THIS LAVISH oversized limited edition book brings together a collection of favorite photographs and stories from the pages of the New Fillmore. It tells the story of an ever-changing small town in the big city with a rich history and a strong sense of community.
Available exclusively at Browser Books on Fillmore, or order online.
THIS DOCUMENTARY — filmed entirely on Fillmore Street — tells the story of longtime Fillmore resident Kelly Johnson, who used a new California law to end his life on his own terms.
Chandler Tang’s new shop Post Script has just opened at 2413 California.
CHANDLER TANG is living her dream — curating and stocking what she describes as “very fun things” for Post Script, a new shop she’s just opened in a neighborhood she knows and loves.
Tang describes her new endeavor at 2413 California Street, near Fillmore — most recently habited by the women’s clothing boutique De Novo — as a “lifestyle store” that focuses on small goods.
The offerings are an eclectic mix of mostly handcrafted items including pillows, throws, soap, candles, planners, bowls, art books, towels and jewelry, along with greeting cards ranging from nice to naughty. Somehow the mix seems unified, no doubt due to Tang’s buying philosophy: “I really just look for a sense of colors and designs that can enrich your every day,” she says.
Days before opening, Tang wanders about the space, newly brightened by refinished floors and a coat of white paint on the walls, one of them adorned with a mural by local artist Katie Benn.
It’s also clear there’s another unifying force: She’s stocked the shop with more than a few of her favorite things.
“Just look at this!” she marvels, plucking a stylized toothbrush with aqua bristles off one of the newly constructed shelves. “It’s by an amazing brand called Hay. They just strip everything and focus on great design.”
Post Script is slated to be open Tuesday through Sunday from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Tang plans to be on site most of the time. “For now, I want to be the face of the store — to meet my customers, to get that personal touch,” she says.
The library’s majestic former reading room is now available as an event space.
By CHRIS BARNETT
One of the neighborhood’s enduring architectural treasures has been resurrected and a mystery is solved — almost.
The 107-year-old Beaux Arts four-story Health Sciences Library on the corner of Webster and Sacramento — which gave refuge to the smart and studious for decades, but has stood empty collecting cobwebs in recent years — is being reborn as a venue for “mission based” organizations and groups looking for conference and symposium space.
A designated San Francisco landmark once known as the Lane Medical Library, the building at 2395 Sacramento Street is now owned by entrepreneurial software executive-turned-humanitarian Kamal El-Wattar and his wife, Anya, a Michelin-starred chef, restaurateur and wellness advocate. The couple bought it more than two years ago for a reported $9.5 million, but have been silent on their plans for the property. Until now.
Kamal El-Wattar heads a nonprofit called The Answers Project that goes far afield for existential truths. Project researchers once trekked to Borneo to question the elders of an Indonesian culture about their life, philosophy and happiness. He is also a board member of the Biomimicry Institute, a low-to–no-profile think tank of sorts probing how technology and nature can be combined to resolve environmental problems.
Anya El-Wattar is an activist and artist who runs a local nonprofit, Project Butterfly Social, that also creates food events. They live in the neighborhood.
The building has a rich heritage. It was designed in 1912 by San Francisco architect Albert Pissis, who also designed Temple Sherith Israel, which shares the block. The high-ceilinged structure was initially owned by Cooper Medical College, the first medical school in the West, which opened in a Victorian brick building across the street in 1882.
The historic Health Sciences Library at 2395 Sacramento Street.
Stanford University acquired the Cooper complex to serve as its medical school from 1908 to 1956, when the Stanford hospital moved to Palo Alto. The complex was then expanded and became the Presbyterian Medical Center. In the early 1990s, it became the California Pacific Medical Center.
For decades, the library was shared by students at the University of the Pacific’s dental school, then located diagonally across from the library. Students used the library as a reading room and study hall until the dental school relocated downtown five years ago. Its neighborhood home was gutted and converted into The Pacific, a 77-unit condominium complex at Webster and Sacramento.
To help bring the library back to life, the El-Wattars hired a Washington, D.C., firm, Bond Events, to produce gatherings. The grandly stated mission: to make the century-old building the Bay Area’s go-to spot to “grow, meet, learn, discover and make history.”
A website shows off the space and the firm’s promotional prowess. The library, once filled with shelves and stacks piled high with musty books and instructional videos, today looks positively palatial, with a wide, sweeping staircase connecting its main floors.
Bond Event marketing director Kate Starr says a separate ground floor gallery space is ideal for “art shows, gatherings and fundraisings.” The second floor, with its large open space that was formerly the reading room, is called The Library. The third floor has meeting and breakout spaces and the fourth floor will have offices for the owners’ nonprofit ventures. The building also has an outdoor garden.
“We are committed to creating flexible space that helps heal our bodies, our minds and the planet,” the website proclaims.
It appears the building is not going to compete head to head with the city’s hotel ballrooms and meetings spaces. “We will have limited social events,” says Starr. Revenue the library generates will be used to support the needs of the El-Wattars’ foundation, she says.
A retractable roof in the weight room has been one of the club’s distinctions.
PACIFIC HEIGHTS HEALTH CLUB, with its lofty-sounding name and low-key vibe — where designer workout garb is not required — will close its doors for the last time on November 27, the day before Thanksgiving, at precisely 3 p.m.
Amy Lang, who took ownership of the club 15 years ago and appointed herself chief motivating officer, announced the move in a letter to members on November 1.
“San Francisco has changed. Retail has changed. The fitness industry has changed,” Lang said in an interview.
The club’s personal training program will continue in the fitness center of the nearby 2000 Post Street apartments, between Steiner and Pierce.
Lang intends to focus, mostly in online sessions, on coaching women from 45 to 55 interested in weight loss — especially those in tech, who share her work roots.
A longtime neighborhood institution, the urban gym at 2356 Pine, just west of Fillmore, has gone through a number of incarnations. It opened in 1984 — when the city had only six health clubs — as a men-only club that offered massages, a hot tub, and was staffed with locker room attendants. It was frequented by a number of celebrity clients, including, for a time, John F. Kennedy Jr.
David Kirk opened the front part of the club to women when he took ownership in 1990. A dozen years later he opened the entire club to all.
Fleeing a worklife in finance and tech, Amy Lang took over as owner in 2004, adding a cheeky sense of marketing along with yoga, Zumba and Pilates classes. Later she discontinued the classes and focused on small group training for older people, a change that didn’t sit well with some of the regulars.
“It created a bit of a kerfuffle,” Lang acknowledges, but also revealed a deeper truth. “It was then that I realized the club is a better place for a person who is a do-it-yourself type of exerciser,” Lang says. “I didn’t know you don’t morph a health club into what you want it to be. But what I’ve learned now allows me to do what I’ve always wanted to do.”
Albert Terry’s son-in-law Ephriam Walters on his final day at the Fillmore market.
PRODUCE FROM Terry Farms, picked just the day before, made its final appearance at the Fillmore Farmers Market on November 2 after owner Albert Terry died earlier in the week.
He was one of the original vendors when the market started in 2003 in the parking lot at Fillmore and Eddy, later to become the site of the Fillmore Heritage Center.
“He was there from the beginning,” said his daughter Lisa Terry-Walters. He had learned about the new market as a board member of the sponsoring Pacific Coast Farmers Market Association.
“After going himself for the first couple of years, he started sending employees,” she said, but they soon wanted to quit. “It wasn’t worth it because they weren’t making enough even to cover the cost of going.”
So Terry started coming to Fillmore again and established an easy rapport with customers and the other farmers.
“He always knew that Fillmore was a special deal, and it became a market that was very personal for him,” his daughter said. “This is the only market he attended regularly himself.”
Terry Farms specialized in peaches — especially white varietals and old-fashioned clings — and pluots. In the fall there were grapes, persimmons and pomegranates.
A decade ago, Terry asked his son-in-law, the tough ex-Marine Ephriam Walters, to come with him to Fillmore. “So I cancelled my fishing trip and came,” Walters said. For the past five years, Walters has been in charge, and has built a strong base of customers who return every week for his fresh fruit and no-nonsense approach.
“When I got out of the Marines, it was hard for me to transition,” Walters said on his final Saturday morning at the Fillmore market, as he bade farewell to his regulars. “This market has helped me. It has changed so much, but a lot of these people I’ve been dealing with for 10 years.”
Walters said the market paid Terry’s medical bills in recent years as he battled heart disease and had to stay close to the ranch he farmed for 51 years in Denair, in Stanislaus County.
Now the family is putting the farm on the market.
“Our family is very hopeful the farm will be purchased by another farmer who will continue to be as passionate about the products the farm produces as my dad was,” said Terry’s daughter, and Ephriam’s wife, Lisa. “With any luck, they will be able to attend the Fillmore market.”
A still from the opening scene of The Navigator, filmed in the neighborhood.
FILM | CLASSICS SHOT LOCALLY
Atop the crest of the hill on Divisadero Street, looking north between Pacific and Broadway, a car slowly makes a U-turn, then stops on the opposite side of the street. Buster Keaton filmed almost exclusively on Hollywood lots, but traveled to San Francisco to get this one shot.
The first five minutes of The Navigator, from 1924, are among the funniest in the entire film. The opening gag introduces Keaton’s character to us as the rich bachelor Rollo Treadway, who wakes up with the bright idea that he should get married — immediately. The caption card reads: “He had completed all the arrangements — except to notify the girl.”
Treadway instructs his chauffeur to take him at once to his girlfriend’s house. The car starts and does a U-turn and stops across the street. Treadway exits clutching a hopeful bouquet of flowers and marches up the brick-lined steps. His girlfriend, played by Kathryn McGuire, is caught off guard by Treadway’s epiphany and rejects his offer of “Will you marry me?” with a “Certainly not!”
Dejected, Treadway slinks back down the steps to the street below and quietly informs his chauffeur that he won’t be needing the car; instead what he chiefly needs is a nice long walk to clear his mind. He then walks back across the lonely street to his own mansion.
The hilarity of this scene only works due to its extravagance. In seconds, we learn that Rollo Treadway is a young man with more dollars than sense, coupled with a keen inability to read a situation. The fact that the chauffeur is not surprised in the least to be instructed to drive his boss a mere 180-degree turn across the street paints a picture of the blissful wastefulness of the young millionaire. Keaton’s brilliance was his ability to create a character no one could relate to, but with whom everyone would instantly sympathize.
The casual viewer will laugh at the scene, but the extravagance goes past the joke. Keaton picked this spot on Divisadero Street purely because the northerly crest prevented other structures from cluttering the scope of the scene. His minimalist vision makes this scene that much more endearing. It’s as if these two giant mansions and a few others exist all by themselves. That makes the fairy tale of the two young lovers that much sweeter, even when she rejects him.
The ivy-choked mansion on the right, which was meant to belong to Rollo Treadway, is now sadly long gone, demolished in the 1930s. But his girlfriend’s mansion is still in place at 2505 Divisadero. Built in 1899, it was more recently known as Metallica guitarist Kirk Hammett’s residence. It sold for $10 million three years ago, a price at which Rollo Treadway might barely blink an eye.
There is something magical and unique about the top of Divisadero Street. Buster Keaton saw it in 1924, and we can see it still.
— Mark Fantino
VIDEO: Buster Keaton goes for a ride in The Navigator
The entry at Sacramento and Buchanan appears in Hitchcock’s Family Plot.
FILM | CLASSICS SHOT LOCALLY
Walking north on Buchanan Street across Sacramento, you hardly notice the home on the corner. Built in 1900, this sheepish three-story house seems to endeavor not to draw attention to itself. But Alfred Hitchcock saw it differently. It was here that he filmed climactic scenes of his very last film, Family Plot, released in 1976.
It may never be considered one of Hitchcock’s greats. While it does include many of his trademark suspenseful moments and thrilling intrigue, Hitchcock injected a level of zaniness in this film he had not mastered. Barbara Harris and Bruce Dern play the out-of-their-element young couple dead set on uncovering the truth about an unclaimed family fortune, as well as an enormous diamond. But instead they get caught up in the sinister skulduggery of the shiny-toothed villain William Devane’s murderous schemes.
The main entrance of the corner home at Sacramento and Buchanan is used a couple of times in the film. Around the corner on Buchanan is the garage door (below) where some deliciously dastardly scenes take place.
Longtime employee Fred Martin at the front desk at Browser Books on Fillmore.
THESE STORIES almost always turn out wrong: the beloved neighborhood small business — especially if it’s an independent bookstore — shuts down.
But not this time. Browser Books, at 2195 Fillmore, got a new lease on life October 1 when the owners of Green Apple Books took the keys.
Green Apple — the new and used bookseller on Clement Street, which added a second store five years ago on 9th Avenue — promises the Browser name and staff will stay the same and the changes will be gentle.
“We’re proud to help shepherd the beloved Browser Books into the future,” said Green Apple co-owner Pete Mulvihill. “We’re coming in confidently but humbly.”
Green Apple will bring an infusion of operating capital and bookselling backbone, but most of the initial changes will be behind the scenes.
“We do plan some gradual improvements,” Mulvihill said. “I hope that six months from now people will walk in and say, ‘I always loved this store, and it’s even better now.’ ”
Browser Books was rescued by its fans last spring when a GoFundMe campaign almost immediately raised $76,241 to pay the debts of longtime owner Stephen Damon, who has been battling a terminal illness.
That kept the books coming and provided time to work out a longer-term solution. Manager Jordan Pearson led the effort, aided by local entrepreneurs Richard and Ben Springwater.
Green Apple takes over the remaining seven years of Browser’s lease. Owners Kevin Ryan and Mulvihill will be in the store on Saturday, October 19, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. for a “Meet the New Owners” celebration and an unveiling of Browser’s new T-shirts and tote bags.
St. Rose Academy, at Pine and Pierce, was torn down after the 1989 earthquake.
ON OCTOBER 17, 1989, the Loma Prieta earthquake shook the Fillmore and the rest of the Bay Area. The neighborhood was spared major damage, but felt the effects of the quake in ways large and small. The most visible local damage was at St. Dominic’s Church, where the top of the tower was lost and the historic home of St. Rose Academy was razed.
St. Rose Academy, a Catholic high school for girls, was completed only a few months before the 1906 earthquake, but survived — only to be torn down after the 1989 earthquake when seismic concerns were raised.
Katherine Petrin, an architectural historian, San Francisco native and St. Rose graduate, class of ’81, observes: “The feeling at the start of the 1989-90 school year was that St. Rose was experiencing some uncertainty. This was spurred in part by St. Ignatius College Prep becoming coeducational a few years earlier and the desire of the Dominican order to focus its educational mission at other facilities in Marin. After the October ’89 earthquake, many St. Rose alumnae were none too pleased when the Dominican Sisters claimed the building could not be seismically retrofitted.”
Soon several alumnae formed Save St. Rose!, a group advocating not necessarily for continued educational use, but that a compatible new use could be found for the building, generating income to pay for the project. Partnering with San Francisco Architectural Heritage, the Save St. Rose! group put forward a study, confirmed that federal and state funds were available and presented preservation alternatives to the city Planning Commission and the community. However, on June 26, 1991, the San Francisco Board of Permit Appeals upheld the Planning Commission’s approval of a permit to demolish St. Rose.
An earlier St. Dominic’s Church building was heavily damaged by the 1906 earthquake and later torn down and replaced by a new Gothic building in 1928. The highly decorative lantern that extended for decades from the top of its tower was damaged and removed after the ’89 quake. Flying buttresses were later added to strengthen the walls of the church and support its stained glass windows.
— Bridget Maley
The top of the tower at St. Dominic’s Church was damaged and removed.
READ MORE: Locals drew together after the quake at the Pacific Heights Bar & Grill, then a key community gathering place, which never recovered from the earthquake.
Behind the crowds queueing up outside the hot new restaurant Noosh, on the corner of Fillmore and Pine, is a small brass plaque recalling an earlier incarnation of the space when it was home to the late and much-lamented Pacific Heights Bar & Grill.
The PacBag, as it was known, was a pioneering restaurant that reigned as the neighborhood’s living room for a decade.
“It was the neighborhood Cheers,” the bar on the television show where everybody knows your name, says Marilyn Fisher, a lawyer who lived nearby and was a regular.
“It was like Cheers,” agrees co-owner Susie Bashel. “People came in almost every day.”
The home at 2561 Washington is between Fillmore Street and Alta Plaza Park.
REAL ESTATE | PATRICK BARBER
A PAIR OF recent home sales, both on Washington Street, highlight the fact that buyers are willing to sacrifice extra square footage for a highly walkable location.
The single-family homes at 2561 Washington Street and 3990 Washington Street each sold for $9.1 million during the second week of September. Though the two commanded an identical price, they differ greatly in size, with 3990 Washington boasting 10,000 square feet of living space — nearly double that of 2561 Washington, which clocks in at about 5,500 square feet. The smaller home changed hands in a brisk three days, while the larger took more than six months to sell.
A few facts explain why a substantially smaller home sold for the same price as a much larger one — and did it so much faster. First, 2561 Washington Street, which had been in the same family for decades, features beautifully proportioned rooms and a desirable open floor plan. Also, the home needs work, which offers the new owners the opportunity to re-envision it to their tastes and specifications.
Finally, there is the classic real estate mantra of location, location, location. While 3990 Washington Street sits on the far edge of Presidio Heights, which would make it necessary for owners to drive frequently, 2561 Washington is barely half a block from Fillmore Street, an easy stroll to dozens of local restaurants, boutiques and services.
