News from the Heart & Soul of San Francisco
FLASHBACK | THOMAS REYNOLDS IT WAS ONLY a few months after the 1989 earthquake when Mikhail Gorbachev, still president of the still superpowerful Soviet Union, made a swing through San Francisco in early June of 1990. It was a brief 22-hour stay, which included sleeping late on Monday morning, June 4. Gorbachev and his wife…
NEARLY FOUR YEARS after it was first proposed, a new garden honoring the founders of Japantown will be dedicated this weekend at the foot of Cottage Row, near Fillmore and Sutter. It began as a celebration of the creation of Japantown in 1906 after the earthquake and fire. Cottage Row was occupied primarily by the…
FILLMORE BEAT | CHRIS BARNETT Frozen in time, the Palace Cafe at 1843 Fillmore Street has been shuttered for decades. It’s said still to be set up just as it was the last time the door opened many years ago, but it seems a safe bet the tiny cafe will not re-open any time soon.…
By CARLO MIDDIONE In the late 1960s and early ’70s, I worked at San Francisco’s Redevelopment Agency in my desire to conquer the world’s ills and to help make people safer, happier and more comfortable. Long before my wife Lisa and I opened our restaurant Vivande on Fillmore Street, which we operated for three decades,…
FLASHBACK | BARBARA KATE REPA After the 1906 earthquake and fire, when Fillmore Street was hailed as the “new Market Street of the municipality,” local officials marked its newfound celebrity with a ribald 10-day Fillmore Street Carnival in the fall that stretched from Fulton to Sacramento. Heartened by the successes of the first few carnivals,…
LOCALS | CALVIN LAU She was the quintessential little old lady in white tennis shoes — at least that’s how relentless neighborhood activist Mary Jane Staymates, known to all as M.J., liked to fashion herself. My first encounter with M.J., who died a few months ago, was at a Western Addition Neighborhood Association (WANA) meeting…
WHAT A TREAT — a visual treat of exquisitely reproduced photographs and a textural declaration of the reproduction of numerous articles from the neighborhood newspaper, the New Fillmore. Publisher, attorney and gallery owner Thomas Reynolds and co-author Barbara Kate Repa have compiled a compelling book that offers a smorgasbord of vignettes of San Francisco’s Fillmore…
LOCAL HISTORY | CHRISTOPHER POLLOCK Of the 220 public spaces the city’s Recreation and Park Department administers in San Francisco, Lafayette Park is unique: It has a privately owned six-story apartment building cut right into its municipal landscape on the side bordering Gough Street. In the city’s early days, several parks had issues over real…
FLASHBACK | JO MANCUSO The windows at the Brown Bag, the quirky office supply store long on the corner at 2000 Fillmore Street, were the topic of an item in Image magazine in 1991: This is the store that breaks all the rules. Its Fillmore Street windows are really shadow boxes, maybe 4 feet square…
ARCHITECTURE | BRIDGET MALEY Since it opened in June 1941, touted as the city’s “newest drive-in market,” the Grand Central Market, now Mollie Stone’s, at 2435 California Street, has been a bustling neighborhood grocery. The News Call Bulletin declared that “a program of entertainment would signalize its opening.” A photograph appearing with the article showed…