News from the Heart and Soul of San Francisco
BOOKS | LEWIS WATTS I have always admired Carlos Santana, but I think I had begun to take him for granted. He made his career in San Francisco during the Summer of Love, starting in the Fillmore. I’ve always loved his music, especially his early albums, but I only knew a few particulars about his…
THE ON-AGAIN, off-again plan to create a memorial Zen garden at the foot of Cottage Row — once a Japanese enclave — is back on again. On October 19, the Recreation & Park Commission approved the garden, a memorial to the founders of Japantown. But approval on the commission’s consent calendar came only after another…
BENKYODO, with its colorful counter and corner tables, for a century has been a gathering place in Japantown for local business people, tourists and generations of Japanese Americans who love mochi and manju.
LOCAL HISTORY | LIV JENKS Sunnie Evers had been living at 2302 Steiner Street for nearly a decade. One day while she was standing in front of her house, a woman stopped to talk. She told Evers that Adolph Sutro — land magnate, capitalist, philanthropist and short-lived mayor of San Francisco — had built her…
A PLAN TO CREATE a Japanese Zen rock garden at the foot of Cottage Row has been green-lighted by the Planning Department and is scheduled for a go-ahead vote on June 15. The garden would honor the first generation of Japanese residents in San Francisco, the Issei, who established Japantown in its current location 110 years…
LONG BEFORE they met, Lewis Watts and Elizabeth Pepin Silva had something in common: Both had wandered into Red’s Shoe Shine Parlor at 1549 Fillmore to inquire about the extensive collection of vintage photographs of Fillmore’s jazz joints that lined his walls. And both had been kicked out. Before he could return to try again,…
LOTTIE CLAIBORNE studied dance as a teen in New York. While modeling, she was given the name “Lottie the Body” and quickly became known as an accomplished dancer, sharing the bill with well-known musicians and singers, including Carmen McRae, and entertainer Redd Foxx. In the early 1950s, she relocated to the Bay Area and became…
AFTER BEING out of print for more than seven years, a new and expanded second edition of Harlem of the West — along with a companion website and exhibition — will be unveiled at the end of the month. The photo and history book celebrating Fillmore’s jazz era in the 1940s and ’50s was originally…
By BRIDGET MALEY My predecessor in writing about neighborhood architecture for the New Fillmore, the respected architectural historian Anne Bloomfield, was an amazing researcher and a passionate advocate for maintaining the character of Pacific Heights and Presidio Heights. She died in December 1999, but her life’s work of helping preserve San Francisco’s past lives on.…
LOCALS | ANNE RUTH ISAACSON After a long walk back home from the Hardly Strictly Blue Grass Festival, I stopped at Fillmore and Sacramento for coffee. Outside on the corner there were no free tables, but a gentleman signaled that I could join him and his friend. That was the day I met Kelly Johnson. I…