News from the Heart & Soul of San Francisco
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…
PEOPLE OFTEN JOKE that there are more dogs than children in San Francisco. Statistics show it’s true: There were about 115,000 children under age 18 living in the city in 2016, according to the American Community Survey. San Francisco Animal Care and Control estimated that at the same time, there were about 120,000 to 150,000…
STORY & PHOTOGRAPHS BY BARBARA WYETH From the first step into the garden behind a welcoming house on Clay Street, I was enchanted — and surprised, too, by its size and parklike feeling. This is not a manicured plot behind a single home, but a meandering landscape of many levels that extends the length of…
SAN FRANCISCO ARTIST Kit Haskell has established herself as the gold standard for pen and ink drawings of the city’s Victorian homes. The newest book to feature her drawings lets children of all ages choose their own favorite Crayola colors for the Painted Ladies. It’s a coloring book featuring 20 of Haskell’s meticulously accurate drawings…
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…
To Our Dear Little Neighborhood: When a disturbing event occurs, it’s the ordinary, everyday heroes who step up to save the day. Our neighborhood’s Little Free Library was violently attacked and toppled on May 29. It stood in front of our home at 2418 Pine Street, on one of the city’s bustling public sidewalks. While…
CULTURE BEAT | PAMELA FEINSILBER Andrew Dodd lives nowhere near the neighborhood, but he’s brought something special to it. Dodd created the Second Sunday Concert Series at the Swedenborgian Church, at Washington and Lyon Streets, offering live music in the stunning 1895 Arts & Crafts-style church. You live in Concord. How did you get involved…
A FAMILIAR FACE on Fillmore Street is missing. Zema Daniels has retired. For most of his 90 years, he was part of the Fillmore scene. In recent decades, Fillmore merchants hired him to help battle litter on the street. With his bucket and brooms, he was a familiar sight up and down Fillmore. He was…
FILM | ANDREA CHASE Italian-born neighborhood resident Pietro Pinto didn’t set out to make a film about boxers. After winning a place in the Jerusalem Film Workshop a few years back, he arrived in Israel for the first time in his life with less than two weeks to find a subject for his short film,…
By JASON OLAINE Artistic Director, Fillmore Jazz Festival What is the sound of jazz? And can jazz mean different things to different people, perhaps even different things to the same person? Since its birth in New Orleans near the end of the 19th century, jazz was a hybrid: a mixed-up, beautiful child of Africa, Europe,…