News from the Heart & Soul of San Francisco
By ERICA REDER It’s 7:30 on a Tuesday evening, and nearly every seat in Dino’s Pizza at the corner of Fillmore and California is taken. Couples and families crowd the tables, sharing pizzas, draft beers and sodas. Three television screens broadcast the Tennessee-Vanderbilt basketball game, while mob movie stills and portraits of famous athletes stare…
[nggallery id=10] It didn’t take a cynic to question the need for another coffee shop and cafe on Fillmore Street — especially one in the exact same spot, at 2123 Fillmore, where Bittersweet and Sweet Inspiration and several others had tried and failed — and next door to recent arrival Citizen Cake, a superstar of…
BOOKS | KEN SAMUELS A customer walks into Browser Books on Fillmore and approaches the counter with a sly smile on his face. “Hey,” he says, “are you guys happy that Borders is closing in Union Square?” “I’m not happy for the people who lost their jobs,” I reply, “but it doesn’t surprise me.” I…
Ex-Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak might consider moving to the neighborhood, suggest our colleagues at the Bay Citizen, since the Egyptian government has a lovely clinker-brick mansion with a fascinating history sitting empty at 3001 Pacific Avenue. It formerly housed the Egyptian consulate in San Francisco.
Fillmore’s newest establishment — originally to be called Sweet Jane, but now just plain Jane — is open for business at 2123 Fillmore. And there’s nothing plain about it. This location has been home to many other sweet shops: most recently the Bittersweet chocolate cafe and earlier Sweet Inspiration and half a dozen others. But…
On January 3, Salvador Valesco was in his upholstery shop at 2108 Sutter Street — as he had been for 30 years — working a little, talking a lot, cracking jokes with passersby. But as the first week of the new year unfolded, his neighbors began to realize they hadn’t seen him for a few…
PHOTOGRAPHY | THOMAS REYNOLDS Singer James Brown may have been the hardest-working man in show business, but David Johnson is surely the hardest-working 84-year-old in the photography business. In recent months he’s had four major exhibitions — mostly photographs from the heyday of the Fillmore’s jazz era — including one in Atlanta and another at…
ARCHITECTURE | ERICA REDER Every year thousands of people visit a building designed by California’s most celebrated female architect, Julia Morgan. Some seek out her work by taking a tour of Hearst Castle or the Berkeley City Club. Others have incidental encounters while walking around the Mills College campus, swimming at UC Berkeley’s Hearst Pool…
By Don Langley The film “Bhutto,” which earned high praise at last year’s Sundance Film Festival, is now playing at several dozen theaters throughout the country. But local producer-director Duane Baughman says it was most important to him to bring his documentary home to the Clay Theater on Fillmore. He invited his Washington Street neighbors…
After 49 years, Fillmore Hardware closed its doors for the final time on the day after Christmas. Read more: “Fillmore Hardware closing”