Photograph of Kristen van Diggelen, creator of vanIvey Ceramics, by Dana Harel
WHEN SHE MOVED to the neighborhood six years ago, Kristen van Diggelen was an aspiring art student who had her sights set on a career as a painter.
One day she wandered into Cottage Industry, the eclectic emporium at 2328 Fillmore, seeking inspiration. But she found far more. The building, with two street-level storefronts and four flats above, is one of the more artistically historic structures in the city, having been home to many of the Bay Area’s best-known artists and poets of the Beat generation in the 1950s and ’60s.
She found not only subjects to paint and an artistic legacy, but also an apartment and a studio — and even an opportunity to be something of a saloniste for a couple of years in one of the vacant shops, where she held monthly gatherings to show her work and that of other emerging artists.
She found opportunities she was seeking and some she never dreamed of. But like many artistic pursuits, they didn’t pay very well. So after she graduated from the San Francisco Art Institute with a master of fine arts degree, she began teaching a high school ceramics class at Cornerstone Academy in 2010.
“Ceramics was one of the highlights of my arts education,” she says, “but I went to graduate school on a painting scholarship, so I felt like everything else had to take a back seat.”
Then when she found herself around clay again, her old flame flickered anew. (more…)
SHE CAME TO California from Paris, Texas, and worked for the telephone company in Los Angeles for many years. But it was only when Ruth Garland Dewson moved north to San Francisco and opened a hat shop on Fillmore Street that she found her true home.
She ran Mrs. Dewson’s Hats at 2050 Fillmore for four decades, closing only reluctantly last year at the end of April. She had already moved herself into AgeSong, a home for seniors in Hayes Valley. Vigorous and opinionated until the end, she died early on Monday morning, October 28, soon after being taken to Kaiser Permanente Hospital, just a few blocks from Fillmore. She was 74.
Ruth Dewson gave full meaning to the phrase larger than life. A full-throated statuesque black woman — and proud of it — she was not shy about claiming her place in the forefront of San Francisco’s parade of colorful personalities. Former Mayor Willie Brown was a walking billboard for her hat shop. And her final Christmas card included her picture with a beaming President Obama.
“I’m not known for not knowing the right people,” she said in an interview a few months ago, recalling how she started the Fillmore Jazz Festival and then got her friends in City Hall to put a parking lot on California Street. She called herself the Mayor of Fillmore Street, and so did many others.
“Fillmore Street for me has been a wonderful, wonderful thing,” she said. “I just can’t tell you how much I have enjoyed Fillmore.”
Julie and Mark Swenson are part of a neighborhood photography project.
PHOTOGRAPHY | Sheila McLaughlin
I had a problem: I didn’t know where to borrow a cup of sugar.
I’m an artist who has lived in the same flat in the neighborhood for 20 years, but I hardly knew any of my neighbors.
Those who lived above had moved away. Same for those next door, across the street and around the corner. I saw some of the neighbors who remain; I looked into their windows; I parked my car in front of their homes. But to see them isn’t to know them.
Camera in hand, I set out to change that. Earlier this year, I began photographing the people in my immediate neighborhood in an attempt to weave together a community through photography. The conceit was simple: I approached people on the street and asked to come into their homes and photograph them.
With surprisingly little hesitation, they’ve said yes. It turns out that I am not alone: Living in a city surrounded by people is isolating for many. We are crammed up against each other by concrete, but might as well have rivers and mountains between us.
My project documenting — and attempting to change — this shared experience is called simply “Neighbors.”
The Rolling Pin — formerly the Donut Hole — at Fillmore and California.
FIRST PERSON | RONALD HOBBS
Aunt Beebee — Bertha — and I were no kin at all. She was “that nice old colored woman” who worked at the Donut Hole. Her niece, Bettye, called her Aunt Beebee. It caught on with us regulars. The joint must have served 500 cups of joe a day and a couple of thousand donuts. But for all of the in-and-outers, only a few of us knew her secret name.
Bettye was 300 pounds of a scorching-tongued negress who worked graveyard. There was no need for a bouncer at the Donut Hole on her shift. Besides, in the back room the bakers, Buck and Chuck, packed some serious heat.
We came bleary-eyed and loud after the clubs closed. It was sugar time. Sugar and caffeine not so discreetly spiked with Korbel brandy. Bettye fussed over us like we were her own children, as if we were the little crosses, cable cars and bridges on her charm bracelet.
The versatile and iconic singer Linda Ronstadt has mostly kept a low profile since moving back to San Francisco from her native Arizona about eight years ago.
But all that changed recently with a huge media blitz touting her new book, Simple Dreams: A Musical Memoir. Her appearances these days are made more poignant by the recent revelation that Parkinson’s disease has stilled Ronstadt’s searing singing voice.
She now maneuvers mostly unrecognized throughout the neighborhood: buying her “sensible shoes” at Crosswalk on Fillmore, dining with friends at A-16 or taking walks through the Presidio, sometimes aided by hand canes.
That easy anonymity wasn’t possible back in the day when she ruled the music world with her belting voice and siren-shy demeanor, innocent dark eyes and pouty lips, all hoop earrings and prairie skirts. “That was my ’70s persona,” she told a local crowd recently at a City Arts & Lectures interview. “We were all hippies then.”
Ronstadt lived in Los Angeles at the time, but claims she found the place “mentally exhausting.” So in 1987, she bought the four-level house at 2518 Jackson, overlooking Alta Plaza Park, with its seven bedrooms, music room and sweeping views of the bay. She promptly painted it a controversial shade of lavender and outfitted it with the Victorian decor that’s close to her heart.
And she got to know some of the neighbors.
“She wandered into the Swedenborgian church one day and I asked her if she wanted to join the choir,” recalls Garrett Collins, who then served as the musical director of the historic church at the corner of Lyon and Washington. He asked Ronstadt to audition first, just as he did any other choir member.
“I found out she did not read music, so I offered to give her private lessons on how to do it,” says Collins, who says their time together helped forge a friendship between them.
“She was musically very disciplined — not pompous, not at all what you’d think of as a big star,” he says, fondly recalling the singer’s big easy laugh and the duet of “White Christmas” they performed together for a fundraiser at the Waldorf School. “She was focusing on the two children she had adopted during those years, Mary Clementine and Carlos, and jealously guarding their privacy.”
Ronstadt sold the purple Victorian in 1997 — it was listed for $5.85 million — and moved back to Tucson to be closer to family. But she came back to San Francisco again in 2005, craving its open-minded culture.
She says she took pains to make sure Simple Dreams was not a “kiss and tell” book. It isn’t. She makes scant mention of her past romantic involvements — including several years with Gov. Jerry Brown, who also lived in the neighborhood for a time, when she became known as the First Lady of California. She concentrates instead on the Southern California music scene during the 1960s and ’70s, during which she was dubbed the Queen of Rock, a title she says now makes her cringe.
She’ll likely keep San Francisco her primary residence rather than return to Tucson, where she still maintains another home. “There’s too much cactus there,” she says. “It can make your tires flat.”
Photograph of John Gaul and his friend Ari by Jose Guadalupe Villalobos Jr.
By BARBARA KATE REPA
IT’S BEEN A YEAR since neighborhood resident John Gaul went looking for a friend and adopted a feisty feline from a cat rescue group, Give Me Shelter. But the dapper octogenarian still gets stopped on the bus, in the grocery store or pushing his walker down Fillmore and asked by friends and even total strangers: “How’s the cat?”
Gaul basks in the attention, and is always happy to give details on how he and Ari the cat have given one another new life.
“We’re just ‘it’ for one another,” he says. “That unhappy shelter cat became a happy house cat. And I’m not waking up alone. I need something that needs me. She does. And it works beautifully. She’s the best companion I could have — and I think she feels that way about me, too.”
Gaul got a star turn last fall as the featured speaker at Give Me Shelter’s annual fundraiser. His speech, “How to Adopt a Difficult Cat” — delivered with gusto and without notes — included a limerick written especially for the occasion. He hopes to do more speaking on the topic.
Ari, too, has been transformed — into a loving creature. She now purrs as she sleeps beside him in bed at night, her head near his face, “looking rather like a meatloaf,” he says. She often lies down in front of the door when he gets ready to leave their apartment, until he reassures her he’ll come right back.
When Ari took up residence, Gaul’s first act was to ask his caretaker to put her cage away where she wouldn’t see it. “Confinement would not be in her life,” he says.
But before their friendship became fully forged, the two had some work to do on each other.
“She had to learn to like people — anybody at all,” says Gaul.
This was a bit easier than it sounds, as he quickly learned that the way to Ari’s heart was directly through her stomach. He put out her favorite wet food in her preferred flavors of salmon, tuna or turkey — never beef — warmed a bit in the microwave. As she ate, he would also warm her to the human touch, gently petting her from the top of the head to the base of her tail. She had let it known early on that she didn’t like her tail touched.
These days, Ari meows regularly to demand petting sessions — tail included — and often jumps on Gaul’s lap and affectionately nibbles his beard.
Then there was the matter of grooming.
“I was sitting one day early on doing a crossword puzzle when I noticed Ari had started to resemble a ratty old coat from a thrift store,” he says. Unlike most cats, who innately seem to be fastidious, Ari did not bother to groom herself. So Gaul tried to do it for her with a grooming brush. The first try didn’t go over well. She scratched him, drawing blood.
“I said, ‘Old girl, you’re not going to get away with this,’ ” he says, and brushed her completely. After a proper interval of feline pouting in the closet just to emphasize who was in charge, Ari emerged a changed cat. “Now, she grooms herself,” he says. “In fact, her new motto is: ‘When in doubt, wash.’ ”
The two also had to learn how to play together.
Gaul first tried to tempt Ari with a button on a string; she gave it one desultory swat. Other toys seemed to annoy her. She actively hated the wand with the feathers on the end.
“I had to learn her definition of play,” Gaul says. “She was going to teach me.”
His first lesson came one day as he was getting ready to floss his teeth, poised at the bathroom mirror. Ari hopped into the tub, peeked out, then took off across the apartment like a shot. Turns out, her favorite game is hide and seek. “Her play is very physical — more like a tiger in the jungle. What fun to learn,” Gaul says.
“I’m assuming shelter cats have had little time or attention from people, so you have to observe them and draw them out from fearfulness to feeling safe,” he says.
The story of the adoption seemed like a relatively innocuous feel-good tale when it ran in the New Fillmore. But it rocked many readers by tapping into pet politics, highlighting the fact that animal shelters and rescue organizations such as Animal Care and Control, Pets Unlimited and Give Me Shelter sometimes work at jealous cross-purposes, competing for supporters and donations, and that some refuse to adopt to older people who might not outlive their pets.
It also evoked some online responses that seemed fueled mostly by mean-spiritedness, such as this one: “A great match for a seemingly articulate and dapper man who is pretty much just another SRO-living semi-homeless guy who won’t be able to afford vet care in the future or will die in a few years, leaving the cat to be placed back in ACC again, furthering its fear and distrust.”
Gaul says he wasn’t bothered by the naysayers, who were far outnumbered by the wellwishers. But that posting did give him pause.
“The old man will just die soon anyway? That comment tells more about the writer than it does about me,” he says. Gaul emphasizes that Lana Bajsel, the founder of Give Me Shelter, has assured him the organization will cover any vet costs Ari might incur. And should Gaul, who will be 88 in November, predecease the cat, who’s 5ish, Give Me Shelter has promised to “rehome” her.
“Old people need companionship,” he says. “And so do rescue cats.”
On the Bosporus, the historic waterway where Europe meets Asia.
FILLMORE ABROAD | Dan Max
For 20 years I’ve been making regular trips to Turkey from my flat above Fillmore Street. During a month-long visit to Istanbul this summer, I experienced a perfect afternoon when I met up with Berk Kinalilar, the owner of the neighborhood’s Troya restaurant and a native Turk.
Troya, at 2125 Fillmore, has become well known in the year it has been open for successfully creating the authentic and refined flavors of Turkish cuisine. People are loving it, and I’ve become a regular. Before my trip last year, Berk gave me a list of restaurants to try in Istanbul. This year, it turned out he was going home to see his mother and father while I was there. He suggested we get together.
When I called him from my hotel, Berk announced that his father, Engin, had invited us to join him for lunch, but that it would require a bit of traveling. I knew that would add some extra excitement. (more…)
Jesse Kay-Rugen from Glaze teamed up with Toni and Sheila Young of Bumzy’s.
WHEN THE OWNERS of Glaze — the new Seattle-style teriyaki grill on the corner of Fillmore and Pine — were planning their menu, they knew they wanted to keep things as fresh and local as possible.
Much of their planning and interviewing had been done at Fraiche, the all-natural yogurt shop down the block, which became their headquarters while the Glaze space was under renovation. And they made it a point to walk up and down Fillmore to meet their neighbors.
When Glaze opened in April, they offered dessert bars made out in the Sunset District. But they kept thinking about Bumzy’s, the cookie shop down in the Fillmore Jazz District operated by the mother-daughter team of Sheila and Toni Young.
Now they’ve struck up a business relationship, and three kinds of Bumzy’s cookies are delivered up the street every morning, making up the entire dessert menu at Glaze.
“We thought it was a good thing to support the Fillmore community,” said Glaze manager Jesse Kay-Rugen. “And once we got to know Sheila and Toni, it seemed like a no-brainer. In addition to having a great product, they’re also great women who are so involved in the community.”
He added: “It’s a bonus we can tell people to go four blocks down the street and visit their shop.”
Three kinds of Bumzy’s homemade and handmade cookies were added to the menu on July 24: peanut butter, oatmeal raisin and their signature chocolate chip cookie. The next night, Sheila and Toni Young showed up in their chef’s whites to offer samples on a silver platter.
“That was such a blast,” Toni Young said a few days later. “It gave us a chance to see and meet a lot of customers who came in for dinner.”
She remembered when Glaze owners Kay-Rugen and Ian Richardson first came walking in the door of her shop, just as she was taking a batch out of the oven. They bought a box of assorted cookies.
“They loved our cookies, so we started a conversation on what it would take to work together,” she said. “We share the same philosophy of fresh and locally sourced ingredients, so it seemed like a great fit. It was a mutual admiration society.”
Photograph of James Moore (center) and friends by Paul Dunn
By Barbara Kate Repa
IT’S BEEN FOUR YEARS since James Moore retired from his post at the express line at Mollie Stone’s. He seems much the same as the day he left — the same ready smile, the same bass blurt of a laugh, even the same gallant manner. “Let me buy you a coffee,” he says. “I don’t like to let women pay for anything.”
He stops by the Starbucks outpost at the entry to the store now and then. Nearly every shopper who passes by extends a greeting, a high five or a hug — sometimes all three. And he keeps up the familiar patter he perfected with customers passing in and out of his line back in the day.
“I was facing the stereotype that all women over 70 look like that picture on the See’s candy box,” laments San Francisco author Barbara Rose Brooker.
That led Brooker to write The Viagra Diaries, a novel chronicling the life and times of Anny Applebaum, an older woman pursuing a writing career, financial independence and undying love — after divorcing her husband when she discovered Viagra in his pocket clearly intended for extramarital escapades.
While not every detail is strictly autobiographical, a painful number come directly from life imitating art. Brooker says men she dated would offer backhand compliments: “You look good — for your age.” And some would make unsubtle age-related inquiries: “You sound like fun. How old are you?”
She was writing a column called “Boomer in the City” for JWeekly, a local Jewish paper, and looking for fodder about finding companionship and love. Her research extended to online dating, although the first service she contacted informed her it didn’t deal with people over age 50. Eventually, her cursor landed on JDate, a site for the Jewish singles community — with a home page peppered with pictures of smiling couples trumpeting their engagements or marriages.
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.
