News from the Heart & Soul of San Francisco
ARCHITECT Aaron Green, who lived in a neighborhood apartment overlooking Lafayette Park for many years, helped Frank Lloyd Wright establish a San Francisco office in 1951 at 319 Grant Avenue. Green’s mother-in-law, Jeannette Pauson Haber, lived at 2510 Jackson Street, on Alta Plaza Park, with her sister, Rose Pauson, who was a former client of…
FIRST PERSON | MARK J. MITCHELL I arrived in the neighborhood in September 1978, following the woman I’m still lucky enough to love. I had dreams of being a San Francisco poet. We moved into the Preston Apartments above what is now Santino’s Vino, but was Uncle Vito’s in those days. I was fresh out…
IN THE LATE ’80s, Elizabeth Pepin Silva and Lewis Watts began an archival journey to resurrect a piece of San Francisco’s cultural history that had been bulldozed into oblivion. The Harlem of the West Project sought to make visible the rich history of the Fillmore District — one of the few neighborhoods in the Bay…
FIRST PERSON | SUSAN McCORMICK The first book in a planned San Francisco Cozy Murder Mystery series, The Fog Ladies features a group of spunky older women and one overworked, overtired, overstressed medical intern who live in an elegant apartment building in San Francisco — and then the older ladies start to die. The story…
CULTURE BEAT | PAMELA FEINSILBER At only 25, opera singer and neighborhood resident Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen has already had a head-spinning career. Cohen graduated from Princeton in 2015. Just two years later, he was one of 12 artists to join S.F. Opera’s prestigious two-year, performance-oriented Adler Fellowship Program, which is what brought him to San…
FILM | ANDREA CHASE The 16th Annual Another Hole in the Head Film Festival, brought to you by the fine people at SFIndieFest, gathers a scintillating collection of the best of the genres of sci-fi, horror, fantasy and just plain odd films currently out there, along with the now traditional rescoring of a classic. The…
LOCAL HISTORY | BRIDGET MALEY A series of photographs taken during and just after the 1906 earthquake and fire reveals the sense of the fear and dread neighborhood residents must have felt at the time. The fire, which crossed to the west side of Van Ness Avenue between Sutter and Clay Streets, was halted by…
REAL ESTATE | NINA HATVANY There are many myths about the San Francisco real estate market — many of them not true. MYTH #1: Homes are still going for 10 to 15 percent above asking in bidding wars. The truth is, the competition for San Francisco condominiums and homes has drastically slowed down as inventory…
FILLMORE BEAT | CHRIS BARNETT Despite the fierce turnover among well-heeled retailers, is Fillmore Street still Mecca for merchants? Jon Levy, an exec with Leap — a New York-based firm that creates and launches traditional retail stores for web-based digital brands — is convinced of it. He just snapped up a second storefront on the…
A NEIGHBOR, out for a walk one night soon after Plants and Friends opened its new shop at 1906 Fillmore in early October, stopped to admire the greenery in the window. “It’s fun,” she said to another neighbor walking by. “It makes you smile.” And so it does. Who would think — in the age…