An unwitting witness to a crime

Posted on July 30, 2018 by editors

CRIME WATCH | DONNA GILLESPIE

I was walking to the Walgreens at Fillmore and Bush when I heard running footsteps behind me. It was 4:25 in the afternoon on the Fourth of July.

I turned to see a group of young people, perhaps 20 or more, bolting up the hill. As they surged past me, one knocked me aside and I fell against the building. No one paused, though one of the bunch glanced back at me with an almost apologetic look. Then the group tacked left in a flock and burst into Walgreens. I entered right behind them.

Inside, it seemed a scene from a movie. The kids were working the hair and dental products, toppling merchandise from the shelves into cloth bags, laughing and moving quickly down the aisle. The more expensive items were out of their reach, locked up behind clear plastic shields. The thieves seemed content to load up on the cheaper merchandise.

They ranged in age from about 10 to 25. The youngest boy in the bunch took the sentry’s position by the front door. He grinned at the employees behind the registers, picked through items a shopper had left behind in a returned basket, then tossed them back. Apparently they were not worth stealing.

Walgreens employees were taking it all in stride. Two were calmly filming the melee on their phones. After about three minutes, the youths swept out in a mass, leaving behind heaps of fallen merchandise in the aisle for store employees to pick up and put back on the shelves. A woman behind a register saw my incredulous look and said: “This happens all the time. The police will come, but not right away.”

I asked her what would happen then. “They’ll say they can’t do anything,” she said.

Someone had called 911 the moment the young thieves had swarmed into the store. I hung around for about 15 minutes afterward, dazedly carrying out a haphazard mix of finishing my shopping and helping clean up. As the editor responsible for compiling the monthly Crime Watch report in the New Fillmore, I was slowly processing the fact that I had been swept up in one of my own crime reports.

No officers had yet arrived. Employees had left their tasks to clean up the mess. The line at the registers grew longer.

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That cat could write

Posted on July 30, 2018 by editors

She turned her newspaper articles into a book.

AFTER OUR FRIEND William died, we helped empty his house and put it on the market. His downstairs tenant was moving, and the pregnant cat that lived mostly under the house and on the street was left without a home.

It turned out no one wanted a pregnant cat — not the nearby Pets Unlimited, nor the SPCA, nor anybody else. So we took her home. Then she had 11 kittens — on 7/11, no less. This did not seem lucky, at least not for us, now with a dozen cats.

Although she was busy enough already, eating and nursing and grooming, again and again and again, we put her to work writing for the neighborhood newspaper. Her nametag — and byline — said simply Saralee. It turned out she was a talented writer with a gift for delicate phrasing and an eye for the wry detail.

“I’ve called this beautiful neighborhood home my entire life — more than two years now, although a proper lady never tells her age,” she began her first story.

These were not her first kittens. “A moment of ardor with an attentive tabby left me with eight kittens to tend — and me just a kitten myself,” she wrote. “No sooner had the kids left the nest than I was out the window again. A small partay with a cool gray long-haired tomcat and I soon found myself with nine little ones this time.”

A visit to the vet capped her prolific output at 28 kittens. Her stories in the New Fillmore made motherhood sound like a joy. “I have to say, this might be my most beautiful brood yet,” she wrote.

She told her story so well that all of her kittens found new homes — and, in the process, we became related by cat to many of our neighbors. Her kids would write on Mother’s Day and 7/11. It was a lucky day after all. Nearly everywhere we went — to a local restaurant, store, church or coffee shop — we’d get an update on Saralee’s kids.

She turned her stories into a book, available on Amazon. And she blossomed into a beautiful and classy Miss Lady, with a lipstick pink collar and heart-shaped nametag.

Saralee died on July 28 after a short illness. She will be missed by many in the neighborhood — and in the literary world.

— Thomas Reynolds

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CPMC scaling back local plans

Posted on July 28, 2018 by editors

The hospital finally relented to neighborhood pressure and relocated a generator at its entry.

CONTRARY TO EARLIER PLANS, California Pacific Medical Center now says it will scale back its operations in the neighborhood when a new state-of-the-art hospital opens next year on Van Ness Avenue.

Patients are expected to move into the new hospital in early March. The current hospital will then concentrate on ambulatory care for patients who do not require overnight hospitalization. That will bring a reduction from 2,100 to fewer than 500 employees at the existing hospital on Buchanan Street, administrators say, and an expected 30 percent reduction in the number of people who visit the current complex. There will be fewer doctors, too, and the emergency room will move to the new hospital.

Earlier plans had called for an expansion of facilities in the neighborhood, including a new building for ambulatory care on Sacramento Street, where the aging Stanford building now stands, and a new parking garage.

No more. “No new construction is planned,” said Ameet Nanda, a hospital administrator. “We’ve scaled back our plans.”

After the new Van Ness building opens, the hospital will close its facilities out on California Street, near Laurel Village. Some of those operations, including women’s health and breast cancer specialists, will move to 2333 Buchanan, along with some outpatient surgery. But the fourth, fifth and sixth floors of the current hospital will be left empty, administrators said.

Neighbors who attended a community hearing at the hospital on July 11 were skeptical that hospital administrators were telling the full story. “To think that three floors of prime property in this neighborhood are going to be left empty defies belief,” said one.

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The Brown Bag served up an eclectic mix

Posted on July 2, 2018 by editors

Treasures from the Brown Bag, the emporium and office supply store at 2000 Fillmore.

FLASHBACK | BARBARA WYETH

Every time I walk past the corner of Fillmore and Pine, I am transported back to the Brown Bag, the stationery store that was a mainstay on the northeast corner for many years.

Back in the day, I owned a small business in North Beach, but was struggling. I met Dawn, one of Brown Bag’s owners, when I was helping out on weekends at the nearby California Street Creamery. We had become friendly, and when I decided to quit my store, Dawn offered me a job at the Brown Bag.

I’d had ongoing connections with the Fillmore neighborhood since moving to San Francisco, so working at the Brown Bag seemed like a good fit. I loved its eclectic mix of practical supplies and wildly impractical baubles. It reminded me of the old-fashioned 5 & Dime in my Midwestern hometown. The place even included the smell of bacon wafting in from the Chestnut Cafe next door.

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Neon on Fillmore, then and now

Posted on July 1, 2018 by editors

Photograph of the refurbished Elite Cafe sign by Daniel Bahmani

By RANDALL ANN HOMAN

The sign for the Elite Cafe, glowing again after a fire left it damaged and dark for months, is a beacon from a time when Fillmore Street was awash with neon signs announcing the street’s vibrant nightlife.

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Kim Nalley comes home

Posted on June 28, 2018 by editors

Photograph of Tammy Hall and Kim Nalley by Dante Miguel

Q & A | KIM NALLEY

Jazz diva Kim Nalley and her band return as headliners at the Fillmore Jazz Festival again this year, appearing on Saturday, June 30, at 4:30 p.m. on the California Street stage.

It all started for you on Fillmore Street, right?

Yes. I was cleaning houses and I got a call from Chris Provo at Harry’s. They had listened to my cassette demo that had three tunes on it: Just Friends (bop jazz), Moonlight in Vermont (ballad) and Never Let Me Go (R&B ballad) They needed someone to work that night — and if it worked out I could have it weekly. They had a grand piano and the gig paid $300 for a quartet; my rent was $200 a month.

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Throwback to the ’90s

Posted on June 28, 2018 by editors

By JASON OLAINE
Artistic Director, Fillmore Jazz Festival

Throwback is a term usually used in a positive way to refer to a bygone era that conjured great memories, which is what this year’s Fillmore Jazz Festival means to conjure up — positive memories of a time when all seemed right with the world: the mid-1990s.

The Bay Area music scene 20-something years ago was a melting pot that no one had tasted before or since. It simmered with a seasoning so potent and spicy, so seductive and sweaty, that it influenced artists and music around the globe. The genres didn’t need to have names — although some people tried to define the music as acid jazz or hip-hop jazz or jazz fusion or jump/swing.

The important thing was that the bands and the artists had names. They became synonymous with the scene and defined who you were, what you did and when you did it. Thursdays were the new Fridays. Mondays could be a Saturday. A handful of local bands — many of which are playing this weekend — were the hottest tickets in town, the artists recognizable and famous, the music infectious and seductive.

It was a time when everyone was listening to and performing with everyone else. Retro jazz was being influenced by Latin groove music and vice versa; rappers were riffing with saxes and horns; straight ahead beboppers were playing funk at midnight. And it was all good, as they say. The nightclubs were booming and new music rooms were popping up all over town.  The cats would be out all night, running into each other, jamming with and sitting in with each other, forming new bands. You’d find them at familiar spots like Cafe du Nord or the Up and Down Club. They were upstairs at the Elbo Room, in the front of Enrico’s, in the back at Bruno’s, in the loft at Club 11, or on the patio at Jupiter — even at Yoshi’s living room-like venue on Claremont Avenue that played host to the first ever T. J. Kirk show with Charlie Hunter, Will Bernard, John Schott and Scott Amendola back in ’94.

It was the heyday for the Bay Area scene. And then, it vanished. The music never died; the scene just changed. The Bay Area still swings and grooves hard to this day, filled with amazing artists. We just want to tip our hats to that moment in time, that bygone era, that window in the past that was truly special and life-changing for many, on the stage and off.

So let’s enjoy some of the best of the best of that Throwback era. Let’s welcome them back as old friends. Just don’t call ’em old.

ENTERTAINMENT SCHEDULE

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Spreading the gospel of jazz

Posted on June 28, 2018 by editors

Photograph of Jason Olaine at Yoshi’s on Fillmore by Kathi O’Leary

Q & A | JASON OLAINE

Jason Olaine returns to San Francisco to book the Fillmore Jazz Festival when he’s not booking Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York.

You’re throwing us back this year to the 1990s — where were you back then?

Well, 1993 was really the beginning of what would be my professional life in jazz. Before applying to grad school or law school I thought I should at least look for a job in “jazz,” as if jazz music had jobs to offer.

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He has his own quartet

Posted on June 28, 2018 by editors

Michael Schwab’s four street banners celebrating the Fillmore Jazz Festival.

Q & A | MICHAEL SCHWAB

The poster for the 2018 Fillmore Jazz Festival is the fourth jazz image Michael Schwab has created for the Fillmore festival. All four now hang as banners on the street.

Are you a jazz fan?

Sure. I’m not an aficionado, but as a kid, back in southern Oklahoma, I remember hearing my dad playing cool jazz albums on the hi-fi in our living room — a lot of Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Sarah Vaughan, Dave Brubeck and Paul Desmond. In high school, I’ll never forget being introduced to Mose Allison: “You know a young man … ain’t nothin’ in this world these days.” Wow.

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It was the Dave Scott era on Fillmore

Posted on June 27, 2018 by editors

Dave Scott: “such an amazing, gentle and talented soul.”

By FRAN MORELAND JOHNS

The news was as mournful as the sound of taps in the distance. When word spread that widely beloved trumpeter-composer-teacher-bandleader Dave Len Scott was decamping from the Fillmore to be near his family in Arizona, there was no joy in jazzville.

But it’s true. For the first time in many years, Dave Scott will not be playing on Fillmore — nor anywhere else in San Francisco — on a regular basis.

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