News from the Heart & Soul of San Francisco
FLASHBACK | THOMAS REYNOLDS IT WAS ONLY a few months after the 1989 earthquake when Mikhail Gorbachev, still president of the still superpowerful Soviet Union, made a swing through San Francisco in early June of 1990. It was a brief 22-hour stay, which included sleeping late on Monday morning, June 4. Gorbachev and his wife…
NEARLY FOUR YEARS after it was first proposed, a new garden honoring the founders of Japantown will be dedicated this weekend at the foot of Cottage Row, near Fillmore and Sutter. It began as a celebration of the creation of Japantown in 1906 after the earthquake and fire. Cottage Row was occupied primarily by the…
Like any street in any great city, Fillmore is always changing, always dying, always being awakened By RICHARD RODRIGUEZ Growing old on Fillmore Street has taught me how much a city can change, how much I have changed — and how a city continues despite it all. Lately, if I have any sort of errand…
NEW RELEASE | SCOTT YANOW Sonny Lewis is a jazz legend who almost slipped away into history. A superior tenor-saxophonist and flutist based in the San Francisco Bay Area since the early 1960s, Lewis made relatively few jazz recordings during his career. He can be heard with Smiley Winters (playing next to altoist Sonny Simmons…
THE DEAL IS DONE: Green Apple Books — the new and used bookseller on Clement Street, which added a second store five years ago on 9th Avenue — has bought Browser Books on Fillmore Street. Green Apple will take over on October 1, but promises that the name and the staff will stay the same.…
FILLMORE BEAT | CHRIS BARNETT Frozen in time, the Palace Cafe at 1843 Fillmore Street has been shuttered for decades. It’s said still to be set up just as it was the last time the door opened many years ago, but it seems a safe bet the tiny cafe will not re-open any time soon.…
By CARLO MIDDIONE In the late 1960s and early ’70s, I worked at San Francisco’s Redevelopment Agency in my desire to conquer the world’s ills and to help make people safer, happier and more comfortable. Long before my wife Lisa and I opened our restaurant Vivande on Fillmore Street, which we operated for three decades,…
FLASHBACK | BARBARA KATE REPA After the 1906 earthquake and fire, when Fillmore Street was hailed as the “new Market Street of the municipality,” local officials marked its newfound celebrity with a ribald 10-day Fillmore Street Carnival in the fall that stretched from Fulton to Sacramento. Heartened by the successes of the first few carnivals,…
REAL ESTATE | PATRICK BARBER Single-family home sales in the neighborhood reached a decade low during the last month, with only one single-family home selling in Pacific Heights, Lower Pacific Heights, Presidio Heights and Cow Hollow from mid-June to mid-July. The summer months are traditionally the slowest time for real estate activity in 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…