News from the Heart & Soul of San Francisco
By HANNAH BLAZEI If you look closely at The Fillmore’s sign you will see an apple at the bottom. You also can find apples as a main theme in the Bill Graham mural on Post Street. That is because Graham famously always handed out free apples at his Fillmore shows. It was a unique symbol…
FLASHBACK | BARRY GARELICK A few weeks before the Vietnam war ended, I met the poet ruth weiss without knowing who she was. The meeting occurred at Minnie’s Can-Do Club in the Fillmore district of San Francisco on one of the weekly open-mic poetry nights. A melange of all sorts of people with all sorts…
SF HISTORY | WOODY LaBOUNTY TODAY IS THE 119th anniversary of the 7.9 magnitude tremor that remade San Francisco. The quake brought down and damaged buildings. It also set off numerous fires. Important infrastructure was crippled, leaving the city mostly helpless to fight a growing inferno. After three terrible days of fire and smoke, the…
WOODY LaBOUNTY traces the circuitous history of a little wooden building on the 1800 block of Eddy Street — which turns out to be the oldest frame church in San Francisco, moved twice since it was built on Market Street in 1854 as the first St. Patrick’s Church. In 1873, the building was moved west…
ST. DOMINIC’S CATHOLIC CHURCH is celebrating 150 years in the neighborhood — and 100 years in its landmark Gothic home — with the publication of a new book, Radiating the Joy of the Gospel in the Heart of the City. The book captures key moments in the life of the church in words and photographs.…
By FRAN MORELAND JOHNS It might be called “The Little Salon That Could,” tucked away in the ground-floor retail space of an historic Victorian at 1724 Fillmore. For decades it was called Citrine Salon, until the pandemic forced its closing. Beloved Citrine proprietor Rene Cohen, who had struggled to keep the business alive by adding…
NEIGHBORHOOD HISTORY | WOODY LaBOUNTY In the 1930s, the WPA’s Federal Writers’ Project put unemployed authors to work on guidebooks. The contributor to the architecture section of California: A Guide to the Golden State, had some opinions on the architectural tastes of the moneyed classes in the late 19th century: “[W]ealth meant even larger buildings with more and…
DAVID JOHNSON, who took the most famous photograph ever taken on Fillmore Street, looking south from Fillmore and Post in the late 1940s, died on March 1 at age 97. Johnson, a Florida native, first came through San Francisco on his way to serve in the navy during World War II. He returned after the…
By WOODY LABOUNTY The story: the imposing Calvary Presbyterian Church on the corner of Fillmore and Jackson streets — which seems like an ancient temple that has stood on its plot for time immemorial — was moved there from Union Square. Let’s play detective and take a before-and-after look. Read more: “One Million Bricks“