News from the Heart & Soul of San Francisco
JOHN GAUL, 97, a fixture on Fillmore Street and in San Francisco historical circles for decades, died on July 25, 2023, at his longtime home at John F. Kennedy Towers. He leaves a considerable legacy of celebrating and perpetuating the history of the city he loved. He was a docent at three of San Francisco’s…
IT’S NOT EVERY DAY that a photo from the neighborhood is published in The New York Times. But today is that day. Alongside a review of Cosmic Scholar, a new biography of anthropologist/artist/filmmaker/mystic/music collector Harry Smith, is a photograph of Smith before one of the murals in the legendary Fillmore jazz club Jimbo’s Bop City.…
By CHRIS BARNETT The space long occupied by Repeat Performance — the San Francisco Symphony resale shop at 2436 Fillmore — has sprung back to life as Warren Estate Sales, with novel pop-up offerings twice monthly in the back of the shop designed to keep the merchandise moving. “It’s simply the best resale shop I…
By FRAN MORELAND JOHNS When the nominations for this year’s James Beard Awards were announced in late January, there was a local surprise. Among the semifinalists for Outstanding Bakery: Yasukochi’s Sweet Stop, a small shop in the corner of a Japantown grocery store most noted for keeping alive one of the city’s most beloved creations,…
ART | JEROME TARSHIS “JOAN BROWN,” a new exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, celebrates the colorful life and work of a deeply imaginative painter and independent spirit who got her start on Fillmore Street and went on to international acclaim. The expansive presentation of Brown’s work features 80 paintings and sculptures spanning…
By CHRIS BARNETT After a 34-year run of flipping pizzas, uncorking wine and telling stories on the northwest corner of Fillmore and California, Dino Stavrakikis is selling the longtime pizza palace known for decades as Dino’s — now renamed after his son as Santino’s Wine Bar — to the owner of Ace Wasabi Sushi in…
FILLMORE BEAT | CHRIS BARNETT Slammed shut and lifeless for well over two years, the large space housing the once popular Grove cafe and hangout at 2016 Fillmore is stirring again, but the new venture’s backers stubbornly refuse to disclose anything about it. “I can’t say, I can’t say, I can’t say,” insisted a bearded guy…
By GARY KAMIYA San Francisco Chronicle The most famous event in the history of avant-garde literary San Francisco was Allen Ginsberg’s reading of “Howl” at the Six Gallery at 3119 Fillmore Street on Oct. 7, 1955. That frenzied reading, the subsequent publication by Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Books of “Howl and Other Poems,” and the…
ART | JEROME TARSHIS In this year’s Venice Biennale, the world’s preeminent art fair, a kind of 21st century surrealism is said to be the dominant artistic tendency. One of the most admired exhibitions of our time is “Surrealism Beyond Borders,” now packing them in at Tate Modern in London after months as a smash…
IT TOOK A FEW YEARS for David Johnson’s photographs of Fillmore Street during its jazz heyday as the Harlem of the West to be appreciated. Quite a few. But it happened half a century later with the premiere of the highly acclaimed public television documentary in 1999, called simply “The Fillmore,” and the book that…