News from the Heart & Soul of San Francisco
By Syed Ali Bud Martinez comes to work most Monday mornings at the garage at the Shell gas station at California and Steiner Streets, just as he has for more than 50 years — and more than a decade after he sold the station and vowed to retire. In 1952, he started working at the…
By Donna Gillespie THERE’S A PLACE in the neighborhood where you can hear a ripping yarn, linger for the latest news and rub shoulders with other locals such as maestro Michael Tilson Thomas, director Wayne Wang and a Getty or two — all while shipping holiday gifts to the relatives back home. In small towns…
“What should I see?” It’s the question the eminent film critic and historian David Thomson is asked most often — sometimes even as he walks his dog in Alta Plaza Park or runs errands on Fillmore Street. Now, more than three decades after he published his landmark Biographical Dictionary of Film, Thomson has responded to…
By MARJORIE LEET FORD Like Robin Hood and his band of merry men, Mary Risley and her crew of Food Runners take from those who have too much and give to those who don’t have enough. It all started when she realized she had a problem at Tante Marie, her cooking school: Her student chefs…
FIRST PERSON | Lynn Harrison “Got some new drawers, I see — finally. I don’t see how you keep ’em up.” “Barbara, didn’t I have a pair of green . . .” “Threw ’em out. Totally shot. You’ve been needing new ones since God was a baby.” Barbara Conway retired June 25, 2008, after 40…
By Don Langley While helping to form the Webster Street Historic District in the late ’70s, Marie Cleasby insisted she wanted to paint her house purple. Like her neighbors, she wanted to form the district as a hedge against further expansion of the California Pacific Medical Center, which abutted the back of her property. But…
Fillmore milliner Ruth Garland Dewson took a stroll down the red carpet in the heart of Hollywood on April 27, 2008, when she was honored for her ceaseless — and ultimately successful — efforts to free a woman imprisoned for more than two decades. On an evening of Tinseltown glitter in the grand ballroom of…
By THOMAS REYNOLDS That distinguished looking gentleman with the silver hair and the purple vestment you see walking around the neighborhood got still more distinguished last month: He was enthroned as the new archbishop of the Anglican Province of Christ the King, which includes most of the traditional Anglicans in the western United States. Among…
LOCAL HISTORY | JOE BEYER It won’t be long now before the fading neon sign proclaiming Deovlet and Sons Furniture on the shuttered storefront at 1660 Pine Street gives way to the wrecking ball and a pair of condominium towers begins to rise. But for 67 years, Deovlet and Sons — known as “the Friendly…
When Volume 1, Number 1, of the New Fillmore appeared in May 1986, one of its features was ambitiously labeled Great Old Houses #1. It was just a picture and a paragraph about the Victorian at 2447 Washington Street written by Anne Bloomfield. “Untouched it is not,” she noted archly. For the next 14 years,…