News from the Heart & Soul of San Francisco
By Chris Barnett THE FOUR CORNERS of the dingy intersection of Divisadero and Bush won’t win any architectural awards today, but the location is increasingly prized by investors, and all four corners are in transition. Bulldozers are rumbling over the dirt on the southwest corner, home for decades to the San Francisco Community Convalescent Home.…
“THESE DAYS you don’t have to move away from your neighborhood; it moves away from you.” So said a longtime local resident to the Chronicle in the early 1970s, when some of the splendid survivors in the path of the Redevelopment Agency’s wrecking ball were loaded up by house movers and rolled to new locations.…
FLASHBACK | HONEY GREEN It was October 1966, just a few days before my birthday. Bill Graham had booked an amazing show. Headlining was the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, with Paul Butterfield, Mike Bloomfield, Mark Naftalin, Elvin Bishop and a host of many others. The second band was the Jefferson Airplane — Marty, Jorma, Jack,…
SHE CAME TO California from Paris, Texas, and worked for the telephone company in Los Angeles for many years. But it was only when Ruth Garland Dewson moved north to San Francisco and opened a hat shop on Fillmore Street that she found her true home. She ran Mrs. Dewson’s Hats at 2050 Fillmore for…
AUTHOR, SINGER, poet, orator, actress and civil rights activist Maya Angelou has had many jobs in her storied life — including, when she was growing up in the Fillmore, a stint as a calypso dancer at the Purple Onion in North Beach. Recently Angelou recalled her first job: as a San Francisco streetcar conductor. “I…
THE USUAL CROWD wasn’t sitting in the sunshine this afternoon in front of Royal Ground, the neighborhood’s oldest coffeehouse. “The coffee shop for locals,” as it was known, ended its 25-year run Sunday as the final notes of the annual Fillmore Jazz Festival were drifting away in the late afternoon light. Ibrahim Alhjat, Royal Ground’s…
FIRST PERSON | MARK J. MITCHELL I moved to San Francisco in September 1978, following the woman who would become my wife, Joan Juster. She had gone ahead and found a studio apartment at California and Fillmore. The rent was a whopping $210 per month and the Murphy bed sagged as deeply as the Mariana…
IT HAD BEEN WHISPERED on the street for weeks: The venerable New Chicago Barbershop had closed and another black Fillmore institution, Marcus Books, would soon be closing, too. Roots run deep for both the bookstore and its building. Before the historic lavender Victorian at 1715 Fillmore that houses Marcus Books was moved from its original…
AN APPRECIATION | Elizabeth Pepin Silva IN MAY 2013 the Fillmore lost a special man with the passing of Reggie Pettus, 73, longtime proprietor of the New Chicago Barbershop and unofficial archivist of the area. Reggie moved to the Fillmore District from his home in Mobile, Alabama, in 1958 to attend City College of San…
By Gary Kamiya San Francisco Chronicle FEW PEOPLE who pass the violet-painted house at 1712 Fillmore Street give it a second look. It’s another Victorian in a city full of them. But this building is different. Perhaps no other structure in San Francisco has such an extraordinary story. If its walls could talk, they would…