Life after the express line

Posted on August 3, 2013 by editors
Photograph of James Moore (center) by Paul Dunn

Photograph of James Moore (center) and friends by Paul Dunn

By Barbara Kate Repa

IT’S BEEN FOUR YEARS since James Moore retired from his post at the express line at Mollie Stone’s. He seems much the same as the day he left — the same ready smile, the same bass blurt of a laugh, even the same gallant manner. “Let me buy you a coffee,” he says. “I don’t like to let women pay for anything.”

He stops by the Starbucks outpost at the entry to the store now and then. Nearly every shopper who passes by extends a greeting, a high five or a hug — sometimes all three. And he keeps up the familiar patter he perfected with customers passing in and out of his line back in the day.

“Hi, sweetheart. How’re you doing?”

“Hey, what’s up with you? You feeling good?”

“I sure have missed you.”

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Woody Allen’s latest opens at the Clay

Posted on August 2, 2013 by editors
Director Woody Allen (center) with stars Cate Blanchett and Alec Baldwin.

Director Woody Allen (center) with stars Cate Blanchett and Alec Baldwin.

Woody Allen’s new film, Blue Jasmine, opens today at the Clay Theater on Fillmore Street. It’s set mostly in San Francisco, and some scenes were filmed locally in Pacific Heights. Blue Jasmine “seems to me the best film Woody Allen has ever made,” says film critic David Thomson, a neighborhood resident, writing in The New Republic.

EARLIER: Woody Allen filming in Pacific Heights

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Finding love later in life

Posted on August 1, 2013 by editors

Viagra-Diaries

BOOKS | Barbara Kate Repa

“I was facing the stereotype that all women over 70 look like that picture on the See’s candy box,” laments San Francisco author Barbara Rose Brooker.

That led Brooker to write The Viagra Diaries, a novel chronicling the life and times of Anny Applebaum, an older woman pursuing a writing career, financial independence and undying love — after divorcing her husband when she discovered Viagra in his pocket clearly intended for extramarital escapades.

While not every detail is strictly autobiographical, a painful number come directly from life imitating art. Brooker says men she dated would offer backhand compliments: “You look good — for your age.” And some would make unsubtle age-related inquiries: “You sound like fun. How old are you?”

She was writing a column called “Boomer in the City” for JWeekly, a local Jewish paper, and looking for fodder about finding companionship and love. Her research extended to online dating, although the first service she contacted informed her it didn’t deal with people over age 50. Eventually, her cursor landed on JDate, a site for the Jewish singles community — with a home page peppered with pictures of smiling couples trumpeting their engagements or marriages.

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Trying to talk about abortion

Posted on August 1, 2013 by editors

Perilous-Times

BOOKS | Fran Moreland Johns

One chilly afternoon not long ago I pulled on an anorak jacket and walked over to San Francisco’s Laurel Village to pick up some groceries. A young woman who appeared to be about 15 or 16 years old was standing on the sidewalk in front of the Starbucks on the corner of Spruce and California. She was dressed in sandals, jeans and a short-sleeved pink T-shirt with Planned Parenthood emblazoned across the front. She was holding a clipboard with a few papers on it and attempting, presumably, to enlist supporters in the fight against a congressional proposal that would have eliminated funding for the organization.

But she was too cold or too shy to be having much success. She smiled at everyone who came her way, but no one seemed to be stopping. So I did. “Good for you,” I said. “I think defunding Planned Parenthood is a pretty bad idea.”

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A poet and now a novelist, too

Posted on August 1, 2013 by editors

KnightPrisoner

BOOKS | Mark J. Mitchell

I’ve lived and worked in the Fillmore since before it was new. Old-timers might remember me as the philosopher of beer behind the counter at Bi-Rite Liquors at California and Fillmore before it closed its doors. More recent arrivals might recall me as the Champagne advisor and single malt Scotch whisky guru holding forth at D&M Wines and Spirits for 15 years.

Before moving to the neighborhood, I studied writing and medieval literature at the University of California at Santa Cruz. And even while working all those years in the spirits business, I supported a serious writing habit.

I am primarily a poet, but every now and again poetry is interrupted by prose. My first novel, Knight Prisoner, was published by Vagabondage Press in June. It’s a historical adventure story set in 1470 in London relating the early criminal adventures of two masters of writing and crime imprisoned together, as told through the eyes of their servant.

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Finding fate – and faith – near Fillmore

Posted on July 18, 2013 by editors
Photograph of Maya Angelou by Dwight Carter

Photograph of Maya Angelou by Dwight Carter

AUTHOR, SINGER, poet, orator, actress and civil rights activist Maya Angelou has had many jobs in her storied life — including, when she was growing up in the Fillmore, a stint as a calypso dancer at the Purple Onion in North Beach.

Recently Angelou recalled her first job: as a San Francisco streetcar conductor.

“I liked the uniforms,” she says. So the 6-foot-tall 16-year-old applied for a job. “I had seen women on the street cars,” she says. “I just had not noticed they were all white. It hadn’t occurred to me.”

When they wouldn’t even give her an application, “I was crestfallen,” she says. Then her mother put steel in her spine. “Go get the job,” her mother told her. “You want it, then go get it.” She went back to the office, taking along “a big Russian novel” to read while she waited.

“By the third day, I wanted to return home,” she says. “But I didn’t want my mother to know I wasn’t as strong as she thought I was. So I sat there for two weeks. And finally a man came out and asked me in.”

Her tenacity won him over — along with her claim of experience working as a “chauffeurette for Mrs. Annie Henderson in Stamps, Arkansas” — her grandmother.

“He accepted me and I got the job,” she says. “That was really my mother’s doing. She was so strict — and so sure about me.”

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Dental school gives way to housing

Posted on July 15, 2013 by editors
The dental school's surface parking lot may become home to 11 townhouses.

The dental school’s surface parking lot may become home to 11 townhouses.

BY THE TIME it moves downtown next year, the University of the Pacific’s dental school will have made room for a lot of attractive — and expensive — new housing in the neighborhood.

Trumark Urban has now bought the dental school’s longtime home at 2155 Webster Street, at the corner of Sacramento, and will convert it into 77 high-end condominium residences averaging 2,000 square feet. Two top-floor 4,000-square-foot penthouses will have views of the Golden Gate Bridge.

A COMMUNITY MEETING will be held on Wednesday, July 17, to discuss the plans for the dental school. Trumark is hosting a pre-application meeting required by the city’s Planning Department at 6:30 p.m. in Bart Hall at Congregation Sherith Israel, the synagogue located at 2266 California Street.

Already Prado Group has converted the school’s former dormitory building at 2130 Post Street into 71 deluxe rental apartments. Leasing began in early June, and more than half of the apartments have been leased in the first few weeks, said manager Meg Russell. Already 23 apartments are occupied. Of the apartments that remain available, monthly rentals range from $3,195 for a one-bedroom, one-bath unit up to $4,695 for a two-bedroom, two-bath unit.

Adaptation of the dental school’s home at Webster and Sacramento will require the developer to build larger units because of the unusually deep floor plan. About 80 percent of the units will be two-bedroom or larger.

In addition, Trumark plans to build 11 townhouses on the parking lot behind the building spanning from Sacramento to Clay Street.

Daniel Cressman, the broker who helped the university buy its new home on Fifth Street and sell its neighborhood buildings, called the dental school building a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to “create a world-class condominium development in San Francisco’s most prestigious neighborhood, rivaling high-end condo projects in New York and London.”

Biz Times: Dental school netted more than expected

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Fillmore’s oldest coffeehouse closes

Posted on July 8, 2013 by editors
Photograph of Royal Ground at Fillmore and California by Daniel Bahmani

Photograph of Royal Ground at Fillmore and California by Daniel Bahmani

THE USUAL CROWD wasn’t sitting in the sunshine this afternoon in front of Royal Ground, the neighborhood’s oldest coffeehouse. “The coffee shop for locals,” as it was known, ended its 25-year run Sunday as the final notes of the annual Fillmore Jazz Festival were drifting away in the late afternoon light.

Ibrahim Alhjat, Royal Ground’s genial owner for the last 10 years, said his 98-year-old landlord, David Kaplan, raised his rent from $16,500 to $25,000 per month.

“I just couldn’t do it,” he said. So after a closing wake with friends and family on Sunday night, on Monday morning he set about ripping out the fixtures and furnishings of the coffee shop and the Wash ‘n’ Royal laundromat next door.

A year ago, when Royal Ground was renovated ever so slightly and beer and wine were added to its offerings, a writer noted: “With a little luck, Royal Ground will remain an island of funk and friendliness in the neighborhood’s sea of stylish storefronts.”

The luck and the funkiness — and one of the final outposts of the old Fillmore flavor — ended on July 7, 2013.

EARLIER: “A coffee shop for locals“

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Before Royal Ground, the Bi-Rite

Posted on July 8, 2013 by editors
Photograph of Bi-Rite Liquor in 1994 by Joan Juster

Photograph of Bi-Rite Liquor at Fillmore and California in 1994 by Joan Juster

FIRST PERSON | MARK J. MITCHELL

I moved to San Francisco in September 1978, following the woman who would become my wife, Joan Juster. She had gone ahead and found a studio apartment at California and Fillmore. The rent was a whopping $210 per month and the Murphy bed sagged as deeply as the Mariana Trench.

I spent two weeks looking for work and began to panic because the rent was due. I saw an ad for a Waldenbooks that was opening on Market Street, circled it, put the Chronicle in my pocket and started downtown.

On the way I stopped at the liquor store on the southeast corner of California and Fillmore, which was similar to one I had worked at earlier in Santa Cruz. I filled out an application and was quickly interviewed by the manager, Danny Kunihara. I never made it downtown to the bookstore; within the hour I was working for Max Cologna and Dan Grove. My pay was the minimum wage: $2.65 an hour. I stayed for 18 years.

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‘We are refusing to let Marcus Books close’

Posted on July 6, 2013 by editors

IT HAD BEEN WHISPERED on the street for weeks: The venerable New Chicago Barbershop had closed and another black Fillmore institution, Marcus Books, would soon be closing, too.

Roots run deep for both the bookstore and its building. Before the historic lavender Victorian at 1715 Fillmore that houses Marcus Books was moved from its original location a few blocks away at 1690 Post, it was home to Jimbo’s Bop City, a legendary after-hours joint that features prominently in the neighborhood’s jazz legacy. Before that — before neighborhood residents of Japanese descent were rounded up and sent to internment camps during World War II — the building had housed the Nippon Drug Co. in the heart of Japantown.

“Perhaps no other structure in San Francisco has such an extraordinary story,” the Chronicle reported in a splashy feature story in mid-May. But the article did not mention that the building had changed hands at a bankruptcy sale a few weeks earlier, and that its street-level tenant, the oldest black bookstore in the country, was endangered.

That story went public on Sunday, June 9, when the front page of the Examiner proclaimed “Closing Chapter” and a headline inside reported: “Marcus Books on brink of closure.”

The next day a phalanx of black leaders assembled at Marcus Books before a group of reporters and television cameras to decry the events that had endangered the bookstore.

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