Anton Cura is bringing back the golden age of the neighborhood barbershop.
By Christine Lunde
WORKING ITS WAY into the local fabric, Attention to Detail Barber Gallery on Sutter Street may soon rival sports bars as the hippest place for men to fraternize. Flat screen TVs broadcasting sports and news, generous servings of beer and champagne — and, of course, stylish cuts and shaves — make the shop at 2180 Sutter a convenient congregating place for clients of all ages.
On one recent afternoon, owner Anton Cura saw his youngest client, a 3-year-old blonde boy, walk by. He waved. A group of women pushing strollers yelled into the shop for stylist Ken El-Armin and he dashed out to say hello. The clientele is mostly male, and on this particular day friends are waiting, browsing through magazines, watching television and joining the conversation. The space is sleek and open, yet intimate enough to encourage conversation.
Cura is bringing back the golden age of the neighborhood barbershop. But Attention to Detail, which opened last year, is the spruced-up post-dot-com version. It doesn’t look like a traditional barbershop because it’s not; it’s a hybrid between a place to get a haircut and a high-end salon. (more…)
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton with Markos and Eleni Tsakopoulos-Kounalakis
By Markos Kounalakis
BUDAPEST, Hungary — Many of my Saturdays used to start out with a saunter down Fillmore Street for an early morning cup of coffee while the rest of my family was still in bed.
Budapest is also a coffeehouse city, but more famed for the conversations and art that grew out of that culture than the coffee in the cups.
It has been three years since we left San Francisco and moved to a country that only a generation ago was behind the Iron Curtain. As I look outside my office here, I see the Statue of Liberty — not the one in New York harbor, but the one atop Gellert Hill in Budapest, erected by the Soviets after World War II. From her office window, my wife looks toward a Soviet monument in the middle of Szabadsag ter — Freedom Square — a golden star topping the prominent stone memorial.
From our apartment in Pacific Heights, we looked out on the bay, the sailboats and the container ships crossing under the Golden Gate Bridge. President Obama marveled at the view during the couple of times he visited our home before assuming office. He later appointed my wife Eleni Tsakopoulos-Kounalakis as the U.S. Ambassador to the Republic of Hungary — a complex and demanding job that brought our family to beautiful Budapest. (more…)
Photograph of the Piano Care Co. at 2011 Divisadero by Daniel Bahmani
By Marjorie Leet Ford
THE SHOP’S carved wooden front door — both rough-hewn and fancy — quietly announces a portal to another time, when the ancient art of piano building was still going strong, and the world was as full of pianos as it now is of cars. The piano was the heart of the family; there were so many that some cities passed laws against playing a piano near an open window. Then came the radio and the gramophone, providing instant music.
But the romance lingers. Having the word “piano” in a title still wins hearts. Witness Thad Carhart’s high-selling novel The Piano Shop on the Left Bank; Jane Campion’s popular film The Piano and The Pianist, which became an Oscar winner for its director, Roman Polanski.
Romance may be part of the pleasure in opening the front door and stepping into the Piano Care Co. at 2011 Divisadero Street, just a few steps north of California. (more…)
Photograph of Ann and Gordon Getty’s living room by Lisa Romerein
DESIGN | DIANE DORRANS SAEKS
Twenty years ago, interior designer Ann Getty began a large-scale redecoration of the Pacific Heights residence where she lives with her husband, Gordon, a composer. It was built in 1906 to a classic design by architect Willis Polk and offers an entry hall with collections as opulent as any London museum. The Gettys, generous philanthropists, often entertain an international retinue of cultural and political figures.
At auctions in New York and London, Ann Getty acquired furniture from the great English country houses, including Badminton House and Ditchley Park. Unable to collect French antiques — she says the Getty Museum was in an acquisition phase, and even her budget was not large enough to bid against the family museum — she gathered George II gilded chairs, dramatic Anglo-Indian beds inlaid with mother-of-pearl and porcelain and ormolu objets.
“I love the heft and boldness of English antiques,” says Getty, who is also a champion of art education.
In Paris she scooped up vivid 18th-century silk brocades for pillows. From the estate of dancer Rudolf Nureyev she acquired velvet patchwork textiles, which she made into dramatic curtains.
The renovation, plus the addition of a new wing when the Gettys acquired the house next door, took place over a decade.
“This is the ornate look I love for myself, but I don’t impose it on my clients,” she says. “My work is not all over-the-top design. For clients, I want rooms that reflect their style.”
Even among this grandeur, there are quiet corners for an afternoon tête-à-tête overlooking the Palace of Fine Arts.
Her gracious rooms, with tufted sofas and chairs covered in plum-colored velvets and golden silks, are at once exotic, dazzling and comfortable. Party guests can often be found sprawled on silken sofas, and friends curl up to sip Champagne on chairs covered with luscious Venetian hand-woven silk velvets.
A quartet of Canaletto paintings hovers above a gilded console table in the music room, a theatrical stage for family celebrations. A Sèvres porcelain table commissioned by Napoleon (its pair is installed in Buckingham Palace) stands in a corner. Gilded benches and tables from Spencer House, plus a silk-upholstered glass chair with the look of carved crystal, all demonstrate Getty’s original eye.
While Ann Getty can design entirely practical rooms for young families, the rooms in her own home glow with baroque splendor. Blossoms, birds and butterflies painted on pale blue Chinese silk panels glimmer on the walls of a bedroom.
“Designing is a minor art, but such a pretty one,” says Getty as she glances around her living room. “I love to create interiors that please the eye. Beauty can be so uplifting.”
Ann Getty Interior Style by Diane Dorrans Saeks, published by Rizzoli, is available at Browser Books, 2195 Fillmore. More on the author’s design blog, The Style Saloniste.
Photographs of Spice Ace at 1821 Steiner by Daniel Bahmani
By CHRISTINE LUNDE
On their honeymoon in Italy, neighborhood residents Olivia Dillan and Ben Balzer floated by Marco Polo’s house on a canal in Venice, which inspired Dillan to leave the tech industry behind.
Then serendipity took charge. Three weeks after Dillan and Balzer decided to start a shop of their own, the space at 1821 Steiner Street between Bush and Sutter, former home to a bridal shop, became available. And now Spice Ace, their clean white store with marble countertops and a bejeweled chandelier, has opened, offering local shoppers 250 herbs, spices and blends from around the world.
“I’d never want to open a store anywhere else,” says Dillan as she floats around the store, eagerly showing off salts and herbs in white-topped glass jars. “This is my home and my favorite neighborhood.”
The triangular Cyprus flake salt looks like a new-fallen snowflake; Dillan recommends a pinch to perk up a slice of fresh tomato. “The fleur de sel was harvested from salt ponds in France,” she says. “All you need is a little bit and — pop!”
From truffle to rosemary, lavender and Himalayan pink salt, the new shop offers a world of nonprocessed spices. The herbs come from organic or sustainable farming practices.
Dillan and Balzer have traveled the globe learning about spices and how they are used in their native lands. Dillan wants to help customers develop their own blends, and hopes eventually to host blending seminars at the store.
Balzer and Dillan’s tastes differ, although they both agree on quality. Balzer prefers peppers and chilies — especially the smoked ones. They house an extensive chili collection, including whole red savina habaneros, one of the hottest peppers on earth.
Spice Ace offers white, red, pink, green and four types of whole black peppercorns — along with Balzer’s favorite brand of pepper crushers, William Bounds.
“The beauty of William Bounds is that they crush the pepper versus grind it,” he says. “The wheel doesn’t clog. These are my favorite crushers and we’re offering a variety to our customers.”
Also on Spice Ace shelves: chervil, commonly used in herbs de Provence, along with smoked pasilla de Oaxaca, a somewhat fruitier chile, six different Himalayan salts and a tart, lemony sumac from Turkey. Other offerings include infused sugars, but only one ginger candy. And forget chocolate. Balzer suggests adding ground cardamom to ice cream.
If it’s paprika you’re after, you’ll have to ask. It’s hidden away in drawers because it loses its flavor and color when touched by light.
“Not all spices are aromatic, but they come alive in oil or with heat,” Dillan says. “I love to cook, and using fantastic spices makes it better. I want to give people the small joys and happiness I get from using good spices.”
ON A CHARMING block of Sutter Street that narrowly missed the wrecking ball of redevelopment 50 years ago, Sidney Hair Care sits among Victorian homes, small shops and the Macedonia Baptist Church.
Sidney, the professional name of Betty Jean Macklin, has cared for clients of all races and walks of life at this shop since 1988. Even before then, she was cutting, perming, relaxing and coloring hair in salons nearby, and gone by, including Jose La Crosby, Patrick’s Barber Shop, Darrnell’s and Ivory’s.
“I am part of a 60-year tradition in this very location as an African American owned and operated hair salon,” she says. “And there aren’t too many of us left in this town who can say that.” (more…)
Longtime local resident John Gaul and (below) his new feline friend.
By BARBARA KATE REPA
FOR MANY YEARS, John Gaul has been a fixture on Fillmore. Strolling and bussing through the neighborhood, he has been a dapper presence, doling out advice and good cheer along the way.
But just lately, his gait has slowed. He is getting about now with the help of a walker since he fell on the stairs a couple of months ago while giving one of his regular tours at the Haas-Lilienthal House on Franklin Street. And then he lost a dear and longtime live-in companion: a tabby cat named Felix. But his spirit remains strong, and he’s still up for a new challenge.
“I’m going through what people my age go through — a seismic shift, a breakdown of the body,” says Gaul, who will turn 87 in November. “But I have to go on. And I wanted something that needed someone to take care of it.”
But Gaul’s attempts to adopt a new feline friend were unsuccessful at Animal Care and Control, the San Francisco SPCA and Pets Unlimited — all of which rejected him because of his age, or his aloneness, or his limited funds.
By most lights, the rejections are hard to imagine. Gaul, who lives at the John F. Kennedy Towers public housing complex on Sacramento Street, just off Fillmore, is a vibrant being — full of good conversation and astute observation.
As he gets about the city, he’s always dressed to the nines, nattily attired on a recent day in a red tie, blue striped shirt, vest with double watch chain and herringbone jacket, his white beard impeccably groomed.
And then there’s the voice — a deliberate, old-fashioned oratorical cadence inspired by the radio days of the 1940s and nourished by listening daily to the announcers on the local classical station. “I like the alto voices and the counter tenor,” he says. “Somewhere in between; that’s where I want to be.”
So he works at it, doing daily voice exercises to perfect his pitch and studied delivery inspired by the Dale Carnegie training he emulates. But with Felix gone, there was no one to listen. “I wake up in the morning and there’s no living thing around,” he says. “I miss having a cat to pet.”
After he was repeatedly rejected by the likeliest animal shelters, a friend found a hopeful lead: Give Me Shelter Cat Rescue, a nonprofit group dedicated to finding homes for adult and senior cats — those most often euthanized in shelters. Its founder, Lana Bajsel, listened to a few details about Gaul’s situation and immediately homed in on a few potential prospects for him. She agreed to bring them to Give Me Shelter’s adoption center at the Petco on Sloat Avenue so they could all suss out one another.
On the appointed Sunday afternoon, she arrived pushing a shopping cart laden with three carriers, accompanied by loud choruses of meows from within.
“It was a circus all the way over here,” she announced, beckoning Gaul inside to meet her charges.
First out of the carrier was Brenda. As Bajsel extolled the 4-year-old female cat’s virtues — she had already been spayed, vaccinated, microchipped and tested for various diseases — Brenda let out a powerful hiss and swatted at Gaul’s extended hand.
Next up was Gypsy, another tabby with a small bald spot who nuzzled Gaul at once; and Buddy, a larger black and white fluffy male with a special fondness for Fancy Feast. Those two might as well not have bothered making the trip.
“That’s the one that appeals to me,” declared Gaul, eyeing Brenda. “Those markings. And the size; I’m in a small unit in city housing.”
“Ah, you like the spitfires,” Bajsel said, nodding knowingly.
Before they parted ways, Gaul had loaded Brenda in her carrier onto his walker, ready to head for home.
“She’s a beautiful animal: a tabby — I’m partial to them — with topaz eyes and white boots,” he explains to a visitor a week later. “And something seemed noble about her from the very beginning — the yowling, the hissing, the scratching. When I saw her, I thought: ‘I wonder what she’s protecting and how I could appeal to that.’ And I also thought: ‘Maybe I can do this. I want that challenge,’ ” he says. “The others thought she wasn’t adoptable. But I see something there. I just do.”
Bajsel later gives some details about Brenda’s challenging past: She came in to Animal Care and Control as a stray and was put on the list for disposition — a polite term for “kill” — after scratching a volunteer.
But Bajsel doesn’t blame the cat.
“Volunteers at Animal Care and Control are not always cat savvy. I’ve seen them, talking away on their iPhones when they’re supposed to be observing and handling the animals,” she says. “But if anyone gets scratched or bitten, the animal is automatically disposed of.”
Once she was ensconced in her new home with Gaul, however, Brenda slowly began to get a little friendlier. She also got a new name: Ariadne.
“In Greek mythology, Ariadne was stranded on an island in the Aegean Sea and left alone until she was found by the god Dionysus,” Gaul says. “It’s the story of abandonment and rescue — just like this one. I’ll call her Ari for short. She’s the perfect cat for me.”
While Ariadne’s not talking, the feeling seems to be mutual. She’s taken to curling just below Gaul’s knees as he naps in the afternoon. And recently, she swatted playfully at a chain he was putting on his wrist.
“She watches everything I do,” says Gaul. “Old men get up at night — and she follows me.” Then, for Ariadne, it’s back to the basket filled with fabric at the back of a closet that she claimed early on as her personal respite.
In her most accommodating moments, Ariadne will walk back and forth just under Gaul’s hand so that he can stroke her from nose to tail. “I get a delightful sense of touch — and I need that,” he says. “And even her yowling appeals to my aural sense.”
She’s yowling less frequently now, though. “We get along,” says Gaul.
He credits past experiences for his current pluck. For a decade, he conducted tours of the Palace of Fine Arts, designed by the legendary architect Bernard Maybeck for the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition. It was there that he connected with Maybeck’s daughter-in-law, Jacomena. The two became so close they talked at 9 o’clock every morning until she died a few years ago at age 95. He recalls her final words in their last telephone conversation: “I’m like a small child standing on the edge of the world. I’m ready to step off now.”
Gaul credits the friendship with an awakening. “Jacomena was a coach of sorts,” he says. “Through her, I began to know what Bernard Maybeck was about. And that fits in with honoring certain ideas, no matter how hard they are. I walked into that world, and I couldn’t have been more lucky.”
The friendship fueled Gaul’s interest in the Swedenborgian Church at Lyon and Washington Streets, which Maybeck helped design. He was a driving force behind getting the Swedenborgian declared a National Historic Landmark in 2004.
His last docenting gig was at the Haas-Lilienthal House, which he refers to as “that stately Victorian home,” where he took the life-changing tumble down the stairs.
Still, he’s not letting the fall keep him down. “If you don’t take on life, you’ll be a victim,” he says. “I won’t be that. What else do I have to do? Sit and feel sorry for myself? I won’t do that, either.
“And when I look back, I think life is good,” says Gaul, who adds he takes no medications and never has. “When you get old, you begin to see that life is winding down. Is it sad? No — not if I decide it’s not.”
Gaul says he now treasures his relationships with others more closely, particularly younger people he can help puzzle through their problems. He finds them serendipitously: on the bus, at the laundromat, in the Safeway.
But there’s nothing quite like a cat.
“This limerick I wrote sums it all up,” he says. “I call it ‘Lonely Old Man.’ ”
There was an old man, all alone
Who remarked, “I’m beginning to groan.”
Give Me Shelter heard that
And provided a cat
Which did quiet that lonely man’s groan.
NEIGHBORHOOD RESIDENT and fencing champion Alexander Massialas is realizing a dream — and continuing a family legacy — by competing in the summer Olympics in London.
His father and coach, Greg Massialas, also fenced in the 1984 and 1988 Olympic Games and qualified for the 1980 games in Moscow, which the U.S. boycotted.
“It’s a really special bond we have, so having my dad here at the Olympic village is kind of incredible, because this is something he’s gone through himself as an athlete,” Alex said in an interview from London shortly before the games began. “Walking through the opening ceremonies, it’s going to be something I probably won’t even have words for.”
Two days later, there he was — right at the front when Team USA marched in during the opening ceremonies. (more…)
Photograph of Mimi Lawrence by M. Christine Torrington
By Marjorie Leet Ford
MIMI LAWRENCE ALWAYS wanted to have her own store.
“I started in retail when I was six,” she says, recalling her childhood in New Jersey. “I loaded an ice chest of soda pop into a little rowboat with a one-and-a-half horsepower motor, like an eggbeater, and rode around the harbor selling pop to people in sailboats.”
Years later, she worked for Lord & Taylor in New York, then for Joseph Magnin in San Francisco. She especially loved J. Magnin because it bravely broke the rules.
“At that time the only lingerie you could get was black, white or cream,” Lawrence says. “Suddenly a runway show had shortie nightgowns in orange, green, and purple. People were shocked!”
Twenty-six years ago, she opened her dream store — Mimi’s, on Union Street near Fillmore. To stock it, she says, she searched far and wide to find fashions that were comfortable and practical, great for travel — and “a little adventurous.” (more…)
Photograph of Kim Nalley and her new daughter Lydia by Kathi O’Leary
By Pamela Feinsilber
IF THE FILLMORE were a university, rather than a school of hard knocks, jazz singer Kim Nalley would long ago have been awarded an honorary doctorate. Though she lives with husband Mike Lewis and their new baby girl Lydia in the saddle between Nob Hill and Russian Hill, looking out on the Golden Gate Bridge, the Fillmore considers her one of its own.
And the feeling is mutual.
“The Fillmore is my home away from home,” Nalley says. “I cut my eye teeth in the Fillmore.”
She got her start on Fillmore Street in the early ’90s singing at Harry’s Bar, the Fillmore Grill and the Alta Plaza Bar & Grill. It was during those gigs that she started claiming an ever-widening circle of fans. Since then, she’s performed around the world as a solo artist, with her band — even, for a few years, as the performer-owner of the Jazz at Pearl’s club in North Beach.
Nalley has been appearing regularly at the Fillmore Jazz Festival for a decade. This year she’s the jazz artist in residence, closing both days of the festival on the California Street stage. (more…)
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.
