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.
When I saw a golden crowned hummingbird up at Alta Plaza Park near the tennis courts, I was confused. I was unaware of any species that sports a golden crown. But then I watched as she dipped her bill into the long red tubular-shaped flowers adorning the bushes and witnessed the way the stamen pressed down on her head as she sipped nectar from the bottom of the flower. That was pollen on her head! It would travel with her to another flower, completing the plant’s sex act. I waited till she landed and took the shot above.
She’s actually a female Anna’s Hummingbird, the species that stays in San Francisco all year. Below is a male Anna’s I photographed at Lafayette Park last April. Note the vermillion, iridescent head. These little guys are amazing creatures, on so many levels, and they thrive right here in the neighborhood.
Photograph of Dino and his son Santino by Steve Maller
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 out from the walls.
But the newest decoration hangs from the balcony. It’s a blue blanket that proclaims: “BABY BOY.”
Owner Dino Stavrikikis struts among the diners, his photo-loaded iPhone at the ready. Customers gush over pictures of the month-old baby named Santino, while the proud father regales them with tales from the crib. “I really love talking about this story,” says Dino, who’s on a first name basis with nearly everyone in the neighborhood. “I talk about it 10 times a day.”
Santino Vasili Stavrikikis was born on January 22. But the story began a year and a half ago, when the 50-year-old bachelor set his sights on becoming a father.
“There wasn’t one specific day that it hit me and I said, ‘Okay, this is what I need to do,’ ” says Dino. “It was just at this point in my life — you know, you get a little older.”
When the idea of having a son took root, he turned to his customers for advice. “I don’t know what anyone does for a living, but everyone does something,” he says. “So I was kind of throwing out words here and there, and hoping someone would hear me and say, ‘This is where you need to go.’ ”
That moment occurred in August 2009 when friends of Dr. Carl Herbert, a fertility specialist and president of the Pacific Fertility Center, came to Dino’s for dinner. “I started talking about it,” Dino recalls. “They all just stopped eating and said, ‘We have the guy for you.’ ”
Dino admits he hadn’t envisioned using fertility technology. “I didn’t imagine this three years ago,” he says. “I mean, who knew about any of this stuff?” But living in San Francisco opened his eyes to new possibilities: “I saw a lot of gay couples doing this, and I said, ‘This is great!’ ”
The six-figure price tag was not a deterrent. “I figured I was blessed enough to be able to afford the process,” he says. “And which would I rather have: my son or a Ferrari? I’ll take my son over the car.”
Still, Dino admits he had a steep learning curve. “I didn’t know what a surrogate was, I didn’t know what an egg donor was,” he says. “I just kind of knew something about the process.”
And the options seemed overwhelming. He had to choose both an egg donor and a surrogate mother. “They do that for two reasons,” he says. “One is for legality, and one is for genetics. Because if the egg donor carries she could change her mind — and then you have a whole nightmare.”
The clinic suggested possible donor agencies and Dino researched each one, finally deciding on an agency that worked with both egg donors and carriers.
One choice took no deliberation. “I wanted a boy,” he says. And he wasn’t going to leave that up to chance. “It’s called spinning the sperm,” he says, and involves a centrifuge that separates X and Y sperm in a lab. “You pay extra for that,” he notes.
But other variables would prove beyond his control. “In January of 2010, within three days my egg donor and carrier fell apart,” says Dino. “I had to start the process all over, start the finances all over. But not once did I think it wasn’t going to happen.”
After losing two egg donors to failed tests, Dino met his best match yet. “Once I met her, I knew she was the right one,” he says of his third, and actual, egg donor. A combination of factors won him over. “I chose both the egg donor and carrier based on personality and looks,” he says. “They had baby pictures of themselves, so you look at genetics, you look at this, you look at that.”
Searching for a surrogate mother, Dino found the winning combination in a Southern California woman named Dusty Kenney. “We clicked right away,” he says.
Kenney agrees. “I feel really blessed that we found each other because we have such a good connection,” she says. Kenney has a daughter of her own, but she too was new to the world of surrogate pregnancies. “It had never occurred to me that people were surrogates for other people,” she says. Then she came across the possibility online. “As soon as I saw it, I knew I had to do it. I just thought what a cool thing to be able to do.”
She and Dino kept in close contact throughout her pregnancy, which resulted from the implantation of the donor’s egg fertilized by his sperm. “He would call and check on me probably every other day,” she says. “He would fly down all the time and hang out and he would cook me dinner. He was supportive through the whole process.”
Dino had planned to visit more often as Santino’s February 23 due date approached. “I was going to fly down there on the 15th of February and check into a hotel and just wait it out,” he says. But as it happened, everyone was caught off guard when Santino arrived a month early.
“I got the phone call on the 22nd at 5 in the morning,” Dino recalls. He was there when Santino made his appearance that afternoon at 5:18 at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Beverly Hills.
It completely changed Dino’s life. A man who says he had “never lived with anybody” acquired not one but two new roommates: his baby son and a live-in nanny. “She’s phenomenal,” he says of the nanny. “We’ve really gotten along, and we’re making it work.”
They weren’t so sure a month ago when Dino and the nanny brought Santino up from Los Angeles. “We got home at 6 o’clock on Thursday night,” he recalls, “and we just looked at each other like, ‘Now what?’ It forced us to get into fifth gear right away.”
Santino’s temperament makes things easier. “He’s really patient,” says Dino. “He’s a good sport.”
His surrogate mother agrees. “He just has such a calm, sweet personality,” says Kenney. “He doesn’t cry unless he’s hungry.” She has visited Dino and Santino since the birth, and expects to continue to make regular visits. “I imagine I’ll see them once a month,” she says.
Dino has given considerable thought to Kenney’s future relationship to Santino. “I tried to figure out a Greek name for her,” he says. “Zoila means the giver of life. When Santino gets a little bigger, he’s going to call her that.”
Kenney also has thought ahead. “I would imagine it would be like the role of an aunt,” she says. “I just want to be there for him. I think the more fans a child has when growing up the better.”
The egg donor has yet to meet Santino, but Dino expects that she will. “She lives in Florida, but she wanted to be involved as much as she could,” he says. “I told her, ‘Whenever you want you just fly out — whenever you feel ready to do it.’ ”
In the meantime, Santino gets plenty of attention. “Every day he gets two or three presents from around the world,” says Dino. “Everybody comes in and asks for him. It’s turned out, he’s not my son; I’m his father.”
Even those surprised by the news have been supportive. “I’ve got people that have known me for a long time that thought I was the biggest bachelor of all time, the biggest flirt,” he explains. “They say, ‘Dino, you committed to something!’ ”
And the story may have ripple effects. “I had two guys come up and tell me that their girlfriends are using me as an example for them to get married: ‘If Dino can commit, how come you can’t commit?’ ”
Those who have yet to meet Santino will have ample opportunity when they stop by for pizza. “I want to bring him more and more and more,” Dino says. “But he’s got to get a little bigger.”
The proud papa has baby pictures he’s happy to share.
Until then, a message painted on the restaurant windows announces to customers and passersby alike: “Santino has arrived.” Dino calls it a low-tech birth announcement. “I don’t know how to send an Internet whatever,” he says. “So the best way for me is to do everything like I’ve done and just put it in the window.”
Dino says he plans to take down the signs after Santino’s 40-day blessing, a Greek Orthodox rite that will take place in early March. And he’s already dreaming of Santino’s future. “He’ll definitely be working at Dino’s when he’s really young,” says Dino, “just kind of walking around and helping me out.”
For now, father and son see each other mainly outside of the restaurant. “I have to work,” says Dino, “but my schedule’s really flexible.”
The two have already created some memorable moments. “On Saturday, we hung out and watched The Godfather,” Dino says. In the film, Santino is the first-born son of New York Mafia boss Vito Corleone — and the name, which means “little saint” in Italian, stuck with Dino when he first saw The Godfather 35 years ago.
“Dino means ‘the sword,’ ” says Dino. “So it’s the sword and the little saint, which to me means we’re basically watching each other’s back.”
A GRANDMOTHER’S VIEW
Like mothers everywhere, Dino’s mother, Koula McCormick, acknowledges two primal yearnings: wanting her child to be happy and wanting a grandchild to properly spoil. So when both things happened — albeit in a somewhat unconventional way — she says she welcomed them with an open mind and an open heart.
She recounts how she learned she at last was going to become a grandmother:
Every mother wants her children to get married and have children. That’s what life is all about. So I wanted the same thing as a mother — and the years went by. But it’s something you don’t press. Some things have to come from the heart.
One day about a year and a half ago, Dino said, “Mom, I want to talk to you.” We have been very close. I went over and we had lunch.
He said, “Mom, I decided to do something, and I hope that you accept it and embrace it.”
So then he told me: “I’m going to proceed to have a baby the surrogate way.”
I was speechless. I thought for a minute and for a second, and I responded to him, “Whatever you decide is better for you, I love you, and I will embrace it.”
He said, “Mom, I want you to know one thing: I will be a good father, and I will raise my son the way you raised me.” What more can a mother want to hear?
I want to see my son put his arms around a woman and be happy. But he’s so happy with his son, it has made a different life for him. He adores the baby.
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 bakery.
Yet less than a month after opening, the simple but stylishly black and white new spot named Jane — the realized dream of local resident Amanda Michael — appears to be just what the neighborhood had been hungering for. Already customers are becoming fans and returning to bring their friends for a bite of lunch or to linger longer over cups and crumb-laden plates. And that’s just what Michael intended. (more…)
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 tell him I’ve been following the stories of Borders’ financial troubles in the newspapers and in Publishers Weekly. Borders was hit hard by the rise of online bookselling and was slow to respond to the challenge. In addition, a megastore in a megaspace like Union Square has a huge overhead that must be crippling in these tough times.
“I understand that,” he says, “but does it help you?” (more…)
The Egyptian flag still flies proudly at the former consulate at 3001 Pacific Avenue.
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 it never looked like this. Impeccably remodeled, it’s stylishly black and white, and the upstairs aerie now sports upholstered chairs. For now it’s sweets and coffee from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. But lunch is coming soon — and the all-day menu may be extended into the evenings later, once there’s beer and wine.
Owner Amanda Michael and her family — including daughter Jane — live just around the corner and intend to make this decidedly a neighborhood spot.
Neighbors check for the latest news posted on the door of the shop.
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 days. (more…)
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 the San Francisco International Airport. He’s featured in a new book, The Golden Decade, celebrating the circle of post-war photographers who studied with Ansel Adams at the California School of Fine Arts. He’s just returned from the screening of “Positive Negatives,” a new documentary on his photographic career, at the San Diego Black Film Festival. And he’s newly married for a second time.
“I can’t believe this is happening,” he says with the warm and easy smile of a man who realizes that fate is treating him kindly. “It’s been a long journey. You never know what life is going to bring, but sometimes it’s an opportunity.” (more…)
For much of her adult life, Julia Morgan lived at 2229 Divisadero Street.
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 or meditating at the San Francisco Zen Center.
It also happens closer to home. The prodigious Morgan designed at least 15 homes and other buildings in the neighborhood and remodeled several more. A closer look also reveals insights into her life and times.
Born in 1872, Morgan’s formative years coincided with the development of Pacific and Presidio Heights. While she enjoyed a comfortable childhood in Oakland, the new San Francisco neighborhoods were fast becoming a sought-after address.
The construction of cable car lines in the 1870s and 1880s added convenience to the area’s natural charms, and many of the city’s wealthy residents began building homes here. In 1887, the Chronicle labeled the area “one of the most desirable situations for residences to be found anywhere,” adding: “In no locality has there been more activity in the building of residences during the past six months.”
About the same time, Morgan was embarking on her path to becoming an architect. In 1890, she enrolled at UC Berkeley’s College of Engineering. Degree in hand, she left for Paris six years later, where she became the first woman to receive an architecture certificate from the prestigious Ecole des Beaux-Arts. The Chronicle noted the occasion, predicting that Morgan would “probably practice her profession in San Francisco.”
Morgan proved the prediction right when she returned home in 1902. She worked for a UC Berkeley architect briefly before striking out on her own. After taking the state certification exam in 1904, she achieved another historical distinction as the first American woman to head her own architecture firm.
Julia Morgan
In those first years, Morgan relied on connections to obtain commissions. Karen McNeill, a Julia Morgan scholar, says family and education helped secure Morgan’s first clients. “She got all of her work through word of mouth,” says McNeill, “and often there was a link to her family or to a women’s club or to her sorority. Things did extend from there, but usually there was some kind of network link.”
Through academic and professional ties to UC Berkeley, Morgan met her first high-profile patron: Phoebe Hearst. The philanthropist approached Morgan with a request for a country house in 1903, even before Morgan had established her San Francisco practice. Later that year, Susan Mills, president of Mills College and purported friend of Morgan’s mother, entrusted the fledgling architect with designing the campus bell tower and library.
Executing these projects with utmost competence, Morgan quickly acquired a good reputation. Dorothy Coblentz, an architect who worked for Morgan’s firm in the 1920s, confirmed Morgan’s ability to gain commissions on her own merit. “People kept coming to her,” said Coblentz in an interview for the Julia Morgan Architectural History Project. “Every job she did was satisfactory to clients.”
Connections would play a role in Morgan’s work in Pacific Heights. One of the earliest houses she designed in the area belonged to Aurora Stull, whose daughter had been a classmate of Morgan’s at UC Berkeley. Built in 1908, the house at 3377 Pacific Avenue demonstrates Morgan’s interest in the Arts and Crafts style. Emphasizing natural materials and forms, the movement gained popularity in turn-of-the-century California. Redwood shingles and large windows create harmony between the building and its location facing the Presidio, following Arts and Crafts principles.
Morgan’s aesthetic influences included many other styles, which she highlighted in response to clients’ requests. In 1916, she designed a Mediterranean-inspired building for the Katherine Delmar Burke School at 3065 Jackson Street, now home of San Francisco University High School. The same year, she designed a house at 3630 Jackson Street that incorporated Tudor elements. The client — dried fruit tycoon Abraham Rosenberg, typified Morgan’s illustrious patrons in the neighborhood. They included Reverend Bradford Leavitt, minister of the First Unitarian Church; Edwin Newhall, millionaire import-export businessman; and Alfred Holman, editor and owner of The Argonaut.
Despite her prominent clientele, Morgan kept a low profile. “She looked like a nobody,” said Coblentz, commenting on her boss’s diminutive figure and sensible dress. “She couldn’t have looked less distinguished.”
True to her discreet taste, Morgan’s own home was anything but ostentatious. In the 1920s she bought side-by-side Victorians at 2229 and 2231 Divisadero Street, which she remodeled into one property. She removed the top floor from the downhill home to allow more light into the apartments she created uphill. Otherwise, the buildings bear little external mark of her influence.
Belinda Taylor, author of the play “Becoming Julia Morgan,” says the property’s modesty reflected Morgan’s financial situation. “It was not a mansion,” Taylor says. “She had no illusions about being wealthy and about having wealth. She really never earned a lot of money herself.”
McNeill agrees. “She bought a house to provide for income,” says the scholar. “She rented out spaces.” McNeill says Morgan’s tenants were “almost always professional women — sometimes her employees, but not necessarily.” Morgan’s living arrangements reveal more than her financial situation: They also touch on what Taylor calls the “essential mystery” of the influential architect. “She never married and had no known love affairs,” says Taylor. “She was a pretty young woman; there was no reason.”
Speculation abounds about Morgan’s romantic situation. Coblentz thought Morgan simply worked too hard. “Nobody could lead a normal life working as she did,” Coblentz says. “She couldn’t have had any private life.”
Morgan’s niece disagreed. In an interview for the architectural history project, Morgan North said her aunt “just was not the type that was at all interested in men.”
Either way, the architect’s fierce privacy continues to intrigue people. “She did not give interviews. She did not write,” says playwright Taylor. “She’s a woman of mystery.”
Mysterious is one way to describe Morgan; superhuman is another. By the time she died in 1957, she had worked on more than 700 buildings. Reports suggest that she did so with minimal sleep and food. “Every architect who ever worked with her said the only problem with her was that they couldn’t live on Hershey bars and coffee, even though she did,” niece Flora North told the history project.
Dynamo and enigma: Both sides of Julia Morgan live on in the neighborhood.
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 and others he had met in his informal office — the Peet’s coffee shop at Sacramento and Fillmore Streets — to a showing there early in the new year. Baughman also bought out a San Diego theater at the end of January so his parents and their friends could see it in the city where he grew up. (more…)
