News from the Heart & Soul of San Francisco
ART | JEROME TARSHIS From the 1890s to the early 1920s, the artists Arthur and Lucia Mathews were at the center of an artistic movement that sought to combine European tradition in art and design with the ideals of a new way of life that celebrated the natural splendors of Northern California. After the earthquake and…
It’s a secret workshop tucked behind a disappearing door at the back of the store. Inside are rows and rows of jars, metal caps and electrical sockets. But this is no mad scientist’s laboratory. From this hidden room come tasteful lamps that illuminate some of the finest homes in Pacific Heights — at prices far…
FIRST PERSON | PASCAL RIGO One morning not very long ago, I was eating breakfast with my family. We were sitting around the kitchen table in our apartment, which is above our bakery on Pine Street.
When Volume 1, Number 1, of the New Fillmore appeared in May 1986, one of its features was ambitiously labeled Great Old Houses #1. It was just a picture and a paragraph about the Victorian at 2447 Washington Street written by Anne Bloomfield. “Untouched it is not,” she noted archly. For the next 14 years,…
The unsightly scaffolding that surrounds Temple Sherith Israel at the corner of Webster and California streets is as repugnant to the synagogue’s leadership as it is to neighbors and passersby, they say, but it is not going away anytime soon. The scaffolding was erected to protect pedestrians from shards of sandstone falling from the facade.…
Calvary Presbyterian Church opened on Fillmore Street — its third location — with a community Thanksgiving service in November 1902. The church moved to Fillmore from Union Square to make way for the construction of the St. Francis Hotel. Much of the Powell Street church — including all of the pews and over a million…
ART | Jerome Tarshis Fifty years ago a reader of the national news media might think North Beach was San Francisco’s only artistic bohemia. But even during the heyday of the beat poets, upper Fillmore offered not only upscale living but fertile ground for art and literature. The artist Wallace Berman’s first apartment in San…
By THOMAS REYNOLDS For years, the dog walkers in Alta Plaza Park watched the construction site at the top of Jackson Street. Two townhouses disappeared, opening a view of the bay. Then one sleek glass and steel home was built where two had been. Yet the view to the bay remained. Architect Olle Lundberg, the…
Then as now, the intersection of Fillmore and Post was also the intersection of two neighborhoods. Japanese-Americans had returned from the internment camps of World War II to find that, in their absence, African-Americans had arrived in record numbers as part of the war effort. What had been Japantown had been transformed into an all-night…
Upon entering Addison Fine Arts at Jackson and Buchanan, one might reasonably wonder: What are paintings of this quality by artists of this caliber doing in a neighborhood gallery? They are, in fact, part of gallerist Steven Platzman’s mission to enrich the cultural holdings of the city. He aims to do that by placing significant…