood was the birthplace of the rebuilt city, and the Harlem of the West, and the Summer of Love. It was a hotbed of business opportunities with its big Jewish, Japanese and African American communities over the decades,” he says.
“It was diverse, an ethnic collaboration, and it is again time to work with many partners,” he says. “It’s the Phoenix rising.”
