News from the Heart & Soul of San Francisco
CULTURE BEAT | PAM FEINSILBER It’s fitting that Randall Kline, founder and executive artistic director of SFJazz — the largest jazz-presenting organization on the West Coast — lives near Fillmore Street. In the 1940s and ’50s, when the neighborhood was teeming with clubs, bars and after-hours joints, it was revered by jazz musicians and fans. Now…
LOCAL HISTORY | LIV JENKS Sunnie Evers had been living at 2302 Steiner Street for nearly a decade. One day while she was standing in front of her house, a woman stopped to talk. She told Evers that Adolph Sutro — land magnate, capitalist, philanthropist and short-lived mayor of San Francisco — had built her…
By FRANCINE BREVETTI Occasionally people enter Michael Perry’s shop at 1837 Divisadero Street and ask for maps of the Island of California. They’ve come to the right place. Among his treasures, Perry has a selection of images of this popular fallacy of the 16th and 17th centuries — that California once was its own island.
“THE PROBLEM IS with the economics of the boulangerie, not the bread,” Fillmore’s Pascal Rigo tells The New York Times today. “I’m going to show that you can make good bread and good money.” Both older and richer than he was in 1999 when he began a bakery empire on Pine Street he later sold to…
FIRST PERSON | BARBARA WYETH For us early morning folk, the long awaited opening of Blue Bottle Coffee on the busy Jackson and Fillmore corner is a blessing. In my mind, a strong cup of coffee is always a good thing, any time of day. That bracing dark, sweet shot of warmth and energy is…
By JASON OLAINE Summer of Love Revisited. That’s the theme of this year’s Fillmore Jazz Festival on July 1 and 2, in honor of the 50th anniversary of that impactful, inspired time in 1967 — its epicenter in San Francisco, with the Fillmore being ground zero. Seminal albums were released by Jefferson Airplane, The Doors, Jimi…
CULTURE BEAT | PAM FEINSILBER For 35 years, Jean Halvorsen has traveled between her home in the neighborhood and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Back when the museum was in the Civic Center, above the Herbst Theater, she volunteered as a docent. In 2000, once the museum was ensconced in its own building…
LOCALS | FRANCINE BREVETTI There was no place to put “1,000 Monks.” Artist Andrea Speer Hibbard was frustrated when trying to find a store or a gallery to exhibit the giclee prints of her drawing. Until she walked into Poetica Art & Antiques on Sacramento Street. There she found the proprietor, the expansive Traci Teraoka,…
ESPECIALLY SWEET MUSIC will rise up into the freshly repainted and retrofitted dome atop Congregation Sherith Israel’s historic home at California and Webster on June 9 at a special Shabbat service celebrating the end of a long-running renovation. “We did it!” exclaimed David Newman, co-chair of the seismic retrofit campaign. “The Sherith Israel community has risen…
CLASSICS | FRAN MORELAND JOHNS Ask any true San Franciscan with a serious sweet tooth what tops the list of local culinary delights and the answer you’ll likely hear: Coffee Crunch Cake. For more than three decades, customers have found this delicacy at Yasukochi’s Sweet Stop, tucked away inside Super Mira Market at 1790 Sutter…